The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Benjamin Franklin speaks to Assyrians

Benjamin Franklin speaks to Assyrians
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, January 15 2008, 22:01:35 (CET)
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In a biography by Walter Issacson appear a couple of telling quotes which shed light also on the situation we find ourselves in regarding the freedom of press…or maybe the integrity of what we’re being fed as news and why this diet had been chosen for us. Surely people know by now that media laws were changed drastically when Reagan was president to prepare for the day when corporations could own all outlets, radio, teevee, print and magazine in one area, something not allowed till then because it attacks the core of free speech and is disastrous to a democracy. There was nothing wrong with General Electric owning a newspaper before…there’s no need to outlaw corporate ownership. But it wouldn’t do GE much good unless they could own everything, every radio, newspaper, magazine and tee vee station in one region…it’s by allowing wealthy powers to own everything in a market that the danger lay….if GE had real competition in the media it’s message would be just one of many and dissent would balance the equation. The attraction to corporations of owning a media outlet comes only when it can own ALL of them so that only their point of view becomes the news.

A quote attributed to Jefferson says that given the choice between a government with no newspapers and newspapers with no government he’d prefer no government, so long as he could freely read about it.

Franklin made his money initially as a printer, one of only three in Philadelphia. He also started his own newspaper, or rather bought one out and made it his own. He took in other printing jobs as well, printed pamphlets, tracts, even paper money for the government… and of course put out “Poor Richard’s Almanack” annually.

His observation about a printer’s calling and the need for a free press is illuminating…now more than ever.

“Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter”

That’s the simplest argument for a free press….or free forums. Maggie and the rest believe quite the opposite. That’s because it isn’t any semblance of the Truth they’re expounding. Rather they work had to fashion “a” truth…their truth, with no balance or opposition. And that can only be because it’s a lie they fear having exposed.

We, on the famous other hand, have hardly invented anything profound by offering a truly free and open forum. The accusation constantly hurled against this place that we’re “just like the others” and have our own “agenda” and “don’t learn” and “insist we know best” fall flat every time. In the first place no one is trying to “teach” anything. I and everyone else in the world have opinions…if we care to make those opinions known we can be said to have an “agenda”…so long as it’s stated out in the open there’s no harm done and nothing out of the ordinary. Who doesn’t have one? But we open ours to scrutiny, challenge, insult…you name it. That is decidedly NOT like the rest of them. We also allow competing ideas and agendas the same freedom and expect them to take the same responsibility and consequences that come with real freedom; mostly meaning you have to earn your own respect and place in the world…you can’t beg and whine for it or call on your long-dead and supposed ancestors to get it for you.

The second quote goes to the heart of what’s wrong with the kind of media we now have…and it still applies to these forums.

“It is unreasonable to imagine that printers approve of everything they print. It is likewise unreasonable what some assert, that printers ought not to print anything but what they approve;since…an end would thereby be put to free writing, and the world would afterwards have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinion of printers”.

This is exactly what GE and neo-conservatives and the rest of the media barons of today want…it’s what they worked to change the laws for decades ago; so that the public would have nothing to read but THEIR opinions...as news.

Substitute the word “moderator” for “printer” and you have the agenda of the other forums. They want people only reading and writing what are THEIR opinions…disguised as a “forum”. They are not forums at all. THIS is a forum…which is the reason they all refuse to write here, even though they read. For in any forum where Truth and Error are allowed access, the errors, as Franklin says, will soon be overwhelmed. That’s the reason Jumblat, Andreas and all those who’ve thought to give a real forum a try have wound up slinking away, “overmatched”. Though they’ll tell us it’s because “we don’t have time to waste”…which is true, though not the way they mean it; they have no time to waste having their errors exposed…better go where they know the lack of freedom will make them look “truthful”.



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