The public mind doesn’t distinguish the 10 Commandments from the Bill of Rights. And whereas the 10 Commandments is a wearisome litany of prohibited behaviors (“Thou shalt not … “), the Bill of Rights in the 1st Amendment offers such delicious American freedoms as the right to run one’s mouth about anything or anyone without constraint of fact or reason. And this because the Founding Fathers believed the intelligent and educated citizenry of their new nation easily capable of distinguishing reasonable discourse from nonsensical abuse of the intellect. In recent years, we’ve failed to learn from the experience of living in a culture of mass media, where almost all 1st Amendment freedom is exploited by commercial enterprise to push us towards irrational consumer behavior, and with no little success. The proof of our inability to deserve our 1st Amendment rights is ever before us.
Then there’s the blogosphere. What are blogs? Some would say that blogs are the democratization of journalism. Anyone with a cheap computer and an Internet account can set up as his own NYTimes, WSJ, or Washington Post. And, as the freedom of the press shall not be abridged, so the blogger claims full protection of the 1st Amendment for himself.
But as the law, the courts and due process are to mob rule and the lynch mob, so the NYTimes, WSJ and the Washington Post are to the crowd of false witnesses who call themselves the blogosphere. If global warming has produced a hole in the Ozone Layer, then the blogosphere is smothering free speech in countless defamations, distortions of fact, theft of intellectual property, and abuse of the rational faculty.
