NY Times for terrorism & child porn, but against political speech?
Free Speech of the Times
New York Sun Editorial
May 30, 2008
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In today’s New York Sun our Josh Gerstein reports on how the Environmental Defense Action Fund may have run afoul of the Times’s favored campaign speech restrictions known as McCain-Feingold with an ad that states “Tell Speaker Pelosi we need a strong global warming bill now.” How is it that peddlers of images of young children engaged in crude sex acts, or those fundraising for weapons with which to murder Jews, should in the Times’s world be protected by free speech, while environmentalists advocating for climate-change laws should be tied up in red tape?
It’s enough to make a person think that what the Times is really concerned about isn’t defending free speech at all, but defending the enemies of Israel and the purveyors of sexualized images of our children. Maybe they have a special axe to grind against Senator Lieberman, who, the other night before a huge crowd at the Commentary dinner, referred to the Times as a “once-great newspaper.” But if it were free speech the Times were concerned about, it would oppose the restrictions on political speech, too. Surely that is what the founders had in mind when they framed the First Amendment.