The 2008 presidential election is to the Liberals, a do-or-die O.K Coral shootout for power. They appear desperate and could not afford to take chances … even opinions written by apolitical authors to enlighten free voting America that have a conservative tone are toxic to this particular agenda. These are a no-no and had to be shot down by means fair or foul.
Leave the butchering of the author’s free expression of ideas relative to the choice of the next President of the United States to the Liberal Media.Online left-leaning publications, i.e. American Chronicle network [ACN]are dropping the blade of the guillotine gag on the neck of opinion writers that are hard to silence.
The censorship of a written opinion either by a Liberal or Republican publication is to us who venerate freedom of expression, a matter of life and death. What I am about to share with you is not just about the suppression of an article but a censorship of authors and authorship in violation of privacy right and freedom of expression.
An award winning journalist wrote a critique of Republican Ron Paul’s candidacy. Dr. Paul is currently campaigning to become the 2008 GOP presidential standard bearer. He has every right of a citizen to aspire for the highest office of the land. The written editorial insight pictured an America with a 2008 elected President who hates the Federal Government, a country without income tax; an isolationist America – the richest and the mightiest power on the planet – sans our current leadership in the international community and, if Dr. Paul becomes the next President, Americans would have no ties whatsoever with the “greedy, light-fingered globalist United Nations”… these and many more oddities were portrayed in the editorial that the author believed American voters should know.
ACN published the article for about 4-5 days. It hit a 3,000-5000 viewing/readership in lest than 24 hours. Then the article disappeared … deleted from ACN and the Internet. ACN e-mailed Paul supporters to use the deletion in their campaign for candidate Paul.
Excuse for removal – the article was vitriolic, a violation of ACN editorial policy.
Not quite … this excuse is a big lie to the reading American public. ACN encourages strongly worded spiteful articles – so long as it is written by Liberal writers, especially against the government, particularly against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Proof is in the ACN itself. Click on this ACN sites to see this proof:http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=31238 [read the last paragraph]http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=31369 [read the title and 4th paragraph]. These ACN articles attacked the President and the Vice President with unprintable words! These are okay under ACN’s editorial policy. The author is a Liberal activist. There are more.
The award winning journalist was neither a Liberal nor a Republican, whose published article was not just gagged … all his published articles in ACN and Internet links were removed. This victim of censorship was a sticking bone on the side of the ACN 2008 agenda and onward, which is now ran by a new set of extremely bias Liberal managers … ergo, the well-read author has to be eliminated.
Let’s not be confused by this Liberal subterfuge in Media management. Candidate Paul is a Republican. Actually, he is a true-blooded Libertarian, politically operating within the shell of the Republican Party. It is not just the conservative population but the American public in general believed that if Paul is the GOP’s candidate for President in 2008, the Liberals are assured of the presidency. One need not be a rocket scientist to figure out why the Liberal Media, i.e., ACN, is promoting, not just protecting, Dr. Paul’s candidacy.Democracy argues that we are free to choose any candidate we want. I support anyone’s freedom to choose any candidate for public office including the right of ACN to support any politician like Dr. Paul even if it is just clearly a political ploy.
We normally view violations of the 1st and 4th Amendments with the government and public officials as the culprits. Hardly do we realize that privately owned online publications under which we publish our creative works would violate our freedom of expression and privacy rights. [Borella,Michael S., Computer Privacy vs. First and Fourth Amendment Rights [http://www.eff.org/Privacy/comp_privacy_4th_amend.paper].
We are now living in the cyber world of computers. Private corporations compete with the government in storing any information about us in a database, and use them against us in violation of our constitutional rights.Like any other private corporations, the American Chronicle network is actually a storage of information about you and me – about each and everyone of us – as authors who write for this media network. In this case that I am describing to you, ACN used its database in circulating a derogatory e-mail about the censored author that he was a “trouble” writer.
To complete the disfiguration blitz of the image of the targeted popular author, his photograph accompanied the removed article [only the title remained without the text or body of the article] in the manner photographs of “fugitives” are published to warn the public. The reputation of the award-winning journalist concerned was no doubt maliciously compromised.
ACN editors did its worst based on information that came from its own computerized database which was inaccurate if not totally false. For instance, the published information that the said author was a “trouble” writer was utterly inaccurate if not maliciously fraudulent. On record, ACN published close to a hundred or so articles of the same author that bolstered the publication’s gross advertising receipts. ACN would not have enriched itself at the expense of the author if he was a “trouble” writer. What ACN did was similar to how the government in many instances, abuses “criminal records” of victims who committed no crimes.
According to the findings of the Congressional Office of TechnologyAssistance (OTA) re: Gordon and Churchill, p. 514], “at best, 49.5 percent”of those database records “were complete, correct, and unambiguous…”(Burnham, p. 74).
We are talking of a media entity which is an active private corporation that interacts with the public. Its interaction with the public is clothed with public interest. ACN is the Fourth Estate that functions like a government of its own. Like a tyrant government, it could choose to be the culprit in violating the 1st and 4th Amendments on its own free will. The arrogance that this Liberal media has shown in committing those violations rivals that of an abusive governmental authority. The same abuse in Hoover’s time was a blot in American history. In 1967, J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, createdthe National Crime Information Center (NCIC). A study conducted in 1982found that, "...as many as one-third of state records lacked information about the disposition of the cases on file…” leading to the miscarriage of justice.
Even the information stored in "benign" databases similar to that of the ACN“…can be used to violate privacy rights.” [Borella, supra].
Many of us in this writing discipline do a free public service feature for the common good. The role we play in this labor of love every time we burn the midnight candle to carve our thoughts in stone for posterity – especially in the discussion of critical issues of national importance – aims to accomplish a noble task, and that is to see to it that we live in a healthy society we want. This is the reason why it is imperative to share this experience that we may be on guard. That violated author was me. # ©
Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access October 11, 2007.
The writer is a veteran diplomat-journalist for more than 45 years and a recipient of excellence awards in journalism. He is a former Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations; he is also an economist, a lawyer and an ASEAN specialist on fiscal policy and regional industrial cooperation. His editorial insights appear in other publications and published in several websites. A brief comment may be e-mailed to ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg.