free speech

You may have heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Simply put, this Web-censorship bill in the House could open the door to widespread Internet censorship.

Opposition to the bill has reached a boiling point. Millions of activists, hundreds of startups, social media sites like Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter and even big companies like Google, Yahoo! and eBay have joined with Free Press and other Internet advocacy groups against it.

This is one of the biggest tech stories of the year. Yet as a recent report from Media Matters for America shows, TV news has ignored it.

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My colleague, Josh Stearns, has been tracking journalist arrests at Occupy protests since the movement launched in September. His documentation of press arrests on social media platform Storify has earned him the site’s nod as “Storify of the Year.”

Since September, 36 journalists have been arrested in 10 cities. Many more have been harassed, roughed up or otherwise hindered while attempting to do their work. The arrests and suppression have occurred even as journalists have identified themselves to police as members of the press.

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Christopher Hitchens was a master at offending just about everybody in the room.

Hitchens, who died Thursday from complications related to cancer, first earned his literary stripes as a political firebrand on the left. No cow was too sacred for Hitchens, an atheist who excoriated organized religion in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything — and lambasted the previously untouchable Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A longtime lefty, Hitchens alienated his former compatriots when he switched gear in the early aughts and defended the United States invasion of Iraq.

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Last week’s Constitution Day celebrations sparked a flurry of news and debates about the role of the First Amendment in our society. On its surface, the First Amendment embodies the sort of apple-pie American value that all people tend to agree with. It’s fundamental to our democracy and has been our media’s defining characteristic since the nation’s founding. However, what became clear throughout the course of the week was that the First Amendment is a contested terrain, and the technological and economic changes shaping our media are also shaping new understandings and implications of freedom of speech and the press.

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In 2008, Free Press reported that numerous journalists were arrested at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. while attempting to report on the event and related protests.

Now it appears that journalists are encountering violence and intimidation once again, this time from riot police at the G20 Summit in Toronto. Watch this video from The Real News journalist Jesse Freeston, who was punched by a police officer while trying to cover the demonstrations.

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