Daily Kos vs. Free Speech

The Cartman law of television economics, the idea that censorship of television necessarily mushrooms as one censorship justifies more to avoid offending other groups, appears to have been fulfilled. It is now open season. South Park has seen multiple infringements with the censorship of Cartoon Wars, material Scientologists find offensive not repeated or sent to foreign stations and the Catholics getting a South Park episode censored in Australia. This follows the broad failure to emphatically defend the right to free speech of Jyllands-Posten.

Now the Daily Kos's disciples have come pretty close to getting the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 censored. Pretty soon television free speech will be limited to that which is utterly bland and uncontroversial or which only offends the precious few with enough principle not to take advantage of the lack of spine being demonstrated by television networks and the lack of resolve shown by our political leadership. Speech will be decidely less free. This post on the Kos made me want to beat the waste of space twunt who wrote it to death with his own lack of principles.

Thankfully this time the Kossacks appear to have failed and alterations have been minor. However, they came way too close to censoring a programme on an important issue just because they think it is wrong.