Yup, Mr Excitement can't avoid going to his "child tantrum" place. Great to lambast CBS on social media and news clips for their slanted coverage and deceptive messaging.
Suing them is fricken stupid. It's their legal right to present slanted and deceptive coverage.
Hey Voldemort, even the king of evil can't have it both ways. Hello!
CBS’s Impossible Opposition to Free Speech
Margaret Brennan, JD Vance and Trump’s outlandish lawsuit.
By James Taranto, WSJ
Updated Feb. 18, 2025 12:58 pm ET
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on CBS's ‘Face the Nation.’ Photo: Face the Nation
It’s hard to be a consistent defender of free speech, since it inevitably entails forming temporary alliances with repugnant people. A classic case is National Socialist Party v. Skokie (1977), in which the American Civil Liberties Union represented neo-Nazis who had been enjoined from holding a demonstration in an Illinois village with a large Jewish population. Thousands of ACLU members quit or withheld donations in protest.
The neo-Nazis won a pyrrhic victory. They never marched in Skokie, and the Supreme Court ruling in their favor expanded free speech for everyone, including the vast universe of people whose speech the neo-Nazis would suppress if they had the power.
Because even totalitarians want free speech for themselves and frequently seek to vindicate that right in court, I thought until this weekend that it was impossible to oppose free speech consistently. But CBS News may pull it off.
On “Face the Nation” Sunday, the network’s Margaret Brennan quizzed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich faulting Europe for political censorship. When Mr. Rubio rebuffed her complaint about “irritating our allies,” she invoked the reductio ad Hitlerum: She said Mr. Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Ms. Brennan would have benefited from a fact-checker. Weimar Germany had laws limiting speech, but their application against the Nazis failed to prevent Hitler’s January 1933 rise to power. His regime suspended civil liberties less than a month later via the Reichstag Fire Decree. Free expression was a distant memory by the time the Nazis begin killing on an industrial scale.
On its own, Ms. Brennan’s comment reflects ordinary inconsistency—she wants to censor speech she finds disagreeable or dangerous. That’s also true of a “60 Minutes” segment that aired Sunday. It praised die Polizei for “introducing a touch of German order to the unruly World Wide Web” by conducting predawn criminal raids on “trolls” for posting not only “hate speech” but “fake quotes” and insults.
Surely CBS would mount a fierce defense if its own speech were under attack. Or maybe not. In a pending lawsuit against the network and its parent, Paramount Global, Donald Trump alleges that CBS misled viewers by editing an October interview with Kamala Harris to cut a “word salad” that began an answer about Israel and pick up with the “completely different, coherent, and decisive response” that ended the answer.
The First Amendment protects political speech even if it is misleading or outright false, so long as it isn’t defamatory, which the Harris interview obviously isn’t. Mr. Trump’s lawyers attempt to evade this protection with an outlandish legal theory: that CBS’s report is “commercial speech”—marketing, not news.
Mr. Trump will eventually lose the case if Paramount fights, but the Journal reports the company is considering a settlement “as a way to alleviate tensions with the Trump administration” ahead of a planned merger. If Paramount yields, CBS will establish itself as a consistent opponent of free expression. The impossible isn’t always worth doing.
Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
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