Is Our Relationship With News to Change?

For John, BLUF:  What do the Feds think about City Life?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at the Blog of Law Professor Ann Althouse are two posts, in sequence, on the First Amendment and protecting our rights under said First Amendment.

The first is a Wall Street Journal article that quotes Judge Rudolph Randa at the end.

[T]he larger danger is giving government an expanded role in uprooting all forms of perceived corruption which may result in corruption of the First Amendment itself.

This is from a ruling wherein a federal judge in Wisconsin rebukes prosecutors trying to silence conservatives.  As Professor Althouse notes:

Notably, the editors connect the John Doe investigation of conservative groups to the IRS targeting of conservative groups.  In both instances, we see how "campaign-finance laws have become a liberal weapon to silence political opponents" and how "fighting the risk of corruption from 'dark money' in politics... done in secret and unrestrained by Constitutional guardrails, have become far more politically corrupting."

The second item has to do with Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman, interviewed by Paul Bedard at The Washington Examiner.

I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers.

Then he adds:

The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications.

And, of course, there is the whole Benghazi imbroglio, with its trampling on the First Amendment.

Because I took too long finishing this post there is another post at Professor Althouse's blog, this one on Ms Tina Brown's complaint in Vanity Fair, that Monica Lewinski (and Matt Drudge) destroyed Journalism, at as she knew it.♠  In the comments to this third post is this from "chilblain":

Tina's article is battlespace preparation. Lee Goodman, the chair of the FEC, has warned that the government is "angling to curtail the media's exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations." Her term is due to expire in December.

Here is the thing.  While a Nanny Government can move to restrict our free access to information, there will be those who desire and seek out information.♥  Even in places like 1930s Germany and the Soviet Union there have been people seeking the truth and thus seeking, and exchanging information.  Thus, the term Samizdat.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Ms Tina Brown is famous for her role in diminishing several traditional journalism institutions herself, including Newsweek.
♥  I would say truth, but sometimes two people can have two views of what is truth.  Strange, but true.