The Enemy of the Press’s Enemy Is Its Friend?
By Randall Nunn (02/14/06)
The outrage of the mainstream media over the warrantless wiretaps by the Bush administration of certain al Qaeda related international phone calls almost makes one think that the media is actually concerned about government infringing upon our civil liberties. But when you consider the many other instances of government intrusion into our lives that truly eat away at our civil liberties, it becomes apparent that something other than principled opposition to abuse of government power is at work here. The mainstream media is simply hard at work trying to weaken the Bush administration by suggesting that this war-time exercise of the president’s powers is an all-out assault on our civil liberties. Instead, what we have is an all-out assault on President Bush by a fanatical liberal media obsessed with bringing this president down.
If one examines some of the current actions of government affecting the rights of individual citizens, there are any number of examples of infringement of our civil liberties greater than this phantom threat conjured up by the media. For example, hearings are scheduled in Congress this month to examine a pattern of apparent wrongdoing by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives at a number of Richmond, Virginia area gun shows. According to reports, BATFE agents released confidential information to local police officers with which to harass lawful purchasers of firearms at these gun shows. There are even reports of confiscation of firearms from lawful owners and questioning of family members of purchasers as if criminal activity had occurred as a result of attendance and purchases. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee intends to hold oversight hearings on these incidents to determine if BATFE was out of line. Probably very few Americans have heard about this because most of the mainstream media believes that the Second Amendment is not important and that gun shows are an evil which should be stamped out. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans attend gun shows and lawfully purchase guns and other items is of no importance once the liberal media has decided that citizens should not have the right to purchase firearms at such shows. If government uses its coercive power to chill the exercise of such civil liberties, that is acceptable to much of the mainstream media.
Another example is the all-too-frequent use of minor traffic infractions as an excuse to stop and search vehicles by authorities engaged in the war on drugs. Even if the stop is a pretext designed to allow police officers to develop “probable cause” to search the vehicle, the courts allow the practice. All of us would like to see illegal drugs taken off the street but is it right to allow traffic stops for minor violations to serve as a subterfuge for investigation of a much broader scope? Aren’t the rights of law-abiding citizens being infringed when this occurs as a standard practice? Yet the mainstream media spends little time giving publicity to the weakening of the average citizen’s right to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Recently another example of abuse of governmental power came to light in Harris County, Texas where the prosecutor in that county announced that his office was going to continue to prosecute persons for carrying handguns in their automobiles even though the Texas legislature had passed a law permitting such conduct. The new Texas law allows a person to legally carry a handgun in their vehicle if it is a private vehicle, not engaged in criminal activity and the person is not prohibited by law from possessing a firearm. In this case, even the ACLU has sided with the citizens of Texas, saying that the “prosecutors are so arrogant they think they don’t have to follow the law.” There are reports that prosecutors in other areas of the state are taking the same approach. It would seem reasonable to expect a media bent on protecting our civil liberties, to vigorously condemn the use of the prosecutorial power of the state in violation of state law.
In all of these instances, the civil liberties are being infringed of many times more people than are at risk under the warrantless wiretap activities of the Bush administration. Millions of Americans own and use firearms. Millions of Americans are subject to searches of their automobiles on the highways if “creative” police work can convert a simple traffic stop into an excuse for a full-blown search of a vehicle. The rights being impacted are fundamental and the numbers of people affected are literally in the millions. It seems strange indeed for the mainstream media to cast itself as the protector of our civil liberties in the NSA warrantless wiretap cases when those it is seeking to protect are relatively few in number and arguably have some connection, slight though it may be in some cases, to foreign enemies trying desperately to kill Americans and bring down America as a world power.
The NSA warrantless wiretap issue is nothing more than a weapon the mainstream media is using against the Bush administration. The mainstream media would dearly love to bring the Bush administration down. If, as the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, who is the best friend of al Qaeda in these United States? And who is the enemy of the real civil liberties of the majority of Americans?
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