A Georgia lawmaker who won’t be coming back to the House filed a bill in April 2019 that is obviously oppositional to the First Amendment.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says Rep. Andy Welch’s “Ethics in Journalism” act would write a canon of media ethics, and create a board led by the chancellor of the University of Georgia system that could investigate complaints and sanction people who break those rules. Five other Republican lawmakers have signed on.
I was a page one day in 1978 in the Georgia House, and even in sixth grade I knew that government intrusion on media was among the reasons Georgia was among the colonies that fought the Revolutionary War. It’s as if current lawmakers never studied the 1765 Stamp Act, knew this history of how Georgia responded to it, or heard of Ben Franklin.
A prediction, and I could be wrong: At some point, the lawmaker will say the bill was facetious, introduced only to draw media attention to perceived media wrongdoing. He’s a lawyer who you’d assume would have read the First Amendment. The AJC story noted that Welch recently “expressed frustration with what he saw as bias from a TV reporter who asked him questions about legislation.”
There’s a difference between legal and ethical, which is the point of this post: What are the ethics of openly flouting the First Amendment and wasting taxpayer dollars with silly, doomed-to-fail bills?
When I was five years old, I pulled a lever on the street where I lived and the fire department came running to answer the false alarm.
Welch has done the same thing. The difference is that I was five and didn’t know better. His bill helps perpetuate the notion that media are somehow subject to legislative fiat.
P.S. The bill also says a retired journalism professor, preferably one who taught ethics, should be on the panel. Would any journalism professor, either active or retired, join any government-mandated panel?