The Constitution, The News, and Me.

1. The article I read is called A Few words about censorship vs. the freedom of speech. It started off with the quote, "Without the freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public freedom without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know." Benjamin Franklin age 16! The gist of this article is that if we have the freedom of speech, why do people freak out when people actuallly excersice that freedom. He used examples of when 2 Live Crew was sued because of t heir lyrics and performances (my article was from 1990) and argues that there is freedom of speech, so if you don't like it you can simply ignore it. Then again he talks about cencorship and how he understands why people wouldn't want R-rated things and X-rated(censorship!) things just open to the public, but thats also where the question of why is their freedom of speech if people are just going to censor everything. I got a reallly good quote: It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those unspeakable precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." It was the ending of my article.

2. Obviusly this article is related to the First Amendment of the Constitution. It talks about the freedom of press and expression vs censorship. The author used different examples such as inappropriate music, x rated books and videos sold in stores, and explicit art work. To show the contradiction of censorship and freedom of speech\ expression.

3. This article interests me because I always have found controversy between censorship and freedom of speech interesting. I think the two are super related, and its hard to draw the line of what is too much because it says in the constituion that there is freedom of expression in the first ammendment but does not have restrictions as to what is too much when you are excersiing that freedom.