LEBANON, Ind. — Brian Kilmeade and E.D. Hill, two Fox News commentators — to call them journalists would be to slur the reputations of real reporters — have decided what this country needs is an official censor.

The idea is naive, insulting, uninformed and ignorant — and those are merely my first thoughts.

Credit James W. Harris, who runs “The Liberator Online” Web site maintained by the libertarian Advocates for Self-Government, for blowing the national media whistle on the latest idiocy from the network that turned the phrase “fair and balanced” into a trade-marked oxymoron.

Thursday, Harris sent out a blistering e-mail condemning Foxists Kilmeade and Hill for proposing that the administration create an “Office of Censorship.”

During June 29 broadcasts, Kilmeade and Hill both referenced a censorship bureau established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.

Harris helpfully provided an Internet link to a transcript of the program “Brian & The Judge,” (www.mediamatters.org/items/200606290009) during which Kilmeade said, “You put up the Office of Censorship. You get a consensus to journalists to analyze and then you realize what FDR realized earlier. Winning is everything. Freedom is — you don’t have any freedom if the Nazis are the victors.”

Kilmeade’s civic illiteracy is stunning in its shallowness.

There are, to be charitable, possible reasons for his ineptitude: Either Kilmeade skipped every American history class at every grade level; he flunked every American history class at every grade level; or, and this is most likely, he was simply repeating the infamous daily memo from Fox News managers which explicitly tells the network’s talking heads what to say and when.

I did not say they were good excuses, mind you. Kilmeade is either deserving of pity, or he needs to grab a concise World War II primer and review the “I was only following orders” defense offered by prominent Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.

On the “Fox & Friends” show June 29, Hill’s suggestion for flinging the First Amendment into a shredder was, if possible, more incoherent than Kilmeade’s:

“What about — in the past, we have had, at times, an Office of Censorship, where people review what is about — is something that was — it’s going to be big, you’ve got to run it through and say, ‘OK. Does this hurt our country or is it of, you know, news value?’”

Hill’s guest, Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Arizona, didn’t believe the nation needs an official censor — although he apparently believes he can fill that function by himself: Hayworth wants Congress to revoke The New York Times’ credentials as punishment for revealing a secret program that tracked possible bank transactions to terrorists.

On June 29, the House of Representatives approved, 227-183, a Republican resolution that condemned without naming newspapers that had published the original stories. The papers were The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

What we have here is a classic example of election year bait and switch, liberally salted with doses of “let’s you and him fight” and “look what you made me do.”

The creation of a national censor, accountable only to the incumbent administration, would be scary even without previous action by the Bush administration to illegally monitor telephone calls — despite the existence of secret intelligence court judges who would have undoubtedly approved the wiretaps had officials simply asked.

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that government has virtually no right to prevent newspapers from publishing information they have uncovered, attorney Lee Levine said on The First Amendment Center’s Web site at firstamendmentcenter.org.

Levine wrote, “a prior restraint — a legal prohibition on the press’s ability to publish information in its possession — will almost always violate the First Amendment.”

It’s not as though censorship cheerleaders such as Kilmeade and Hill haven’t gotten their way elsewhere, of course. They can find ample support for their official government censor office elsewhere.

North Korea would be a good place to start.



— Rod Rose writes for The Lebanon (Ind.) Reporter. He may be reached at rod.rose@reporter.net.