Captain Ed over at Captain’s Quarters Blog has a story entitled, Singapore Shuts Down A Critical Blogger about a Blogger being shutdown by his government for criticizing one of their agencies. The downed site, along with the apology to the agency can be found here.

Captain Ed’s response is the following:

“Both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have taken a look at Chen’s battle with Singapore’s elite. Chen’s surrender is certainly understandable, but unfortunate. Less understandable is the acquiescence of traditional media outlets in paying these judgements, as the article implies, and their silence to this point about the practice of Singapore’s leaders. Rather than comply with these blatant attempts to stifle free speech, the larger outlets should simply stop reporting from Singapore and give better coverage to the government’s opposition movements from bases outside Singapore.

Sometimes I wonder if the Exempt Media understands the stakes in fighting for freedom of expression.”

Along the same lines, is a followup to an article we published here, back in March concerning the concerted efforts of the Pew Charitable Trusts. In the May 12th issue of, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Mr. William A. Schambra writes, In a World of Bloggers, Foundations Can Expect More Scrutiny, about the importance of the new media of bloggers. Charitable foundations can no longer make claims without being thoroughly investigated. He states the following:

“Any foundation interested in public-policy activism can now expect its implicit political inclinations to be vetted far more thoroughly and publicly than before. It will be much more difficult for donors to operate beneath the radar, justifying their low profile by saying that they are simply objective servants of the public interest. After all, the new networks were born of a reaction against precisely that claim by mainstream news media, and so are inclined to suspect hypocrisy whenever it is made. All foundations — not just those on the right — that want to shape public policy will now be treated as political actors.”

Finally today an article from Red State which links to a rather lengthy piece on FEC regulation of bloggers found here. The poignant statement quoted by Krempasky is the following:

“They [bloggers as agents] are then vulnerable to the full force, with scant mercy, of the regulatory enforcement process. The first subpoena served on a blogger-agent will make this point keenly felt.

This last set of considerations seems lost on those who, fiddling with various proposals for regulating blogs, have no experience with the regulatory process. In other words, they have little feel for the phenomenon of regulatory investigation.”

The point of our writing today is to illustrate for you what happens when “Freedom of Speech” is squelched by authorities anywhere on the planet, including right here in the USA. If regulated by the FEC, bloggers would lose their medium for investigating, reporting, editorializing, and commenting on current events. The public would no longer have the checks and balances provided by blogs against the bias of the MSM.

Please become informed on this issue, and contact your legislative representatives with these phone numbers, 202-225-3121 for the Senate, and 202-224-3121 for the House. Please urge them to co-sponsor and pass Rep. Hensarling’s bill - HR1606 and the Senate’s bill - S678 both of which supports the unregulated speech of bloggers.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Politics - Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Tags: blog regulation, FEC regulation, Blogger shutdown, Freedom of Speech