Patterico's Pontifications

10/26/2007

Crushing Free Speech, Southern-Style

Filed under: 2008 Election,Politics — DRJ @ 1:09 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

Borrowing from the Instapundit, “They told me that if Bush were re-elected, government would be crushing speech it didn’t like.” And they were right:

A UNC-Chapel Hill professor says John Edwards’ staff tried to kill a student’s video story. The professor, retired political reporter Leroy Towns, writes on the journalism school’s Talk Politics blog that the Edwards’ campaign demanded a student journalist take down the video she had posted on YouTube.

The video focuses on Edwards’ campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill’s affluent Southern Village. It includes an interview with a columnist for the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC-CH student paper, who criticizes the location as contradictory to Edwards’ advocacy for the poor. The segment had been produced for the school’s Carolina Week television program, but student Carla Babb posted it online as an entry in an MTV contest.

Edwards staffers then tried to persuade the professor to kill the story, Towns writes. He declined.

Towns writes the experience was instructive: “The Carolina Week staff learned the importance of standing their ground against a disgruntled source, even when that source is a candidate for president. PR students saw firsthand how a public relations mistake can turn a small non-story into a potential national story. Very instructive.”

I guess John Edwards’ advocacy for the poor has its limits and for his campaign staff that limit is an address in the Southern Village.

— DRJ

9 Responses to “Crushing Free Speech, Southern-Style”

  1. Heh.

    Paul (f4626d)

  2. Perhaps you should have called this Crushing Free Speech Progressive style?

    Thomas Jackson (bf83e0)

  3. Oh No! Now Edwards is being Swift Boated for being hypocritical about his stands on poverty. I guess he’ll just have to leave his 26,000 square foot mansion and stop repossessing homes in poor neighborhoods of New Orleans in order to address the charges, but not before he gets another $400 haircut. He wouldn’t want to look shaggy or anything on TV.

    daleyrocks (906622)

  4. Only the poor are authentic enough to advocate for the poor.

    whitd (10527e)

  5. Ted Kennedy thinks he’s authentic. So does Jesse Jackson.

    daleyrocks (906622)

  6. Well, now, you can’t expect his professional and highly-paid staff to have to work in the ‘hood, do you?

    Dana (556f76)

  7. I gotta agree with Dana.

    You guys are from LA, maybe we can set the Edwards staff up with a push cart with Edwards bumper stickers and stuff over by MacArthur Park.
    Maybe run some $20 bills in periodically to pay the gang bangers rent and to not kick their asses.
    Or skip the payments and move the cart to Westwood

    Villaraigosa wouldn’t last an hour down there without LAPD bird dogging him.. so a couple of Edwards interns would last ten minutes….

    SteveG (4e16fc)

  8. The only thing better would be to find out that the Chapel Hills HQ is located next door to a pricey hair salon.

    JVW (951b34)

  9. This guy is a trial lawyer for petes sakes what else can you ever expect from his ilk LET THEM PLAY LEMMIMGS AND JUMP IN THE OCEAN

    krazy kagu (e778bf)


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