Mr. Free Speech in Comedy doesn’t think that journalists deserve the same constitutional protections as the average Kill Tony contestant.
Back during the early anti-woke movement in the mid-2010s, Joe Rogan was the defining voice of the mostly white, mostly male group of comedians who felt that increasing cultural sensitivity regarding topics such as race, gender and sexual orientation was an infringement upon their human rights and an existential threat to humor itself. Simultaneously, the yet unradicalized Rogan was also one of the most influential and vocal supporters of progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whom he would endorse in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Today, Rogan is a personal friend of Donald Trump and the president’s hot-and-cold confidante Elon Musk, and he uses his massive platform on The Joe Rogan Experience to spread demonstrable untruths from the Trump administration about America’s most pressing issues. As Trump seeks to cripple his most prominent critics with a $20 billion lawsuit against the respected CBS news program 60 Minutes, Rogan insists that the President has a right to ruin journalists who dare to interview his political enemies, a point that Rogan’s former favorite candidate recently rebuffed with prejudice.
Don’t Miss
Sanders appeared on the most recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience where he criticized Trump’s habitual targeting of journalists with outrageous lawsuits clearly intended to silence criticism. When Rogan seemed to defend the President’s attacks on the media, Sanders asked, “Should I sue you if you ask me some stupid question that I don’t like?”
During the talk, Rogan repeated Trump’s accusation that 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during her failed campaign last year, asking his guest, “Don’t you think there’s a real issue with what they did?”
“No,” Sanders replied plainly.
Rogan pressed, “You don’t think that there’s a real issue in editing conversations to give someone an answer different than what they really answered?”
“Joe, I’ve been on eight zillion shows, right, in my life, okay? Now, should I sue you if you ask me some stupid question that I don’t like?” Sanders shot back.
Rogan then claimed that 60 Minutes’ cut of the Harris interview was “not investigative journalism … if you ask her a question and she comes with a rambling answer that doesn’t make sense and you edit that out and insert another answer to a different question that seems more cogent.”
Critically, Rogan misreported the facts of the case, as 60 Minutes simply shortened some of Harris’ answers to their questions in the final cut rather than presenting the answers out of order.
“You’re walking down a dangerous path,” Sanders told his one-time supporter, then explaining the basic principles of media intimidation to arguably the single most influential voice in American media. “You could be sued tomorrow, right, because you are doing this, you’re too sympathetic to this, and, Joe, you did that and they have a big law firm behind (them) and you’re going to have to spend zillions of dollars defending yourself. You know what? Next time you do an interview you say, ‘Maybe I’m not going to go in that area.’”
Sanders continued, “If I were to sue everybody who said things that were factually incorrect about me, I’d be suing people zillions of times. But Joe, what you’re saying is, Does media get it wrong sometimes? Absolutely. Should you have the most powerful person in America suing media, what is the impact of that? The impact is clearly intimidation.”
Sanders then summarized Trump’s approach to free speech in journalism as, “Hey, I got the power, don’t you criticize me, you criticize me, I’m gonna sue you.”
Unfortunately for us all, Sanders’ arguments didn’t seem to sway Rogan, who famously founded his own stand-up club, Comedy Mothership, to protect the freedom of speech for conservative comics like himself. Apparently, reporting on a major candidate’s stances during a presidential election isn’t the right way to use the First Amendment. In Rogan’s mind, the Founding Fathers wrote it to protect stool-humpers and stool-humpers only.
Source link
