DOJ Investigated Journalists for Insider Trading, Stalking and Worse \u2013 Rolling Stone<\/a> Rolling Stone implies that investigating journalists for actual crimes may constitute a threat to their journalistic freedom.<\/p>\nIn my state, by state law, all public employees are protected from any retaliation over their non-work-related political activities. This means an employee cannot receive a performance review that might be tainted by a boss’s view of their politics, nor be disciplined or fired – even if the evidence for a link to their political view is weak.<\/p>\n
Citizens – the rest of us have no such protections. Our bosses can (and have) fired workers for having differing political views. I once had a boss walk the hallways and tell us how to vote on a initiative that would give him extraordinary financial benefits with the implication that if we didn’t vote correctly, it might affect our future.<\/p>\n
This creates an asymmetry in public discourse when academics, government employees and journalists have greater free speech rights than do citizens. Citizens may put their livelihood at risk merely for contesting the speech of the “speech protected elite”. This creates a public environment where everyone is equal except some are more equal than others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Academics have long maintained they have a “freedom of speech” to pursue whatever they want to pursue in terms of research; this freedom extends to political opinions. In my state, all public sector workers have protection on their off-the-job speech. Private sector workers have no such protections and may be fired or receive negative performance reviews for their off-work speech. Which means when it comes to speech, some have more freedom than others, and that means, for example, that viewpoints of academics and public sector workers could be more influential because others may not be able to counter their comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,29,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-civil-rights","category-media","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}