One of the biggest failings of the bourgeois liberal theory of freedom of speech and press is, of course, that it has a great big blindspot regarding the power of private property, the corporations, firms to control and deny the speech and press of billions of people through many means ,including firing or not hiring for jobs, onerous lawsuits, refusal to invest in a city, control of the mass media etc. The government is not the main controller or represser of speech and press. The idea of the corporate person as needing Bill of Rights protection is not only nonsensical, but a cover up of the fact that the Corporate Person the actual ruling class unit. The freedom of press is for them that owns the presses, and the same class that controls the big presses controls the state ! So, the U.S. First Amendment press freedom is historically out of date, in important ways. The monopoly media dominates the state . The need for the freedom of the private monopoly media from state control is an anachronism in many ways, as that monopoly media is a major sector of the ruling class control of the state power.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
CB
* Gunns Limited, a Timber and woodchip product company in Australia (Gunns Website <http://www.gunns.com.au/> ) is suing 17 individual activists, including Federal Greens Senator Bob Brown, as well as three not-for-profit environmental groups, for over 7.8 million dollars. Gunns claims that the defendants have sullied their reputation and caused them to lose profits, the defendants claim that they are simply protecting the environment. The defendants have become collectively known as the Gunns 20 (Friends of the Gunns 20 <http://www.gunns20.org/> ). Although this example involves a private law suit, not government censorship, some claim that it is an abuse of defamation law, since it is intended to tie up the environmental activists in court procedings, during which time Gunns intend to build a Pulp Mill in northern Tasmania. According to this view, the plaintiffs are not genuinely seeking to vindicate their reputations and they are seeking to scare off other activists with the prospect of ruinous legal expense. Such cases raise interesting questions about the extent to which powerful corporate interests should have access to defamation law