Wow... George Orwell Would Be Proud... The "Free Flow" Of Information Act...

[JDPriestly]

199. If the Founding Fathers had wanted to define the press, they would have done so.

The fact is that the press encompassed all kinds of things then, all kinds of undesirable gossip and even secrets. John Adams tried to control the press with the Alien and Sedition Act. It was specifically aimed at francophiles like Jefferson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_and_Kentucky_Resolutions

It's do as I say, not as I do in the US with regard to freedom of the press as the excessive classification of matters of general interest and public policy that are appropriate for public discussion and coverage are labeled top secret by our government. This is especially true of those nasty little embarrassing facts that show a government agency to be corrupt or not acting as it should -- as in the shooting of the reporter in Iraq that was exposed by Corporal Manning and the other atrocities and killings of civilians by drones.

Nevertheless, our government claims to strongly support freedom of the press.

In May 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama signed legislation intended to promote a free press around the world, a bipartisan measure inspired by the murder in Pakistan of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The legislation, called the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, requires the United States Department of State to expand its scrutiny of news media restrictions and intimidation as part of its annual review of human rights in each country.[22] In 2012 the Obama Administration collected communication records from 20 separate home and office lines for Associated Press reporters over a two-month period, possibly in an effort to curtail government leaks to the press. The surveillance caused widespread condemnation by First Amendment experts and free press advocates, and led 50 major media organizations to sign and send a letter of protest to American attorney general Eric Holder.[23][24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

Apparently the new system allows the president to define what is news and what is not and then lets Congress decide who gets to publish the news and who doesn't.

It is kind of a circuitous route to absolute censorship.

I have told the story on DU before that many years ago, I knew a man from and Eastern European country who was hired by his then Communist government to censor the foreign news media. He was among the first to leave his native land.

We are not allowed to know this and that, things that are probably very important for our lives, because if we knew them, we would know that our government is made of human beings not gods and that we can never be as safe as we would like to be and what is more that America is not perfect. It would be terrible if we found out about the crimes committed in the name of the USA, wouldn't it? We might really demand change. And there are certain individuals and cliques in our government and corporations that would not be employed were that change to occur.