That’s a fair remark. Money = speech? Well, sure. Always to some extent, after all that’s how Ben Franklin became a billionaire-equivalent in his day, by running printing presses. His speech outweighed many others’. Of course, we like him so its okay. And in Arab countries, money = speech pretty exclusively, since there is pretty damn near no speech at all that doesn’t issue forth from the aristocratic class, which tends to be pretty strictly fundamentalist right-wing petrocrats. Which, yes you find here and in Europe and in Canada even (they support Harper). We don’t imprison for saying bad things about the faith or the state. Yes, sure, be the wrong color and pull out a cell phone and you could be shot. Very bad, of course.
Let’s take a hypothetical case. Let’s say you’re a bloody tyrant who sees human rights talk as endangering your hold on power. Let’s say you have a neighbor, also a bloody tyrant. What a good move it would be to finance a nice, liberal news outlet in their country, that publishes well-written articles with moving photographs about human rights abuses in that neighboring country. Who knows? Your neighbor might even have one of those Arab Spring things and suffer destabilization.
Clever, right? Disentangle that. Make it a couple of moves more complicated and you have Al Jazeera.
But you’re right of course. You can view the video on YouTube, send just a few pennies (or nothing) to Al Jazeera, and have it stand on its own merits.
