Pai Wins Free Speech Award, Slams CIN Studies
The FCC’s scrapped Critical Information Needs study threatened free expression, Commissioner Ajit Pai said in a speech accepting The Media Institute’s Free Speech award Wednesday evening at a dinner we attended. His office has "had success in calling attention to…
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government initiatives that threatened our constitutional freedoms,” he said. “This study involved researchers funded by the agency that licenses television stations going into broadcast television newsrooms and asking questions about editorial judgment.” The FCC canceled the study in 2014 in the face of widespread public opposition and questions from legislators (see 1403040033). Though Pai wrote in The Wall Street Journal attacking the CIN studies as an FCC overstep, he downplayed its part in the agency eventually scrapping the study. “What compelled the FCC to stop was the opposition of Americans from around the country and across the political spectrum,” he said. Pai said an increasing culture of censorship on college campuses is connected with policies designed to prevent offensive speech. “This progressive impulse to squelch speech on college campuses is anything but progressive,” Pai said. “An academic culture pervaded by safe spaces, trigger warnings, and a fear of ‘microaggressions’ must be challenged if America is to preserve the first freedom embedded in our Bill of Rights.” Pai also criticized the CIN study during a speech at a 2014 Media Institute event (see 1411190060)