Republican South Carolina representative Mike Pitts, pictured above, has sponsored a bill in his state's congress, which will be called the South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law if it gets passed. Before covering matters related to government, a journalist would be required to undergo a background check, similar to the background check required before buying a handgun, to report the news. No one who has written anything controversial, or who has written anything that has garnered complaints about government, petitions, or boycotts would be allowed to cover state events. There would also be a non-refundable fee for the background check to report the news, effecting a charge to tell the truth! Also, every journalist in South Carolina would have to be listed in a registry. Hmm....where has your blogger heard something like this before? This sounds an awful lot like the German Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933, which was aimed at forcing Jews out of any professional field in Nazi Germany.
This bill is such a gross violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that it will never pass. Still, the question that needs to be answered is this: why is South Carolina so afraid of writers and journalists?
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