If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.
replyTo be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.
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>The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum, or non-binding statement, from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
replyThis phrase was coined when the government, having arrested somebody for handing out leaflets opposing the draft in WW1, claimed that handing out leaflets opposing the draft was the moral equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
replyRick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.
replyIt only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.
replySure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.
It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.
I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.
But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?