Citizen Tom

I expect it has been done, and I have just never heard it. Surely someone has mentioned it. When they write, some journalists commit hate crimes. Nonetheless, I fear this is just one of those things we have to put up with.   In Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville  sort of put it this way.   

I confess that I do not entertain that firm and complete attachment to the liberty of the press freedom of the mind which things that are supremely good in their very nature are wont to excite in the mind; and I approve of it more from a recollection of the evils it prevents than from a consideration of the advantages it ensures

If any one could point out an intermediate and yet a tenable position between the complete independence and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion hateful thought, I should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position. If it is your intention to correct the abuses of unlicensed printing thinking and to restore the use of orderly language good thought, you may in the first instance try the offender by a jury; but if the jury acquits him, the opinion which was that of a single individual becomes the opinion of the country at large. Too much and too little has therefore hitherto been done. If you proceed, you must bring the delinquent before a court of permanent judges. But even here the cause must be heard before it can be decided; and the very principles example which no book person would have ventured to avow are blazoned forth in the pleadings, and what was obscurely hinted at in a single composition act is then repeated demonstrated in a for the multitude of other publications. The language action in which a hateful thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work deed is too subtle for their authority. Too much has still been done to recede, too little to attain your end; you must therefore proceed. If you establish a censorship of the press hate crime laws, the tongue of the public speaker will still make itself heard, and you have only increased the mischief. The powers of thought do not rely, like the powers of physical strength, upon the number of their mechanical agents, nor can a host of authors rebels be reckoned like the troops which compose an army; on the contrary, the authority of a principle an example is often increased by the smallness of the number of men by whom it is expressed. The words of a strong-minded man, which penetrate amidst the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators; and if it be allowed to speak freely in any public place, the consequence is the same as if free speaking was allowed in every village. The liberty of discourse must therefore be destroyed as well as the liberty of the press hateful thoughts; this is the necessary term of your efforts; but if your object was to repress the abuses of liberty thinking, they have brought you to the feet of a despot. You have been led from the extreme of independence to the extreme of subjection without meeting with a single tenable position for shelter or repose.

The above was “excerpted” from the contents of Chapter 11, Volume 1 (of 2).