Most Republicans favor closing or fining media they don’t agree with

Conservatives are always up in arms about the importance of free speech and how those darned liberals are supposedly undermining it (by using their own free speech to criticize them). Yet a new poll suggests more than half of them would have no problem silencing or punishing the press for using speech they don’t like:

Almost half of Republicans say they are in favor of courts shutting down media outlets that publish inaccurate or biased information, according to a new survey.

Forty-five percent of Republicans in the Economist–YouGov poll said courts should be able to shut down media outlets, while 20 percent of Republicans are opposed the idea.

[…]

A majority of Republicans also said they support fines for media outlets that put out biased or inaccurate news reports.

Fifty-five percent of Republicans said they would favor fining news outlets, compared to just 12 percent who opposed the move.

Alternate headline: Half of Republicans don’t understand the First Amendment. Or maybe they think it would be improved by cutting out that bit about a “free press”.

Before you start yelling at them, though, there’s also this:

Just 18 percent of Democrats said they would favor [shutting down media outlets for “bias”], while 39 percent of them are opposed to it.

That 39% is a chillingly low number. Subtracting the openly censorious 18%, that leaves 63% of Democrats who apparently can’t decide whether or not government censorship of the media is a bad thing. That’s a lot of Dems who don’t understand the First Amendment much better than most Republicans do.

(via Joe.My.God.)