From what I've seen, freedom of speech has been improving. It used to be that people could barely speak their mind on Reddit, Twitter or at universities without getting attacked or cancelled over who knows what. Now, people are expressing themselves more regularly in all of those places. Universities still have a ways to go, but it is improving.
There have been some television networks that also had public licensing to broadcast over the air, but that requires a broadcast license which has stipulations of serving the public interest. To maintain this license, you require locally relevant content, a variety of viewpoints expressed and they cannot distort the news.
Increasingly, shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and The View which are all broadcast over the air with public licenses, became more than simply interview shows with interesting guests. They became actual political hit jobs that masquerade as news while day in day out insulting politicians and spreading provably false out of context lies which people could debunk themselves with their own research. Yet, these networks used this entertainment loophole as if it was a blank check to go against the public interest broadcast license.
No doubt, people can argue the same about politicians themselves, but politicians aren't restricted to this legal standard, because they need the flexibility to achieve whatever they think the country needs at the moment. Public broadcasting is its own thing and does allow for a significant range of content, so long as you adhere to the standards.
If PBS ran a decent journalistic report investigating some problem in an administration that is in the public interest and is an entirely different thing than these political hate shows that all seem to echo the exact same thought with different words. They can exist just fine, but I fundamentally agree that it stretches the definition of what is acceptable public interest programming for over the air broadcasting.
Putting pressure on them to change up their programming is probably a good thing for the country. What ever happened to the old high quality high integrity debate shows and intellectual interviews? It's all insults or propaganda now and "I don't know, they're crazy!", so nobody understands what's going on in the world or why it's happening. It's like they make it obvious that they have no interest in informing you, because if you understand it, you can't hate it as much as they need you to.
It would be fine for those networks to continue running those shows, but they would have to move it off to some other channel that isn't broadcast using an over the air license.
As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
Companies are largely pro-American and if they feel like woke helps resolve some kinds of political tensions that have been dividing America, then they will feel like that is the patriotic thing to do. When it turns out that is actually Marxism in disguise aimed at destroying the country, they push back. These things just happen slowly and it takes time to adjust.
> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.