| The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which staged a fake news conference, was among the "winners" Tuesday of the 2008 Jefferson Muzzle Awards in Richmond, Virginia.
The Jefferson Muzzle Awards is a free-speech group for egregious First Amendment violations.
FEMA made the list for staging the news conference during the California wildfires.
Agency employees posed as journalists and asked officials soft questions while real reporters got little notice of the news conference and were barred from asking questions because the conference call was "listen only."
Jefferson Center director Bob O'Neil said the bogus event was an example of fake speech substituting for free speech, indicating it was an "extreme" violation.
The police department in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was cited for filing criminal charges against Dawn Herb, who screamed a string of profanities when a toilet in her home overflowed.
Herb's neighbor, an off-duty officer, told her to tone it down.
When she continued, the policeman charged her with disorderly conduct.
The Federal Communications Commission got a Lifetime Muzzle for having four citations and for being in the running nearly every year for 17-years.
The commission allows a few media corporations to own the public's airways and newspapers, including allowing one company to own nearly all the outlets in a single market.
The FCC was cited for its definition of indecent words.
A Muzzle went to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., for introducing a bill that would require the FCC to maintain a policy that would make broadcasting a single word or image indecent, and therefore punishable.
CBS Radio and MSNBC were cited for taking radio host Don Imus off the air after he made racist and sexist comments about Rutgers University's women's basketball team.
The networks allowed public criticism and loss of ad revenue to control their actions, despite the fact that they could've used broadcast-delay technology to prevent the comments from being heard.
OTHERS RECOGNIZED
A Lancaster County, Nebraska, District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront for barring witnesses from using the terms "rape," "victim," "assailant," and "sexual assault kit" in a sexual assault trial.
The New York Department of Motor Vehicles for recalling a vanity license plate after deeming its "GETOSAMA" message offensive.
The managing board of The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia's student newspaper, for firing a cartoonist because of public criticism of a strip called "Ethiopian Food Fight" â despite the fact that the editors approved the cartoon before it was published.
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