This is where freedom of speech becomes impeded, because if you aren't told both sides and don't know which bit of what is fact you cannot reasonably form your own opinion, nor argue for it without seeming either simple or pig-headed. What value, then, in the fact speech is "free"?
More ominous are the markers of a growing intent to curtail the right to express any personal opinion - of which the massacre of French magazine Charlie Hebdo's staff is a stark example.
But much as I abhor violence and denounce that act, to those chanting "Je suis Charlie" I say, "Je ne suis pas Charlie". Because Hebdo's usual level of "humour" recently included portraying, on the cover, the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorist group Boko Haram as pregnant sex slaves crying, "Hands off our [welfare] allowance!"
Is speech that is disturbingly hateful to the point of inciting violence truly "free"?
Note that while world leaders posed in a photo op that claimed to be but wasn't actually part of the reactionary march in Paris, Boko Haram was murdering around 2000 people in their latest bout of blood-craziness.
Did the world stand still for that? No.
It's been observed two things follow heinous terrorist acts that gain media-frenzied attention - first there's an outpouring of grief and solidarity, then governments use it as an excuse to take freedoms and power from people.
Certainly that's happening here. National is amending the Human Rights Act to do away with the offices of the equal employment opportunities commissioner and the race relations commissioner; they're to become "generic" roles within the overall commission.
The HRC's independence will also be lessened by making their work programme subject to the whim of the Minister of Justice - evidently the promised payback John Key hinted at when the commission criticised aspects of the GCSB Bill in 2013.
Apart from getting police to raid media outlets and investigative journalists' homes over the teapot tapes and Dirty Politics, this diminishing of the last watchdog for public rights makes complete mockery of Key's post-Hebdo assertion that upholding freedom of expression is vital.
Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler's semi-autobiography Mein Kampf comes off copyright this year. Authorities are worried lest a rash of reprints stirs a neo-Nazi upsurge.
They needn't be. We already have more than sufficient hate-speech going on to fuel a dozen world wars.
That's the right of it.
-Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet
