RICHMOND, Va. AP – The Democratic and Republican parties both earned dubious Jefferson Muzzle Awards Tuesday for what a free-speech watchdog described as tacit compliance with restrictions on where protesters could demonstrate during their national conventions over the summer.
The Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression picked the parties for its 2009 list of egregious violators of free-speech rights because it said both went along with government-designated “free-speech zones” that limited protesters to areas that were often out of view from delegates to the presidential nominating conventions.
