Media and Communications Policy : Media Policy & First Amendment Foundation : The Media Institute : Free Speech, Media Regulation, Content Controls

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So we turn now to the question on everyone’s lips: Will the Stewart/Colbert rally tomorrow be funny?  Or will it be a kind of medley, a skosh funny here and a tad serious there?  And whichever it is, does it really matter?

Judging by the published opinions of much of the chattering class, it does.  Writing in Politico, Ben Smith says: “Jon Stewart’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ on the Mall Saturday has occasioned handwringing from some devoted fans who worry that he’s losing his outsider credibility, and celebration from some Democrats who hope to channel his energy to advance their electoral prospects.”

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, Carlos Losada writes that “this rally just doesn’t feel right.  When all is well with the universe, you’re the guy mercilessly mocking people who hold rallies, not the guy organizing them.  The (rally) just feels a little too – what’s the word – earnest for you.”

In what may be a preview of the Act on the Mall, Stewart interviewed President Obama on the “Daily Show” Wednesday night.  The comedic high point of the interview came when, in reply to Obama’s defense of his former economic adviser, Larry Summers (“Summers did a heckuva job”), Stewart said: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.”

Perhaps anticipating that there would be those, like Dana Milbank, who would see this remark as something less than hilarious, Stewart put on display the Full Monty of his political perspicacity.  Quoth the great man to the President: “ You ran with such, if I may say, audacity – yet legislatively it has felt timid at times.”

Never mind for a minute the mind-bending dissonance and transparent grandstanding in this observation – had Obama been any more aggressive he would have been characterized as a kind of latter day Visigoth – the really interesting question is how long would it take Stewart’s joke writers to come up with maybe a dozen parodies of this remark?

In the end, the guess here is that none of this matters much.  At a time when millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, and millions more are within a week or two of having their homes foreclosed, political humor is probably not going to be widely appreciated right now.

The choices available to Stewart and Colbert are to be funny but not relevant, or relevant (to some) but not funny to most.  Or, they can try to straddle the two, but at the risk that, at a bad time in the life of the country, they are seen as mostly just interested in aggrandizing themselves.

*What Aeschylus said to his tailor.
                                              

                
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

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OK, so right off the bat let’s deal with what NPR’s firing of Juan Williams is, and what it is not.  It is a free speech issue, but it is not a First Amendment issue.  This is an important distinction because while many First Amendment issues involve freedom of speech, and many free speech issues involve the First Amendment, it is not the case that all free speech issues are First Amendment issues.

At bottom, the Speech Clause of the First Amendment is a proscription on what government can do to the media, not on what the media can do themselves.  As a practical matter what this means is that NPR’s management had the right to do what they did, and that, were this matter to go before a court, its resolution would not turn on First Amendment case law.

This said, the wisdom of the action taken, and what it suggests about the future of freedom of expression generally, are very much at issue here.

People of a certain age may remember the sad case of Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder, who was fired by CBS for some bizarre off-the-cuff comments he made about black athleticism while having a meal at a Washington restaurant.  Other similar cases are those of Don Imus, and more recently Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez.

So while there are some important differences in these cases, we’re beginning to see a pattern here: When reporters and commentators say things that arguably offend minorities (and thereby disturb the politically correct equilibrium) they get fired.  And the question is whether this is the right, or even the intelligent, way to deal with such issues, especially for media companies?

It used to be believed that the best way to handle speech that is unfair or false was for more speech, not less, and by that measure a better way to have resolved many of these matters would have been for management to issue comments that mock, or directly challenge the falsities, in the offending comments.

Though the dust hasn’t even begun to settle, it’s already clear what many people, of varying political stripes, think of the way NPR has handled the Williams affair: They think it’s a disaster.  As Howard Kurtz, formerly of the Washington Post, put it in a Daily Beast piece: “His firing has backfired, handing FOX a victory and making Williams a symbol of liberal intolerance — on the very day NPR announced a grant from George Soros that it never should have accepted.”

Indeed, the Soros revelation, combined with Republican and (especially) conservative antipathy for taxpayer support of PBS and NPR, guarantee that the Williams flap is not going away any time soon.  As lamented here, there has been a coordinated and richly financed effort underway for months that has, as part of its aim, a substantial increase in government funding for public media generally, and that would oblige PBS member stations to redirect their news programs to more local coverage — the very thing that Soros’s contribution is designed to facilitate at NPR.

But that is a story that will play itself out in days to come.  Front and center now is the question of the impact of the Williams affair on NPR, in which regard it might be useful to examine a couple statements; the offending one, made by Williams, and another, made after his firing, by the president of NPR, Vivian Schiller.

Here’s Williams’s comment: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

And here’s Schiller’s: “Juan Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and his psychiatrist or his publicist.”

Under pressure, Schiller later apologized for her remark, but going forward that may not mean much.  Put it this way, of these two comments which one do you think is the most mean-spirited and intemperate?  And of the acts at issue — Williams’s comments or his firing – which one do you think does more damage to NPR?

Yes, I think so too.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

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This week, Oct. 18 to 24, is National Freedom of Speech Week (NFSW).  The Media Institute created NFSW in 2005 in cooperation with the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation as a chance for groups and individuals to celebrate the free speech and press that we enjoy thanks to the First Amendment, which protects most speech from government censorship.

The event has grown every year as more organizations have joined the celebration.  This year, however, we have seen a real spike in participation.  Much of this has come from colleges and universities, where professors of communications and law, in particular, see NFSW as an opportunity to host debates and discussions on freedom of speech.

We’re also seeing a big jump in persons writing about National Freedom of Speech Week, and free speech generally.  Much of this is happening in blogs and tweets, as opposed to traditional news stories, by all sorts of people with all sorts of interests who have at least two things in common: They take full advantage of their ability to speak freely, and they generally do so through digital means of communication.

And this is precisely what National Freedom of Speech Week is meant to celebrate.  We are all speakers, and we all have the ability to speak our minds without fear of government censorship.  Many of our large Partnering Organizations are conducting innovative programs, contests, and activities to raise awareness of free speech.  We salute them – and we will do our best to compile a list of their activities to document NFSW 2010.  

In the meantime, we tip our First Amendment hat to the bloggers and tweeters who are using their digital devices to create a new and exciting dialogue about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  Their free speech is truly the language of America.

The National Freedom of Speech Week website is at freespeechweek.org.