Category: First Amendment

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Is This What Net Neutrality Is Really About?

Recent congressional hearings held in the wake of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) net neutrality ruling provide a glimpse into what is so deeply wrong with this regulation, and why so many activist groups were behind it.

It’s an aspect of this matter of which you were perhaps unaware while the FCC was considering its regulatory strategy. Perhaps you thought net neutrality meant what was said of it: that it was intended to prevent the blocking or throttling of websites, or of “paid prioritization.”

Silly you.  Actually, those were the interests of those companies — like Google and Netflix — that saw in governmental sway over the Internet commercial benefits for themselves.  But what about those groups and individuals who had political or ideological interests, and who played such outsized roles in the deal?

You know, groups like Free Press, Media Matters, Public Knowledge and New America’s Open Technology Institute?  Or what about the large grant-giving foundations, like Ford, MacArthur, Knight, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute that, in addition to munificently funding third-party net neutrality activists, directly lobbied the FCC themselves?

It should now be clear, even to those who weren’t paying attention earlier, that the primary interest these groups had, and have, in net neutrality is their desire to insinuate government in the regulation of speech on the Internet.  >> Read More

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘Forbearing’ the Constitution: Net Neutrality and the FCC

So the latest word is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a branch of government that, amusingly, is still referred to as an “independent” agency, is about to enact so-called net neutrality regulations under Title II of the Communications Act.

This, because according to its fans at the Commission, such regulations are needed in order to ensure a “fair and open” Internet.  Because, however, even the most passionate among them understand the many problems this would otherwise cause, the majority Democratic commissioners are said to be poised to enact regulations that forbear the full imposition of Title ll rules.

Meantime, Congress is considering enacting a law that would itself aim to protect net neutrality, but would do so in such a way as to deprive the FCC of its ability to regulate Internet service providers as a utility under Title II.

If (you’ll forgive the expression) one googles the word “forbearance,” the first definition that comes up reads: “The action of refraining from exercising a legal right…. ” — and there’s the rub!

With every passing day it becomes clearer that the Internet is the future of the press, and the plain language of the First Amendment bars the government from abridging freedom of speech or of the press.  >>Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

We Are Not Charlie. We Are Weak.

The worst aspect of the Charlie Hebdo affair is that human beings were murdered for practicing free speech.  A distant second is the way this affair, and the earlier hacking of the Sony Pictures studio, has exposed the pieties and inadequacies of so much of the media.

Speaking the other day at the Consumer Electronics Show, Kazuo Hirai, CEO of Sony Corp., is reported to have said that he was proud “of all of the employees of Sony Pictures for standing up against the extortionist efforts of those criminals that attacked” the company.

Really?  No acknowledgment that the studio belatedly moved to release the film only after being criticized by virtually everyone in the country up to and including the president?

And despite the happy profusion of “Je Suis Charlie” displays, what has been the response of American media companies to that monstrous act?  As reported in Politico on Jan. 7, CNN senior editorial director, Richard Griffiths, sent a message to CNN staff saying, among other things, that “Video or stills of street protests showing Parisians holding up copies of the offensive cartoons, if shot wide, are OK.  Avoid close-ups of the cartoons that make them clearly legible.”

And here, according to a piece in Rolling Stone, is the way the Associated Press described its decision regarding the Hebdo cartoons: “We’ve taken the view that we don’t want to publish hate speech or spectacles that offend, provoke or intimidate, or anything that desecrates religious symbols or angers people along religious or ethnic lines. …  We don’t feel that’s useful.”

Even the Hollywood bible, Variety magazine, adds to the general alarm:

A brutal attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo over cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed has jolted Hollywood, escalating concerns by artists and producers that major studios and networks may avoid greenlighting movies and TV shows with potentially inflammatory content….

Freedom of speech is under attack, but, given Sony’s initial decision to pull the release of The Interview and its subsequent about-face, it’s not clear how rousing a defense the entertainment business is willing to mount in the midst of financial pressures, political dangers, and the threat of violence.

Making matters incalculably worse is the fact that the most immediate threats to free speech in this country don’t come from abroad, but from here at home.  As described three years ago by Jonathan Turley in the Washington Post, we are witnessing the censoring of speech under one of four rationales: Speech is blasphemous; Speech is hateful; Speech is discriminatory; Speech is deceitful.

Shortly after the Sony affair broke open, Ross Douthat, the loneliest and bravest journalist at the New York Times, wrote one of the most powerful paragraphs about that, and related, matters:

Of course it had to escalate this way.  We live in a time of consistent gutlessness on the part of institutions notionally committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, a time of canceled commencement invitations and CEOs defenestrated for their political donations, a time of Twitter mobs, trigger warnings and cringing public apologies.  A time when journalists and publishers tiptoe around Islamic fundamentalism, when free speech is under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic, when a hypersensitive political correctness has the whip hand on many college campuses.

So why should anyone be remotely surprised when Kim Jong-un decided to get in on the “don’t offend me” act?

So what to do?  Enforcement of the First Amendment won’t suffice because it only proscribes governmental abridgement of free speech, and only, of course, in the United States.

Here are a couple suggestions.  The next time you read or hear something that you think is truly awful, moronic, hateful, or false, send a comment by email, text, or social media stating your objections but also saying that you respect the right of the offending party to speak his or her piece.

And when you hear of some group or individual threatening advertisers with boycotts for advertising on programs they don’t like, contact those same advertisers yourself and let them know that you have a different view.

In the end, free speech can be guaranteed, if at all, not by the press or government, but only by the people.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  This article was originally published here in the online edition of USA Today on Jan. 15, 2015.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Free Speech Week: Not a Moment Too Soon

With two and a half months still to go, 2014 has been one of the toughest years on record for freedom of speech in the USA.

In February, for instance, two “climate change” groups collected 110,000 names on a petition they then sent to the Washington Post.  The petition demanded that the Post stop publishing “editorial content denying climate change.”  In a press release issued by one of the groups, columnists George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and the Volokh Conspiracy blog were singled out by name as “climate change deniers.” Happily, the petition went nowhere, though the Los Angeles Times has adopted an editorial stance similar to what the petitioners demanded of the Post.

In March, Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site, demanded that the producers of an anti-abortion film about convicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell remove from their proposal vivid language about the way Gosnell went about his work. Kickstarter said the language in the proposal went against its “Community Guidelines.”  One day after the producers refused, and loudly took their proposal to another crowd-funding site, Kickstarter said it would allow the proposal, and later said it was amending its guidelines.  Too late.  To date the film has raised over $2 million on the competing crowd-funding site, Indiegogo.

April was an especially busy month for the nation’s speech police.  On April 3, Brendan Eich resigned his position as CEO of Mozilla Corporation.  Eich had been roundly attacked on social media, and by LGBT activists, for a contribution he made six years earlier to California Proposition 8, which sought to establish that only a marriage between a man and a woman could be recognized as valid in that state.

Five days later, on April 8, Brandeis University reversed its decision to award an honorary degree to women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, following heated criticism of the award to her by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Arab American Institute.  As a young Muslim woman, Hirsi Ali endured genital cutting and later wrote the screenplay for the film “Submission,” which was critical of the way Muslim women are treated. Defending the decision, the president of Brandeis said that Hirsi Ali was free to come to the campus “to engage in dialogue” but that there is a difference between having a provocative speaker on campus and awarding an honorary degree.

Things proceeded apace in May, with Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde being targets of opportunity for local censors.  The former secretary of state withdrew from a commencement address at Rutgers after student and faculty protesters criticized her role in the Iraq war.  (We can only wonder if, a few years from now, the same students and faculty will protest campus addresses by members of the Obama Administration for their role in the bombing of ISIS.)

And Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, withdrew as commencement speaker at Smith College following the appearance of an online petition objecting to her role, at the IMF, in strengthening “imperialist and patriarchal systems.”

The media’s own PC patrols were out in June, as the struggling St. Louis Post-Dispatch used its mischaracterization of a George Will column as an excuse to drop the columnist altogether.  Will had argued, in a piece titled “Colleges become the victims of progressivism,” that colleges were opening themselves up to litigation in cases where allegations of sexual assault deny due process to those accused.  The paper’s editorial page editor, no friend of conservatives, averred that Will’s column caused hurt among people in the social media and some female friends of his … or that Will was past his prime, take your pick.

The months of July and August were relatively free of such fireworks, presumably because the PC too need a vacation, but the current month has already been marked by more of the same.  On Oct. 6, for instance, Scripps College, a women’s liberal arts institution and one of the five undergraduate colleges that comprise Claremont Colleges, disinvited George Will from delivering an address as part of a program that was designed to bring prominent conservatives to the Scripps campus.

Will’s offense?  The same column he wrote last summer about sexual assault on campus.  In the inscrutable words of the Scripps president: “Sexual assault is not a conservative or liberal issue.  And it is too important to be trivialized in a political debate or wrapped into a celebrity controversy.”  One assumes, on reading such stuff, that the Scripps president was engaging in some kind of liberal arts equivalent of speaking in tongues.

Interestingly, the Scripps president doesn’t appear to honor the distinction made by the Brandeis president – that there’s a difference between allowing someone to speak on the one hand, and giving that person an award on the other – but who’s to question disagreements between such giants?

Ensuring that October will not go out like a lamb, no matter what happens from now until the end of the month, comes the latest brouhaha, an attempt by the City of Houston to subpoena sermons delivered in five area churches by pastors who oppose passage by the Houston City Council of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

After the city disqualified a petition by opponents to put HERO to a referendum, some of the petition organizers filed a suit against the city; in response Houston and its pro bono attorneys subpoenaed the sermons and other information from the five churches, though none of the five was among the groups suing the city.

It is (or was) the city’s position that the subpoenas are a legitimate tactic in the discovery process, but since the mayor and the city attorney have now reversed themselves and say that they think the subpoenas are overbroad, it’s not at all clear where this matter will end, most likely in the withdrawal or quashing of the subpoenas.

October 20 begins the start of the annual celebration called Free Speech Week.  As demonstrated by events to date this year, one hopes it will grow and gain traction.

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

Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘Freedom From Speech’

Evidence that the human race is not yet won, as a former colleague used to say, is coming in the windows.  From murder in the name of religion, to widespread crime, greed, and violence, to the bottoming of popular culture, it’s pretty clear that this is not mankind’s finest hour.  But enough about mankind, generally speaking.

The subject of today’s tutorial is that little slice of homo erectus living in the USA, and practicing the politics of proto-fascism.  And who are such people, you wonder?  Well, they’re to be found among  activists, journalists, college professors; wherever, in other words, “progressives” congregate in especially large numbers.

It is these worthies who have foisted upon us the deeply undemocratic and freedom-busting protocols of political correctness.  Think about it: We have now arrived as a nation at a time when people who say anything that gives (or could give) offense to any minority – with the exception of white, Christian, heterosexual and Republican men, about whom no amount of criticism or ridicule is sufficient – may find themselves expelled or unemployed, if not under arrest, the constitutional guarantee of free speech notwithstanding.

It is a time when certain taxpayer-funded colleges and universities allow free speech on campus only within designated “free speech zones,” and sometimes not even there.  A time when textbooks must come with “trigger warnings,” lest a reader feel threatened or uncomfortable with the contents therein.

It’s a time when colleges are routinely the site of “disinvitation” campaigns aimed at preventing speakers from appearing on campuses, and when colleges formulate so-called campus speech codes.

It’s because of his concern with this cultural void that Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has written a new book titled Freedom from Speech.  Published just recently by Encounter Books, this slim volume is must reading for anyone who senses that things are going badly wrong on campuses and beyond, and wants to know what to do about it.

What Lukianoff is doing, in addition to writing books, is challenging colleges with litigation, aided by Bob Corn-Revere, the terrific First Amendment lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine.  (It should be noted, in the interest of full disclosure and a measure of chest-thumping, that both Lukianoff and Corn-Revere are members of The Media Institute’s First Amendment Advisory Council.)

A justly flattering review of Lukianoff’s book, written by Ronald Collins in Concurring Opinions, provides this telling quote: “This is a surreal time for freedom of speech.  While the legal protections of the First Amendment remain strong, the culture is obsessed with punishing individuals for allegedly offensive speech utterances.”

And it’s this dichotomy: strong legal protections, undermined by weak and/or contradictory applications of the law in the culture generally, that goes to the heart of the problem, and its seeming intractability.

If this situation is to improve, two things need to come to pass: First, some of the colleges being challenged with lawsuits need to defend their positions in court (rather than just buckling under at the threat of litigation) and then lose decisively and painfully; and second, there needs to be some measure of genuine opprobrium attached to the practices, on campuses and everywhere else, of the speech police.

In the meantime, there are a few things people troubled by all this can do.  They can (1) buy Lukianoff’s book; (2) make a tax-deductible contribution to FIRE; and (3) contact Bob Corn-Revere whenever you think you’ve spotted an actionable offense in this area.

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

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Udall Amendment: When Politics Mean More Than the Constitution

It came as no surprise when, in June, Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and 41 other U.S. senators, Democrats all, proposed a campaign finance amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, Democrats and their surrogates in the media and allied advocacy groups, worried that the case would work to their political disadvantage, have been on a mission to find some way around it.

So what’s the amendment all about?  S.J. Resolution 19, as it’s called, proposes to allow Congress to regulate contributions to candidates for federal office, and to extend similar power to the states for candidates running for state office.

Language in the joint resolution avers that it would amend the Constitution “relating to contributions and expenditures intended to affect elections.”  But as Floyd Abrams, easily the most distinguished First Amendment expert of our time, said in congressional testimony, the amendment would have been more revealing and accurate if it had said that “it relates to limiting speech intended to affect elections.”

And there, of course, is the rub, since the most highly protected form of speech is political speech.  For the Senate sponsors of this amendment to have clearly and unequivocally stated its impact would have required more candor than they possess, and in addition put themselves in direct conflict with the First Amendment, as found in caselaw, and free speech, as understood by people generally.

Given that this amendment stands no chance whatsoever of making it past all the hurdles that stand in the way (2/3 majorities in both the House and Senate, and ratification by 3/4 of the states), one might wonder why the effort is being made, or why anyone should even bother talking about it.

The answer to the first question is that it’s an election stunt meant to rally the Democratic “base,” while the answer to the second is that sponsorship of this amendment shows that when politicians fear for their own, or their party’s, chances at the ballot box, anything, even the trashing of the most important part of the Bill of Rights, is fair play.

Much as the primary villains in this affair are Democrats and their allies, things might not have gone this far but for the shabby reporting and commentary that has come in the wake of the Citizens United decision.  As detailed in a piece published in Mediaite by Dan Abrams, even mainstream media like the Washington Post and New York Times have made egregious errors in their references to this case:

But reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and watching MSNBC in particular, it is hardly surprising that the public would be confused.  On January 9 (2012), in a front-page piece on the influence of Newt Gingrich supporter Sheldon Adelson, the Times inaccurately reported that Adelson’s $5 million donation to a pro-Gingrich Super PAC “underscores” how the Citizens United case “has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election.” … The opinion, in fact, did nothing of the sort….

The Washington Post has done no better.  On January 11 (2012), Dana Milbank, writing of Adelson’s $5 million donation … asserted that it was “the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which made such unlimited contributions possible.”

In fact it was the 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, which established the right of wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of their own money for independent political speech.

Some critics of Citizens United point out that with this case the Court undid some earlier decisions, most importantly a challenge in 2003 to the so-called McCain-Feingold law (McConnell v. FEC), where the Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of that law.

But several years before Citizens United, the Court largely nullified a major section of its McCain-Feingold decision when it ruled, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, that unless an “issue ad” expressly urged the support or defeat of a candidate it was unconstitutional to forbid its airing on TV close to the time of a primary or general election, something forbidden by McCain-Feingold, and the very issue that was at the center of Citizens United.

Finally, many advocates of campaign finance regulations have mocked the Citizens United decision for empowering corporations with First Amendment-protected free speech rights. But in fact the cases that confirmed First Amendment protection for corporations are decades old, most notably Central Hudson in 1980.

It would be possible to have an honest debate about the constitutionality of campaign finance laws, but not when the facts are twisted and the true motives of the disputants hidden from view.

 The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils. A version of this article was first  published by USA Today, on July 13, 2014.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Dropping George Will Is a Bad Way To Arrest That Subscriber Decline, Post-Dispatch

Even as such things are becoming commonplace, the sacking of George Will’s syndicated column by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sets a new low in mainstream journalism’s race to the bottom.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the situation, Will wrote a piece (“Colleges become the victims of progressivism”) in which he ridiculed, in the context of a new Education Department mandate, some phony math and dubious cases being cited to demonstrate that America suffers from a rape epidemic.

Will’s larger point was that the DOE mandate threatens the loss of federal funding to colleges that do not institute a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating allegations of sexual assault.  This, he wrote, would inevitably lead to costly litigation “against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.”

Elsewhere in his article, Will also points to the growth of campus speech codes and the idea, on some campuses, of the need for “trigger warnings” on college textbooks that feature language or concepts as might “victimize” unwary students.  Will contrasts these developments – none of which are much resisted by college faculty and administrations – often they’re welcomed – with those same colleges’ anger at another prospective DOE program, a rating system that would compare schools on things like graduation rates, student debt, and earnings after graduation.

Will concludes his piece with this: “What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity.  Which serves them right.  They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.”

So that’s it.  That’s what the piece is about.  But not to one Tony Messenger, the editorial page editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  To Mr. Messenger, Will’s column “was offensive and inaccurate,” for which apologies were in order, and sufficient grounds for dropping his column from the paper permanently.  And what, precisely, was the offensive and inaccurate thing to which Messenger objected?

Well, as reported by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, it was: “Seeing the reaction and intensity of the hurt in some of the social media and the reaction of women I know and talking to people who really were offended by the thought that sexual assault victims would seek some special victimhood – it helped seeing that response and it informed my [Messenger’s] opinion.”

Against the slim chance that anyone wonders about it, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a long record of supporting liberal and Democratic priorities, which means that Tony Messenger fits right in.  He routinely bashes the Missouri Republican Party, often harshly, and champions every liberal cause that comes his way.

Because it’s not nice to pick on the weak, it wouldn’t be right here to speak about Messenger’s abilities in and of themselves, except perhaps to say that somewhere between his brainpan and his mouth there are little walls that prevent him from making sense when speaking.  You can witness this yourself, and in fact it’s recommend just for the humor, by checking out Messenger’s interview, available on YouTube, with a fellow named Lee Presser (“A Conversation with Tony Messenger”).  Videotaped in 2012, not long after Messenger was hired, it’s almost comic how Messenger filibusters the hard questions while still managing to back himself into rhetorical cul-de-sacs.

One such is his claim that a unique feature of his paper’s editorial page setup is its insulation from the publisher.  This, because of a special editorial board that meets regularly.  Asked by Presser who sits on that board, Messenger says it’s him, two guys who report to him, plus the editor-in-chief, who Messenger reports to, and the guy the editor reports to, the publisher.

Apart from the substantive nature of this matter, and Messenger’s personal shortcomings, there are many smaller ironies.  One is that George Will is the recipient of a Pulitzer prize, named after the former owners of the St Louis Post-Dispatch.  (It and some other newspapers were purchased from Pulitzer by Lee Enterprises for $1.5 billion, a few years after which Lee Enterprises filed for bankruptcy.)

Another is the fact that, from 2010 through the end of 2012, the Post-Dispatch’s circulation dropped from 213,472 to 178,801, while the Sunday paper dropped from over 400,000 readers to 299,000.  At the same time the paper routinely excoriated Republicans and the Republican Party, which today controls both the Missouri House and Senate by more than 2-to-1 majorities.

Asked by Presser in the aforementioned YouTube video why so many people say they no longer read the paper because of its transparent political bias, Messenger’s answer (trimmed of its fat) was that such people are confused, and that they should remember they can always write letters to the editor.

Yes, that’s it exactly.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  A version of this article was first published here on The Daily Caller on June 23, 2014.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Free Speech and the Academy

So here we are as a nation, at the intersection of fear and despair, and what do we get?  A blessing on the activities of the latter-day Hitler Youth among the nations “progressive” collegians!  This, courtesy of a piece written by one Lucia Graves, as published in National Journal.

Under the title “The Case for Protesting Your Commencement Speaker,” Graves manages to assemble, in the fewest number of words, more non sequiturs, straw men, and fallacies than should be permitted any professional journalist.

Of course some might argue that Graves is neither professional nor a journalist.  Having formerly written for the Huffington Post about energy matters, where she demonstrated the same facility for agitprop that she displays in the NJ piece, Graves more closely resembles a wannabe editorialist or MSNBC commentator than a journalist or reporter.

For those who get the picture already, and would rather not inflict on themselves the whole of Graves’s opus, it’s perhaps enough just to know the subtitle of her piece: “These students aren’t silencing debate.  They’re creating it.”

That statement sums up nicely the quality of what Graves has to say about the recent travesties at Rutgers, Haverford, Smith, and numerous other colleges, where students and faculty have succeeded in shouting down, or otherwise causing the cancellation of appearances at campus events, of speakers who have said or done something that gives offense to the PC police and student/faculty progressives.

Graves’s argument is reminiscent of one made by a protester at Brown University who, fresh off a successful shout down of the New York City chief of police, averred that the affair “was a powerful demonstration of free speech.”  As written at the time, the Brown case was a powerful demonstration of free speech in the same way that a mugging is a powerful demonstration of free will.

Similarly, the protesters of which Graves speaks “created debate” only in the sense that, by their actions, they have demonstrated the peril in the growth and nurturing of a mindset and a movement that are, at bottom, fascistic.

Given her inconsequence and modest ability, one might wonder about the need to criticize Graves at all.  Indeed, the criticism here is pretty tame compared to the kind she gets in the (highly recommended) comments her piece attracted in NJ itself.  Moreover, one should hasten to commend (even as Graves objects to) a number of liberal outlets, including Slate, Vox, the Nation, and the Daily Beast, which have roundly criticized the campus thuggery.

Even so, there remain reasons to criticize Graves, most notably because she’s far from alone, and the disease of which she’s a carrier is found not just on campus but off campus as well.

Witness, for instance, the latest chapter in the ongoing attempt by “climate change” activists to isolate and censor climate scientists who say or do things that indicate any degree of skepticism about the subject.

As reported, Swedish climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson’s scholarly paper was rejected for publication by a leading scientific journal after one reviewer criticized it on the grounds that it would provide fodder for climate change skeptics.  Bengtsson’s crime?  He and his four co-authors suggested that climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than has been reported by the UN’s IPCC.

When, as now, too many people believe that the ends justify the means, even the most basic of human rights, like freedom of speech, can be targeted by propagandists.

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

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Nowhere To Hide

Because free speech aficionados like us are attracted to those subjects where even angels fear to tread, let’s talk about Donald Sterling.

The first thing one wants to say is that the guy is a slob.  Indeed, there’s evidence that he’s been a slob for quite some time.  Read, for instance (if you have the stomach for it) an account of the 2003 lawsuit filed against his former mistress–not his more recent one, V. Stiviano, but an earlier flower child named Alexandra Castro.

Indeed, one would be willing to wage a fair amount of money on the proposition that when Sterling passes away, he will do so unwept by anyone.  Whatever joys and beauties this life offers up, Sterling has had, and abused, all of them.

But the question that has been on my mind is this: Is Sterling a slob because of the statements he made, or did he make those statements because he’s a slob?  There is, it seems, a difference worth noting, especially at a time when, because of the growing lack of privacy, anything (including what one might consider the most intimate and confidential conversation) may find its way into widespread distribution.

Consider, for instance, Google glasses, or the even more worrisome prospect of video camera-embedded contact lenses!  What, then, would prevent the recording, editing, and uploading – to sites like Google’s YouTube – of conversations that were recorded and edited, in or out of context, of which the speakers were unaware?

Does there exist any person in the world who has not said something in confidence, or without reflection, or just for effect on the hearer, that he or she would not want bruited about?

As stressed at the beginning, none of this is said in defense of Donald Sterling.  He is of no interest or consequence, whatever becomes of him.  But as reported, on CNN, by First Amendment lawyer Mark Randazzo:

Isn’t it bad enough that the National Security Agency can spy on all of us? How can we complain when we condone giving our friends the ability to do worse – perhaps just to try to destroy us?

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

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Political Correctness Takes a Turn for the Worse

It’s widely understood that “political correctness” can be employed as a speech-killing device.   But it’s only been in recent times that we’ve been able to witness the full range of its lethality.

From colleges and universities like Fordham, Brown, and Brandeis have come recent, ugly demonstrations of intolerance, based on PC–themed arguments, which have yielded a suppression of “disfavored” speech on those campuses.

Elsewhere, columnist Charles Krauthammer reports that in February, the Washington Post received 110,000 signatures on a petition demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming!

In the midst of all this have come a number of commentaries, mostly written by conservatives or libertarians, decrying this state of affairs, and the apparent acquiescence in it of mainstream entertainment and journalism outfits.

Subjects that have prompted recent censorious acts include opposition to (1) the Affordable Care Act; (2) global warming or “climate change”; (3) same-sex marriage; and (4) abortion.

The role of the media in the growth of the speech police hasn’t been so much a matter of their overt support as of their benign neglect.  So it is that environmental organizations can brand climate change skeptics as “deniers,” whose views are unworthy of circulation or consideration, safe in the knowledge that most in the mainstream media agree with their take on the issue, even if they may not themselves encourage censorship activities.

So too with the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, and abortion, opposition to all of which has been loudly and uncritically attributed to racism, homophobia, and a “war on women,” respectively.

As Krauthammer put it in his piece about the number of signatures on the global warming petition: “The left is entering a new phase of ideological intolerance – no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition….  Long a staple of academia, the totalitarian impulse is spreading.  What to do?  Defend the dissenters, even if – perhaps, especially if – you disagree with their policy.  It is – it was? – the American way.”

It’s against this backdrop that one reads with considerable relief an article published last week in … Nation magazine!  Written by Michelle Goldberg, and titled “#Cancel Colbert and the Return of the Anti-Liberal Left,” this slim offering is one of the best, and more encouraging, things written about political correctness in recent memory.  It’s one of the best because of the reasoning employed in the piece; it’s important because of its publication in the resolutely left-wing Nation.

But don’t take my word for it.  Read on:

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness.  Recently, we’ve seen the calls to #CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years….  Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them….

Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression and that “it is possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite.  Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones….”

Note both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing.

What Goldberg calls “left-wing anti-liberalism,” others might characterize more harshly.  Take, for instance, the example of the group called Media Matters for America, created for no other reason than to attempt to silence conservative voices.  To characterize such a group as merely anti-liberal, or anti-conservative, would seem like a rather dainty way of putting it.

Beyond MMA, there are other groups and individuals, whose actions or theories play a role in the speech suppression business.  Robert McChesney, co-founder of the septic organization misnamed Free Press, comes to mind.

This said, there’s much to be appreciated in Goldberg’s thesis.  For one thing there’s the consoling fact that, for all the cultural and political differences currently roiling the nation, there are certain bedrock principles, like free speech, that people of vastly different perspectives can rally around.

For a nation founded on the principles of popular democracy and the Bill of Rights, this is a good thing indeed.

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