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Free Speech on Trial in the Court of Public Opinion
One could argue that all sides of this debate have lost perspective. If decorum wasn’t already dead, it may be now. Then again, as messy and unpleasant as this situation is, it may be the surest of signs that the First Amendment is alive and well.
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11 Responses to “Free Speech on Trial in the Court of Public Opinion”
Decorum can be restored if enough civil people participate in sharing their point of view with mutual respect and humility that allows for the possibility that they may have inaccurate facts or misunderstand some essential context.
I don’t know how anyone can discuss controversial issues with certainty that they are right and adversaries are wrong.
One persons terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
The sad thing is it’s so much easier to attack the opposition instead of debating on the facts or merits of the issue.
Maybe if it was required that everyone take a semester of debate in high school they’d learn how to debate on facts and not Logical fallacies. Of course, you get better sound bytes out of a good ad hominem than from real debate.
I see this getting worse before it gets better as the “news” stations are after the ratings, the talking-heads are out to score points, and the viewers are apathetic.
In addition, many of the blogs are not much better. Let’s face it, calls for the execution of sitting presidents (both Clinton and GW Bush), are not exactly reasoned discourse. Both sides of the political spectrum have cheerfully looked the other way when they sympathize with extreme views, but howl in outrage when the other side does it. I like Rambie’s suggestion – require high school debate. In fact, requiring debate, and eliminating the requirements for the angry race/class/gender courses would be a huge improvement for the public schools. Do not look for either of these changes soon, if ever.
this has nothing to do with free speech or the first amendment. if it did, one would be allowed to say or show whatever one wished on the public airwaves. one does not, and the right wing love to trumpet that fact.
this is about one small blogger attempting to make advertisers aware of what their dollars were going to support. he did not ask them to pull their monies, he did not call or threaten a boycott of products if they did not pull thier monies.
this did not become an issue until the disney attys sent a cease and disist letter to spocko’s isp.
what occured was not as a result of what was said on the air, but what ksfo, disney and their attys did to stifle another’s freedom of speech.
then the morning crew at ksfo began whining that their freedoms were being abriged.
hah.
in their 3 hour show, did they choose to discuss the issues of the first amendment and fair use? did they allow opposing voices to debate the issue?
nope. they spent most of the time maligning bloggers, spocko, mike stark and star trek fans.
they lied about issues in the news and used fear tactics to attempt to make the point that it is only their voices that are between us and the imminent takeover by islamo fascists.
they even went so far as to threaten advertisers who pulled their ads with a counter boycott.
there was a time when one could listen to talk radio and be entertained by voices from the left, center and right. but the days of joe pyne and michael jackson are long gone.
and as for these champions of free speech on ksfo, where were their voices when howard stern was being attacked from all quarters. where was their outrage when a fellow bay area broadcaster lost his job for calling sf giant players “brain dead caribean hitters, swinging at slop nightly”.
I thought this was just an example of someone petitioning a business with whose practices one disagrees. But Spocko completely misrepresents what has been presented by the talk show hosts by presenting the smallest possible part of a clip to make his point. I would have more respect for his supposed “concern” about violent talk if he had protested Don Imus’s musings about hanging Dick Cheney, but he didn’t.
Again, I don’t have a problem with protesting programming with which a person disagrees. But what Spocko and those that agree with him want is to muzzle conservative radio. So much for free speech.
One signifigant difference. Spocko was taking the words spoken by these people and using it to cause them to lose advertisers. He was merely repeating what they said on the open air, and bringing it to the attention of those who are essenetially financing it. ABC was shutting down Spocko, not using any influence to take away support, arranging for his site to be shut down.
Popular opinion was obviously in favor of Spocko, so they cut off his means to disseminate the BS the radio hosts were spewing.
sharon, muzzle conservative radio? There was exactly one dissenting caller to that three hour whinefest. That was Mike Stark. The poor, oppressed conservative radio hosts, champions of freedom of expression all, hung up on him. Exactly which voices are being muzzled?
In addition, is it your position that letting advertisers know what they are funding is “muzzling conservative radio”? That’s pretty loopy too. In essence, that means you feel that conservative radio hosts should be paid to talk and their advertisers should not be permitted to know what the hosts are saying. All Spocko did was inform the advertisers what they were paying for. Some of the advertisers pulled their sponsorship and others didn’t. Seems reasonable to me.
sharon,
i dont think imus is even heard in the bay area.
and this had nothing to do with muzzling conservative voices and everything to do with fair use.
both moderate and conservative bloggers should be up in arms about this,,,for they to use clips and soundbites from tv, movies and radio to make valid and at times invalid criticisms.
Don’t expect real Republicans to understand why it’s ok to give actual quotes from the radio shows they fund, some of the ugliest were not mentioned in the article, they feel perfectly free to make up wars against Christmas (by Rabbis) but they consider it suppression of free speech if anyone challenges.
I will be happy to admit that some leftists are just as bad, but the committed left is very small compared to the Republican cadre. They represent roughly 10 to 20 percent of the nation, roughly the same number as strongly supported the Nazis and more than those who supported the Bolsheviks, and they hope based on history to cow the nation.
I saw this years ago in groups untelated to politics. Fans of Limbaugh and other members of the Republican Guard would habitually put in remarks about poor people and many other topics that some found offensive.
At one point a white Texan responded to a comment on horrible the sixties was, with a polite ststement outling the horrors of segregation and racism, the rightis reacted with hur outrage as though they had been atacked and the name calling started.
I have seen this bullying in circle after circle, I hope it has reached it’s peak, but I expect these people to become more extreme. As Hitler said you can get people to believe the really big lie.
These people routinely distort, they have run boycotts, right now they have distorted a party in SF where a Yale crowd was attacked by rowdies from a Catholic school that was rivals wit those holding the party. The trouble started when the group was singing the Star Spangled Banner, but these comments were not anti war, but anti homosexual. These thugs were probably Republican Guards who hate “ragheads” as much as they hate “faggots.”
All they needed to do was get drunk.
Yet the situation is distorted so that the left is responsible.
Holding someone responsible for public quotes is not repression of speech, but in Republican world it is if those quotes reflect poorly.
1984 all over again.
derrick cho,
I respect your points, but not all Republicans are guilty of what you charge, nor does the Republican platform intrinsically lend itself to “censor-to-protect” tendencies.
It is the habit of a the meanest, most-controlling of the bunch, not unlike certain Democratic leaders who would hide the workings of Congress behind closed doors.
ALL concentrations of power, left and right and even middle, react in similar ways to squelch voices of dissent.
This is a people problem, not a party problem.
Sharon, you should know better than to lie. Exactly how long should a clip be to keep one from “misrepresenting” the speaker? Is your interpretation of a sufficiently long clip within the fair use portion of copyright law?