Our Founding Fathers had a very good reason for including freedom of speech and of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution: Those rights provide the very foundation of our democracy – right behind the right to vote.
A citizen’s vote is dependent upon the information that he or she has. No information, no democracy, it’s as simple as that. And how do people get their information? They get it through the speech of others, and especially through the press, whose primary responsibility is to provide the information that people need to have in order to make the decisions that responsible citizens need to make. This principle can be stated with a very simple equation: Speech = Information ==> Ability to make decisions (including voting) that citizens must make in order to maintain a democracy.
The free speech portion of our
First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law …. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
It sounds pretty simple. But because of numerous technological changes that have occurred since the creation of our country, it’s more complicated that it sounds – and that has given those who wish to turn our country into a Fascist state a loophole to create enough obfuscation to abolish our First Amendment rights in practice.
Indications of the loss of our 1st amendment and democracy in the United StatesOne good way to evaluate a process is to look at its results. Here are some of the results that I believe should serve as a dire warning that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is no longer functioning very well, and that our democracy is consequentially deteriorating:
Election integrity: Increasing numbers of our votes are counted by computer programs which American citizens have no legal rights to inspect, since those programs are deemed by our government to be “proprietary”, or private property. Yet, despite the fact that a recent
poll showed that 92% of Americans believe that “
Citizens have the right to view and obtain information about how election officials count votes”, legislators throughout the United States have felt free to continue to pass laws that provide for machines that count votes in secret. This is possible only because so little information about this issue is provided to the public by our news media, as exemplified by the fact that there was virtually no media coverage of the
results of exit polls conducted during the 2004 presidential election that clearly showed John Kerry to be the winner, even while a similar situation
in the Ukraine that occurred at the very same time was given widespread coverage throughout the United States.
Rationale for the Iraq war: Despite
widespread evidence that the Bush administration was lying to the American people about its excuse for invading Iraq in 2003, the great majority of Americans were not informed of that fact, and therefore the Bush administration felt free to carry on with its plans.
Response to the September 11 attacks: The ability of the Bush administration to protect Americans against terrorism is its strongest suit in the opinion of the American people. George Bush’s response to those attacks was widely praised by the American news media and widely believed to be heroic by the American people. Yet, most Americans were unaware that the Bush administration had
multiple warnings of the September 11 attacks yet failed to prepare for them, that Bush continued
reading a story to school children for several minutes after being informed of the attacks, and that the response of the American military to the attacks on September 11th were
woefully inadequate.
Current beliefs about the reasons for the Iraq war: Even as late as
March 2006, 39% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks on our country, 44% considered the Iraq war to be part of our war on terrorism, and 48% believed that Iraqis were better off as a result of the war, despite a vast amount of evidence disproving each of those assertions, including several
polls of Iraqis.
Abuse of human rights: Only 41% of Americans, according to a
recent poll, believe that “the Bush administration has gone too far in restricting peoples’ civil liberties in order to fight terrorism”, despite clear evidence of widespread gross abuses of human rights constituting violations of domestic and international law.
Another poll taken at the same time clearly shows that the reason that a good majority of Americans do not believe this is that they are unaware of what our government is doing in their name.
The wiring of George Bush during the 2004 presidential debates: Though clear documentary evidence existed that George Bush was wired to his puppet-masters during the 2004 presidential debates with John Kerry, this information was
withheld from the American people.
Congress votes against veterans’ benefits: How would most Americans feel if they were aware that the Republican Congress in 2006
voted against much needed veterans’ benefits by virtually a straight party line vote? Well, there’s little need for Republicans to worry about that, since few people know about it.
Tax policy: George Bush and the Republican Congress have been able to push through billions of dollars worth of tax cuts that benefit
only the wealthy. Does anyone believe that they would be able to do this in the face of an informed public?
Bush violates the Constitution: Just this week a federal judge ruled that Bush habitually violated the U.S. Constitution – clearly an impeachable offense – and yet our national news media devoted
extremely little coverage to it.
Bush approval ratings: Finally, despite all the above, and despite the fact that George W. Bush can’t carry on a conversation with a person willing to put pressure on him to answer questions, without being revealed as the babbling idiot that he is, his approval ratings continue to hover in the 30s.
This is just a tiny portion of the examples that could be given. The American public is clearly grossly uninformed about the most important issues of the day, and this fact clearly has far-reaching effects on the policies of our government.
Now we need to consider what the loss of our First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of the press has to do with this, but first let’s take a look at some landmark legislation and policies created in an attempt to enhance our rights to freedom of speech and of the press:
The relevance of the concept of “public airways” as a guarantor of freedom of the pressThe
Federal Communications Act of 1934 replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The
philosophy behind the legislation was that the airways that enable communications via radio or television are public, and therefore they must serve the public’s purpose. This philosophy can be likened to the view that the air we breathe, the water we drink, the public roads that we travel on, and our national parks and forests must serve the needs of the public, and therefore private individuals or corporations may not use them for their own purposes at the expense of the public. The concept of public water and air protects our need for essential elements of life. The concept of “public airways” protects our right to free speech and freedom of the press, and consequently to our need for the information required in a democracy.
In order to prevent the chaos that would exist in the absence of any federal regulations, the 1934 Act gave the FCC the responsibility for granting licenses to broadcasters to use the public airways, with the understanding that they were required to promote the “public interest”, a phrase that appeared 40 times in the legislation. The obligation to promote the public interest derived from the fact that the broadcasters received free federal licenses worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
In 1949 the FCC initiated the
Fairness Doctrine, which was a further attempt to require broadcasters and publishers to serve the public interest:
This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio stations being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.
The demise of free speech in the United StatesIn order to understand the relationship between our First Amendment rights and the telecommunications industry in the United States today, one must begin with the understanding that the vast majority of information that most Americans receive today is through the telecommunications industry, that the government provides licenses that enable them to operate and make huge profits, and that the rights of one individual or corporation to provide information to the public infringes on the rights of others to do the same.
The bottom line is that information is everything in American politics today, and therefore information is everything in our democracy. Many or most of us are very concerned about the role of money in politics today. That issue is intimately tied to freedom of speech because the vast majority of money received by politicians as campaign contributions is used to get their message (i.e. information) out to the American public.
Furthermore, it must be recognized that for freedom of speech to have any meaning in reality, as opposed to meaning merely as an abstract principle, the speech must be heard by other Americans. To establish so-called “zones” where free speech will be tolerated, for the express purpose of limiting the ability of the speech to be heard, is tantamount to abridging free speech, and therefore to violating our First Amendment.
With that in mind, let’s consider how freedom of speech in the United States has been chipped away at over the past several years or even decades, culminating with a full scale attack since the inauguration of the Bush administration. I will review eight that Americans should be very concerned about and must address if they are to preserve their democracy for much longer:
The claim that money is speechIn 1971 Congress passed the
Federal Elections Campaign Act, which was the first modern major campaign finance reform legislation aimed at removing some of the influence of money on politics.
However, this legislation was challenged, and in 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its
Buckley v. Valeo decision that certain parts of the legislation were unconstitutional because by limiting campaign contributions it was thereby limiting free speech (though some limits on campaign contributions from the legislation were retained, in recognition of their over-riding importance). In other words, the Buckley decision equated money with speech.
Many of us believe that, far from protecting free speech, this decision did much to abrogate it. Given the vast disparities in wealth that exist in this country, to equate money with speech is tantamount to saying that some people have vastly more right to free speech than others. This might not be such a terrible thing if the rights to speech by the wealthy didn’t reduce those same rights for citizens with less money. But they most definitely do. By receiving vast sums of money from wealthy special interest groups and individuals (who expect “favors” in return, but that’s another issue), those candidates who sell their “services” to wealthy interests use the money that they receive from those interests to purchase air time on the previously “public airways” to get their message out – in the process precluding those with less money from doing the same. Giving a billionaire the right to thousands of votes per election would serve the same purpose.
The demise of the Fairness DoctrineRonald Reagan was not a president who had much affection for the concept of “public interest”. Consequently, during his presidency the Fairness Doctrine was not much emphasized, and the courts declared that it was not mandated by Congress.
Therefore, in 1987 a Democratic Congress voted to enact the Fairness Doctrine into law. But Reagan vetoed it, threats of a veto during Bush Senior’s presidency prevented it from being enacted, and emboldened right wing media stations prevented its enactment during the early Clinton administration before the election of a Republican Congress in 1994 precluded any further consideration of a resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine.
The demise of the Fairness Doctrine meant that stations could more fully reflect the political views of their owners, and led to a proliferation of Rush Limbaugh type shows.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996In 1996 a Republican Congress passed the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was signed into law by Bill Clinton. By relaxing rules that prohibited monopoly control of telecommunications, that Act led to the concentration of the national news media of the United States largely in the hands of a very few wealthy corporations, to an extent never before seen in our country. This, more than any other event, has allowed the content of the news received by American citizens to be determined by a small number of very wealthy and powerful interests. Hence the pervasive blackout of meaningful news discussed in the earlier section of this post.
Relaxing of rules against conflicts of interest between journalism and business pressuresOne of the primary principles of journalism ethics is that what a journalist writes should be influenced only by a sincere search for the truth, and not by commercial interests which could act as a “conflict of interest” to pressure a journalist to give short shrift to the public interest or to the truth.
The good majority of journalists work for corporations, which of course have numerous commercial interests which drive their priorities. It has long been considered traditional practice that journalists who work for these corporations, in accordance with the above noted principles, must be separated from the commercial interests of their corporations.
But this is frequently no longer an important consideration – or any consideration at all – for the telecommunications industry. Ken Auletta, in his introduction to “
Backstory – Inside the Business of News”, explains how today’s journalists are constantly pressured by the corporations for which they work to give priority to the interests of the corporation. The corporations call this “synergy” – a process that enhances the bottom line for the corporation. Those with an understanding of journalistic ethics call it by its former name – “conflict of interest”.
Auletta does not explain why this phenomenon has intensified so much in recent years. But it seems to me that it must have a lot to do with the consolidation of the national news media, as well as the pervasive so-called “free-market” ideology among the wealthy in today’s United States, which encourages the absence of any constraining influence on the drive for ever larger profits.
First Amendment zonesWith the onset of the Bush pResidency in 2001 we saw the creation of the concept of “
First Amendment zones”, in which American citizens would have their Constitutional rights to free speech protected. The corollary to that is that their Constitutional rights are NOT protected outside of those zones. The American Constitution does not say anything about “zones” in which the Constitution applies. It is supposed to apply throughout the country. And in fact, the very purpose of George Bush’s “First Amendment zones” is to impede the ability of American citizens to have their protests of government heard by other citizens. As such, the first amendment zones should be seen as a clear violation of our Constitutional rights to free speech.
What do you think that the NRA would say if “Second Amendment zones” were established – especially if those zones did not include their homes, where Second Amendment protections were most needed?
Access to the PresidentThe Bush White House has also established a well publicized policy of
denying access to the President for journalists who fall out of favor with the Bush administration. Since the jobs or careers of many journalists depend on having this access, this practice gives those journalists a strong incentive to write stories that cast the pResident in a favorable light, and a strong disincentive to write stories that are unfavorable to the pResident.
That practice also violates our First Amendment rights. The pResident works for us, the people. We have a right to know what he is doing, and that right is definitely abridged if only those journalists who have proven their loyalty to the pResident are allowed access to him – especially in the context of presidential press conferences.
Paid pResidential Pre$$titutesAnother unprecedented practice of the Bush administration is to insert its own reporters (paid by tax payer dollars, by the way, but that’s another issue) into its press conferences or other venues and have those reporters pretend to be real journalists, printing stories as if they constituted real news or independent editorials, when in fact they are nothing but
government propaganda.
This again is a violation of our First Amendment rights, including free speech and freedom of the press. The purpose of the press, as previously noted, is to provide citizens with the information they need in order to form opinions. If the United States government arranges to put out government propaganda disguised as news, then citizens will not be able to distinguish between the two, and therefore “news” loses much of its value. And also, it ties up airtime or newspaper space that would otherwise be devoted to real news.
The criminalization of independent news reportingThe most egregious violation of our First Amendment rights by the Bush Administration has been its attempt to
criminalize journalists who report stories that the administration considers unfavorable. As with all tyrannical power grabs, this is done under the guise of “national security”. But since the Bush administration itself allots to itself the power to determine when a journalistic action is criminal, it thereby has the power to send to prison any journalist who writes a story that displeases it. Here is Bush’s Attorney General,
Alberto Gonzales, rationalizing the right to imprison journalists for providing information to the public that the Bush administration deems to be criminal conduct.
ConclusionThe bottom line, as
Bill Moyers points out, is that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers goes on:
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.
And an
anonymous blogger offers the ultimate proof that Moyers has diagnosed the situation accurately:
Even when we get to this point when the administration threatens to jail them for somehow not staying in line (as if they ever strayed from corporate whoredom), what do they say and do?
Nothing. That’s, right, nothing. Go look at all the major journalism web sites right this second—WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBS, MSNBC, LAT—and there’s just total silence on this incredible outrage of American 21st Century Fascism. How could this be?
The only rational explanation is that the big boys don’t care—why else do nothing? There is no other answer. They don’t care because they’re in cahoots with the war felons. They’re on their side so they don’t feel threatened. This is a critical moment for American free speech, and actions speak all that is necessary.
How can we fight this? A thorough answer to that question is beyond my current understanding. But I will say that a very useful starting point is that we must recognize the extent to which our First Amendment rights have been grievously abrogated, as well as the fact that our corporate news media is on not on our side. Recognizing the problem and the enemy is always the first step towards finding a solution.
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