According
to Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, which sponsored a $1 million study about public awareness
among high school students,
"when
told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three
high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights
it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be
allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories."
These kids also thought flag-burning was illegal, which it is not.
I don't know if this is more terrifying because of the level of ignorance
and indoctrination it indicates or the level of apathy. Either one is
fatal to real democracy.
The Freedom of Speech is the fundamental one upon which all other freedoms
and rights depend. The Founding Fathers were Masons and Deists and Rich
White Guys but they at least had the good sense to make the first item
in The Bill of Rights the guarantee of freedoms of speech and press.
(Granted, The Bill of Rights was not included in the original Constitution
but was added as the first ten Amendments.)
Now comes University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill to announce
his unpopular but not implausible idea that somehow the victims of the
9/11 attacks were comparable to Nazis and the attacks were a natural
reaction to our policies in the middle east. The Nazi statement is hard
to support but the notion that the attacks were not active, but reactive,
is one that this writer has also advanced.
The part that worries me is that the Governor of Colorado is talking
about canning professor Churchill for his untactful and quirky statements.
"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So
was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're
in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise.
Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." --Noam Chomsky,
The First Amendment wasn't designed to protect popular speech or expression
of popular and accepted ideas. It was designed to protect the unpopular
speech with which the majority or the government does not agree. Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put forth the notion that 'the free
marketplace of ideas' was the ideal way to advance democracy because
it promotes an informed public. We rely on The First Amendment to provide
this free marketplace. If the free flow of information is not allowed
or if that information is controlled by an elite then there can be no
real freedom.
The dictatorships of the 20th Century took advantage of the new mass
media. First radio was the tool and then television. Stalin and Hitler
and Roosevelt all understood that when you can control information,
you can control popular thought. It's more economical to dictate behavior
with words than with guns and prison cells. And it is easier to control
information if the media is structured from the top down the way it
has always been (newspapers, radio, television.)
But now there is a minor inconvenience for the media oligarchs. It's
called the internet.
All of a sudden it is possible, just by having a computer and an internet
connection, for one person to broadcast information to millions. This
changes everything and we have only begun to realize how much. When
the mainstream media dropped the ball in the case of the forged George
Bush National Guard documents released by CBS, it didn't take the bloggers
on the internet a hot twelve hours to start the buzz that led to a rumble
and then the earthquake that toppled Dan Rather. This is The Information
Revolution.
This all must be a terrible worry to the powers that be. All of a sudden
they don't have exclusive control over every tidbit of information that
we are fed. Now there are independent contractors coming out of the
woodwork and dissecting and analyzing and investigating and commenting
and discussing. Reporters that are not owned by the corporations or
the government are digging and sifting facts and exposing lies.
But there are two sides to every coin. The internet spreads as much
malarky as it spreads truth. Let the buyer beware. But the truth has
a way of bubbling to the top. There is an old saying, " When the
ears hear the truth, the heart respects the lips that say it."
The internet works this way. How many times have you received forwarded
emails or articles that express some simple, if cliche, truth? The point
here is that the world of free speech has changed just as surely as
the world changed on 9/11. And as is usually the case with change, we
don't understand exactly what the changes mean. Yet.
The Poet's Eye has an optimistic gleam because at least there is still
a semblance of free speech in this country left over from our embattled
Constitution. Paris Hilton can still get on TV even if she is a spoiled
porn star. George Bush can still pass as a leader. Michael Moore is
not locked up in the Federal pen. They haven't taken the internet off
the air for reasons of national security, not yet anyway, so life is
good. Even if our children think the Constitution is going ''too far,"
at least we are not rounding up journalists and making them disappear
in the night like some of the regimes that we have supported abroad
have done. I'm with Bush on this. Let's keep tyranny over there so we
don't have to fight it over here.