Freedom of Speech

[Lightning Rod]

The AP reports:

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 items 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 advanced 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 do this. 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. One day they will call our era 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 you 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 many lies as it spreads truths. 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 yet for reasons of national security, so life is good.