I decided to elevate my thoughts about this excellent discussion of the marketplace of ideas to a new post. As I have said before we have a very difficult problem nowadays and I don't have a good answer. But here's how I think about it.
Back in the good old 1790s there was no mass media as such. Every city had several newspapers, many of them very niche and frankly opinionated. The ideal of the allegedly neutral journalist as taught in school nowadays didn't really exist, although I suppose some people thought of themselves as more about giving the facts than advocating. In any case if you had something to say and didn't have a newspaper it was inexpensive to print up a handbill or a pamphlet. There were no national newspapers or public affairs journals, although important documents such as the Constitution itself would be reprinted for distribution in every city.
No doubt people back then believed all sorts of crazy shit and we know they expressed opinions that would be out of bounds today because among other things people owned slaves, women couldn't vote, and indigenous people were being massacred and their land expropriated and this was all respectable.
Widely or nationally distributed magazines existed in the 18th Century, but they were expensive and catered only to the wealthy. Also, we didn't have compulsory education or universal literacy. It wasn't until the late 1800s, aided by the train and then the automobile that made national distribution more feasible, that a lot of popular national magazines emerged. But the first weekly news magazine wasn't launched until 1923. That would of course be Time. You can read more about this here. Time and its competitors purported to give the straight up facts and segregate opinion, but of course many other journals had an overt advocacy or partisan agenda. But still, there was a consensual reality.
Radio, and then television, changed the landscape dramatically. News radio emerged in the 1920s, but television didn't achieve widespread distribution until the 1950s. There were only 3 TV networks, and they'd each give 1/2 hour of news every night. Since they were all aiming to attract as large an audience as possible, they stuck pretty much to the middle or the road. But with the availability of more broadcast channels, and then the proliferation of cable TV in the 1980s, something like Fox News became possible, aimed at a narrower audience but more than large enough to be profitable.
Then came the Internet, which became a whole new entity when it was largely consumed by the World Wide Web. I'll muse about the implications for society and the regulation of speech next time, but for now I just want to make the point that the First Amendment, subsequent foundational jurisprudence, and the ways in which people think and debate about freedom of speech have their origins in a totally different universe from the one we're in now. So we need to think about it again, from the beginning.
5 comments:
Technology changes but principles and ideas don't.
If you think the idea and principle of free political speech needs changing, then that's a discussion we can have.
There's a mechanism built into the constitution for that. The next argument offered up is that it's just too difficult and that would not be true.
It's been done 27 times and two of them were about beer.
No, I don't think the idea and principle of free speech needs changing. (It's pretty vague, actually.) But I'm saying we need to rethink what it means and how best to implement it in the modern context.
I'd like to see a principle that goes something like this:
I'm free to say anything I want to say, but then you are free to refute me on the same platform. Basically a debate of some sort.
I realize that this is hard to pull off practically, I've seen too many discussions turn into flame wars, but it seems like the freedom to challenge a statement should have the same legitimacy as the freedom to make it in the first place.
The fundamental principle behind sport is that it be played on as level a field as possible. Just listen to the sportscasters' commentary when a play is under review.
If "Free Speech" was cast more as a sporting event a lot of our current issues with it would go away.
Candidate debates as currently practiced wouldn't count. A speaker who avoids the question/topic should immediately be whistled and penalized 30 seconds.
Well, I think this begs the question. Who's going to be the referee? I'm going to do a new post on this.
That's always been the question and unless you have a good answer, restricting speech is just not doable in a free society.
That's the reason why the ACLU defends Nazis, communists, etc.
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