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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Fire!

Can't I leave you people alone at all? I'm gone just a week and return to find the 1st Amendment about to be chucked. First, there's this clown:

“We are just awakening to the need for some scrutiny or oversight or public attention to the decisions of the most powerful private speech controllers,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who briefly advised the Obama administration on consumer protection regulations online.

Google was right, Mr. Wu believes, to selectively restrict access to the crude anti-Islam video in light of the extraordinary violence that broke out. But he said the public deserved to know more about how private firms made those decisions in the first place, every day, all over the world. After all, he added, they are setting case law, just as courts do in sovereign countries.

Mr. Wu offered some unsolicited advice: Why not set up an oversight board of regional experts or serious YouTube users from around the world to make the especially tough decisions?

Yeah, I want some "regional expert" deciding if my YouTube video deserves to be seen or not. Heavens, if I'm not monitored closely, I'm liable to inadvertently commit blasphemy and cause all kinds of trouble:

While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. "Based on my understanding of the events," 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, "I think this meets the imminence standard."

Finally, much 1st Amendment jurisprudence concerns speech explicitly advocating violence, such as calls to resist arrest, or videos explaining bomb-making techniques. But words don't have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says Lewis. "If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard."

Indeed, Justice Holmes' original example, shouting "fire" in a theater, is not a call to arms. Steve Klein, an outspoken anti-Islamic activist who said he helped with the film, told Al Jazeera television that it was "supposed to be provocative." The egregiousness of its smears, the apparent deception of cast and crew as to its contents and the deliberate effort to raise its profile in the Arab world a week before 9/11 all suggest intentionality.

The point here is not to excuse the terrible acts perpetrated by committed extremists and others around the world in reaction to the video, or to condone physical violence as a response to words — any kind of words. The point is to emphasize that U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.

This isn't to excuse those terrible acts, no siree! I say something, and someone else uses it as an excuse to kill people, and I get lectured or, if some of these people have their way, thrown in jail, but we're not excusing the little extremist thugs who can't control their childish rage, oh, no, not at all.

Those of us in the print press have always pooh-poohed the idea that other forms of communication -- at first just movies and radio and TV -- should have the same First Amendment protections we do. Now we're paying the price for our arrogance as government seeks more and more ways to stifle speech on the Internet, which is quickly outpacing all the rest of us as a source of information. Throw in all this phoney-baloney "respect" for Islam and the delicate feelings of its faithful, and we have a real seething cauldron of repression brewing.

And still we don't learn. We should be shouting every day that the First Amendment belongs to everybody and the government has no place in controlling our speech. Instead, we're lobbying for a National Shield Law that will grant us "real" journalists special privileges the rest of you don't have.  We're inviting the government to regulate our speech by deciding which of of us are legitmate enough to use it.

Yeah, our theater is getting more crowded every day. But sometimes, there is a fire, and those who see it have the obligation to point it out.

Comments

RAG
Mon, 09/24/2012 - 10:55am

Welcome back.

For a long time we have been told by the experts about our "constitutional rights".  That subliminal thought leaves in us the idea that our rights come from the Constitution.  Our rights can be manipulated by the U.S. Federal Government.

A better phrase should be "constitutional powers" of the federal government.  That subliminal thought would leave in the federal government representatives the idea of what power or lack of power Washington was granted.  If they care.

Trivia.  What non-born American wrote the following?  "Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press [i.e. any communication] shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?"

Hint.  He's on one of your Federal Reserve Notes.

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