The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2001, Page 12, Image 12

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TALK OF THE NATION
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"Freedom of speech is a principle pillar in a
free government: when this support is taken away, the
Constitution is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its
ruins."
- JAMES ALEXANDER (1737)
"I do not write about ‘the little people' They are as big as
you are, whoever you are."
-JOSEPH MITCHELL
The first newspaper published in the English/American
colonies hit the streets on September 25, 1690, but was soon
suppressed because of unkind remarks about the British Crown
Forty-five years later, in 1735, John Peter Zenger was put on trial
and acquitted for defamation against the English King in his
newspaper The New York Weekly Journal, which raised issues of
a free press that contributed directly to the First Amendment of
the U.S Constitution.
Two years after the Bastille was stormed in Paris to set
the stage for the French Revolution, the 'Bill of Rights', the first
ten amendments tacked onto the Constitution of the new United
States as almost an afterthought (but its mainframe inspiration for
James Madison and Thomas Mason who fomented them), were
adopted in 1791 as the most basic rights of the common citizenry
— the ten commandments of American civilization.
The 1st Amendment states simply and clearly that
government has no right to interfere with freedoms of speech,
press or religion or with public gatherings, which are indispen­
sable to political and personal liberty and are necessary to
abolish if liberty is to be thwarted:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.
(Article 1, Section 8 of the Oregon State Constitution is
even stronger than the 1st Amendment in regard to freedom of
speech and press: No law shall be passed restraining the free
expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write, or
print freely on any subject whatever; but every person shall be
responsible for the abuse of this right.)
The 1st Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech
and a free press in the assumption that liberty survives only in an
atmosphere of free and open expression of thought and opinion,
no matter how diverse or uncomfortable. It is a guiding principle
of newspapers and broadcast journalism, the so-called media that
evermore dominates our lives and society, and in particular small
underfunded and poorly circulated 1st Amendment publications
and limited range listener-sponsored radio stations that continue
against all evidence to believe that human beings ought by right
of birth be free. "Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do
not matter much," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
wrote: 'That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its
substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of
the existing order."
A workable definition of information and the purposes
it serves is necessary, whether it is a source of public dialogue
and free exchange of ideas crucial to an open society or if it
should be privately controlled to reflect only certain ideas and
points of view. A corollary question is if the use and dissemin­
ation of information should be treated as a business regulated
by a relative few who seek profit from it. The renegade journalist
A. J. Leibling, who was generally dyspeptic about subordination
of information, caustically claimed that a free press was avail­
able to anyone wealthy enough to own it.
Controversy, that feared word, is the language of
democracy — the robust dialectic of conflicting opinions.
Without controversy there is no dialogue, only abject obedience
to command or directive. The only appropriate response to
controversial or unpopular speech or ideas is public rebuttal,
not censorship, yet those who claim to rule in democracy's name
continually attempt to enlarge their own powers by limiting the
range of ideas and information necessary to engage in the
argument of opinion that is indispensable to political and personal
freedom.
Everyone claims to love the idea of freedom of the press,
radio, television, and more recently the internet, but most feel
uncomfortable with freedoms they do not endorse, generally
regarding them as sources of moral, economic or patriotic decline
of the nation.
The nght to speak implies a responsibility to those who
listen: a listener to free speech is free to tune out the speaker
But shutting up the speaker is quite a different matter. Then the
listener is threatening the right of the speaker to speak, which it
is not his/her right to do, no matter how uncomfortable, obscene
or absurd As U.S Supreme Court Justice William Rhenquist
wrote in a majonty opinion regarding the defamation of religious
evangelist Jerry Falwell, who was depicted in a Hustler magazine
cartoon mcesting his mother in an outdoor toilet (which tread on
several taboos), the 1st Amendment does not only protect the
reasonable but also the outrageous.
The persistent attempts by government and groups of
powerful elites to control public dialogue, particularly in matters
GAYLE McKENNON
of political and social behavior, has always been dangerous and
usually the guise for authoritarian usurpation of the apparatus of
communication.
Stripping 1st Amendment rights and freedoms is critical
to undermining democracy, especially its protections of thought
and expression.The 1st Amendment has not prevented attempts
to impose religious or political orthodoxy. The excessive and
blatant repression of the McCarthy era ruined the lives and
professions of many of the nation's best writers, artists and
teachers. Censorship of the new Internet is disguised as
protection of children. Christian fundamentalists in particular
have been attempting to ban books from schools and public
libraries for decades, and other censorious groups demand
control over the contents of school textbooks and suppression
of everything from pornography to Mother Goose.
To remain at liberty, or at least preserve what remains
of our liberties and eventually venture into a more just and
compassionate climate, the influx and dissemination of inform­
ation, ideas and opinions are necessary. The problem is that it
has been nearly sacred doctrine that an informed citizenry will act
reasonably and with sound judgment. The reality is that the vast
bulk of information and data on virtually every conceivable and
esoteric matter from everywhere in the world at all times of day
every day, and the sheer volume of its variety (statistics,
fact[oid]s, opinion polls, ideas and perceptions that range from
faxtastic to meretricious, and reportage of events from births to
wars to the latest corporate mergers, such as the increasing
megopoly of the media that cheerfully reports its own confisca­
tion) is incomprehensible. At some point the beleaguered brain
overloads and shuts off.
Public apathy is not accidental or the result of not having
enough access to information. It is most usually the opposite, a
premeditated response to a society awash in paper and verbiage.
We know too much. It is this which confounds the believers of
information as the temple of freedom. To cull through the
immensities of twaddle and drivel to discern what is pertinent —
or work through the purposely misleading, might finally be too
much to require or expect of a citizen. Suppression after all fires
the wronged spirit. Gluttony buries it.
If anyone took stock of the contemporary use of press
and speech freedoms, it should confirm the wrst cynicisms
about the content of information transmitted as news and
entertainment; emphasis on trivial and scandalous stories rather
than focusing on economic, chemical or environmental issues
that affect millions — banal, violent and sexually exploitive
spectacles blatantly conjured to distract the citizenry from the
real business of a democratic society. Controversy, flirtation with
original ideas as well as divergence from status quo journalism,
is anathema to megamedia, which consolidates immense
technologies to hype the salacious, mendacious and indigestible
The nation and its citizens are plugging rapturously into
an electronic superhighway of infotainment that proposes infinite
possibilities and no few dark prophecies. The information
highway is plastic, fluid and still unpredictable despite political
and corporate invasion of its cyberspaces. But the pervasive
ambitions of monopoly by government and the newly consoli­
dated mediacrities reverberate through electronic and print
networks. Power in the New World Corporate Capitalist Order
is shifting to control and manipulation of the immense flow of
information, up until recently a vital resource but now a post-
Orwellian system of indoctrination, propaganda and sensation­
alism.
There are currently as many forms of communication as
there are groups of special interest using them. It would seem
that half the stars at night are communications satellites orbiting
earth within the Clarke Belt Worldwide satellite transmission has
dramatically changed radio/television programming and access
and provides with fiberoptic cables, computer internets and
worldwide webs, and the ubiquitous FAX, instantaneous
information everywhere on the planet. The proliferation of special
interest groups, citizens groups, political action committees, even
library boards and soap opera fan clubs that publish newsletters,
fanzines, micromedia videos, tapes and newspapers, engage in
political, religious or business mass mailings and spammed e-
mail (also advertising throwaways), own or syndicate programs
on radio/television networks and commercial internets — all of
this print and visual/babble saturates us with information, virtually
all of it self-promotional, biased and of questionable veracity.
The growth of huge interlocking newspaper chains and
entertainment networks nationally and worldwide has long made
newsgathering and reporting hostage to advertising and profit,
and concentration of ownership threatens the diversity of
independent media through which the public is presented multiple
views and perceptions.
Television of course changed everything. Without TV a
person has little to talk about with anyone. The vision television
projects has become the prevailing, not to say pervasive, vision
of our culture. Even when it is criticized as a narrow, superficial
and self-serving distortion, TV is yet the defining edge — it
represents, reflects and is a cause of what we are and how we
view ourselves through its one/way prism. More than any other
medium or mode of communication, television has precipitated
the question of who is in control of the information that assaults
us through its flickering window night and day in an interminable
stream of words and visions.
More people watch TV than read. Reading although
antique is yet a relatively recent form of communication, a
cumbersome abstract that beams its script directly to the brain
(and requires forests to provide readable pulp). First radio, now
TV, and of course film which has upstaged theater, (and VCRs),
return information to its ancient forms of voice and performance.
The spoken word is mesmerizing and its eloquence surpasses its
content. What might be recognized as hogwash when read is
often captivating when spoken or presented visually as melody
and form rather than content or substance. (MTV and the
infamous political/commercial sound-bite have telescoped the
form even more.)
The greater part of a century of radio/TV advertising,
during which a daily average of 70% or 80% of Americans have
passively accommodated outrageous commercial falsehoods,
has probably eroded our capacity to recognize or critically
evaluate truth. At some point language is obscured, transposed
from communication to promotion and transaction — from
clarification to obsfucation and manipulation. Truth is not
necessary, only the appearance of truth — or more pertinent,
adhering to the principles of advertising, if a lie is told often
enough it is accepted as truth; agreed upon fictions that
masquerade as reality to distort and manipulate circumstances
and are eventually recorded as historical certainty.
The trend is that megacorporations are increasingly in
control of the information we receive and they influence political
and legal decisions about its use and flow, such as a 1985
Oregon State Supreme Court ruling that corporations, which are
classified as individuals under the law, cannot be investigated
and reported about without great risk of libel suit. That ruling,
which was against a Portland weekly newspaper and favored a
major bank, said essentially that while celebrities of the moment
can be inexhaustibly exhumed in the media, institutions that
affect the lives of millions are virtually sealed off from public
scrutiny. (Similar to that ruling is the U.S. Supreme Court — as
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