Conor Friedersdorf asked FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) what laws they would like Congress to pass to protect free speech in the US. They said:
- Eliminate the FCC and stop regulating television altogether.
- Crack down on "jawboning" – when the president or other senior figures call up TV networks and complain about coverage – by requiring that all such communications be disclosed.
- Allow people who sue the government for infringing their free speech to collect damages.
- Anti-SLAPP laws to limit frivolous lawsuits; many states have these but not all, and the Feds do not.
- The Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, already introduced into Congress, which would ban “free-speech zones, which imply that expression is restricted elsewhere on campus,” and prohibit onerous security fees that colleges sometimes impose on organizers of events with controversial speakers, and require that any limits follow what the Supreme Court said in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, that speech rises to a Title VI violation only if it is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” and “so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”
2 comments:
1/2
What a bizarre list.
Numbers two, three, and four all appear fairly sensible, at least at a glance.
Number five is just... wrongheaded. If enacted, it would actually harm freedom of expression. Banning "free-speech zones" would achieve nothing productive.
Firstly, "free-speech zone" is an informal name for the phenomenon.
The entire point of a so-called "free speech zone" is to set aside a portion of a public space where people can conduct protests and express themselves without directly interfering with the day to day operations of ordinary public services which are paid for by taxpayer money. Such areas do not exist to regulate the content of anyone's speech - they instead place limits on the timing, location, and form of expression, for the express (and limited!) purpose of avoiding disruption to services.
For example, in the context of a public college campus: it's reasonable to protest on the school grounds and property, but it would be unreasonable to protest in classrooms that are actively in session, or in the middle of parking lots that would otherwise be occupied by vehicles; it's reasonable to protest during daylight hours, but it would be unreasonable to chant through the night outside the student dormitories; et cetera.
This is no different than other publicly funded services. If you wanted to protest outside a fire station over the local fire chief's public comments and call for their removal, that's one thing - but if the form of your protest involves physically blocking off the fire station and preventing the dispatch of emergency vehicles, you are going to be forcibly removed by the police, and for perfectly valid reason.
If you tried to ban "free-speech zones", either what would actually happen is that they ban public institutions calling such an area by that specific name, in which case they would simply be called something else and nothing would change...
...or you would be arguing for the freedom of anyone, anywhere, to disrupt any public service, at any time, for any reason - which would be an insane thing to expect to ever become law. Your right to protest on public property extends only until the point where it infringes on other people's rights. Your right to protest does not overrule other people's separate rights. You can't just protest in the emergency room of a public hospital; or in the security offices of a public airport; or blocking traffic in the middle of the road; et cetera.
2/2
Continuing on the matter of number five...
The expectation to prohibit "onerous security fees" for controversial speakers is likewise boneheaded. If you succeeded in prohibiting said fees, then public colleges would simply decline to host such speakers in the first place, defeating the entire stated purpose of promoting speech.
And if you want to somehow prohibit said colleges from declining, you're now in effect suddenly arguing that the government must be forced to spend taxpayer money to give a platform to anyone who wants it, no matter how controversial or liable to incite violence and criminality. Again, this is the sort of thing that no sane person should ever expect to end up becoming law. It's nonsensical.
Speaking of insanity... we now move on to the matter of number one.
Number one is sheer lunacy. No country in the world has ZERO regulations for public broadcasting. On that note, it also would be especially nonsensical to carve out total deregulation for TV specifically, and not do the same for all other forms of public broadcasting.
We regulate television for extremely good reasons, almost all of them related to the public being preyed upon by bad actors. I shouldn't have to give examples - any reasonable person should be able to imagine hugely problematic hypotheticals for themselves, with just a bit of thought.
That's not to say nothing needs looked at or changed (see George Carlin's famous complaint regarding the "Seven Dirty Words"), but there's a vast gulf between that sort of thing and removing all regulation entirely.
Post a Comment