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From the category archives:
Free Speech
A British journalist offers a humorous look at the tricks of the trade – how television journalists put together and manipulate news stories. (Content Warning: If you are easily offended, there is one part with language that would be bleeped out on American television.)
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Last night, President Obama showed unprecedented hostility to the Supreme Court for a decision expanding free speech rights.
Watch the stone-faced Supreme Court Justices as a sea of legislators around them give Obama a standing ovation. Justice Samuel Alito can be seen shaking his head and saying “not true”.
The Supreme Court’s rulings are supposed to be anchored in constitutional principles and interpretation of the law and Justices are not supposed to be influenced by the opinions of the executive and legislative branches of our government nor by popular opinion.
Obama’s attack on the Court in a forum where the Justices could not respond is at best in poor taste and at worst a dangerous attempt to intimidate the third branch of our federal government which has equal status to the executive.
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The Supreme Court this week handed down a major ruling in defense of free speech.
In Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in elections.
President Obama was quick to condemn the ruling. He claims that corporations will be able to manipulate American opinion by supporting political candidates.
This demonstrates the left’s belief that American voters are unable to evaluate political statements and need to be “protected” from political statements made by private corporations. Of course it is ok for the left that labor unions, organizations like ACORN and left-wing media companies have the right to support candidates and make political statements. In the left’s view, Americans need to be “protected” only from political speech by organizations that are more likely to oppose the left’s agenda.
Ultimately, the constitutional right to free speech should mean that there are no restrictions on individuals or organizations to fund or engage in free speech. The only requirement should be full disclosure of who is paying for political advocacy.
The Supreme Court ruling does not go this far and many restrictions remain in place. However, the Court made statements that are very encouraging given the Obama administration’s desire to impose new regulations on political speech on the internet and talk radio.
Here are some excerpts from the Court’s opinion (via Hugh Hewitt):
Two key excerpts from Justice Kennedy’s opinion.
From p. 9:
Courts, too, are bound by the First Amendment. We must decline to draw, and then redraw, constitutional lines based on the particular media or technology used to disseminate political speech from a particular speaker.
From pp. 48-49:
Political speech is so ingrained in our culture that speakers find ways to circumvent campaign finance laws…Our Nation’s speech dynamic is changing, and informative voices should not have to circumvent onerous restrictions to exercise First Amendment rights. Speakers have become adept at presenting citizens with sound bites, talking points, and scripted messages that dominate the 24-hour news cycle. Corporations, like individuals, do not have monolithic views. On certain topics corporations may possess valuable expertise, leaving them best equipped to point out errors or fallacies in speech of all sorts, including the speech of candidates and elected officials.
Rapid changes in technology –and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression– counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers. Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. Soon, however, it may be that Internet sites, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide candidates with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet [the challenged law] would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds. The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech.
Two other key excerpts, these from the Chief Justice’s concurring opinion:
From p. 1
The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern. Its theory, if accepted, would empower Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations–as the major ones are. First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of democracy.
The Court properly rejects that theory, and I join its opinion in full. The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer….
From p. 11
The fact that the law currently grants a favored position to media corporations is no reason to overlook the danger inherent in accepting a theory that would allow government restrictions on their political speech.
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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in an interview on MSNBC this morning called defeated Democrat Martha Coakley “the victim.”
Democrats love to see victims in every conflict and when the voters defeat them they quickly consider themselves victims of voters who they like to call “angry mobs” and other epithets when the American people don’t support their left-wing agenda.
The danger of this attitude is that Democrat’s next step will inevitably be finding ways to protect the “victim.” They have complained about the influence of talk radio and internet blogs. Today, the failed left-wing radio network Air America filed for bankruptcy again.
More on the Obama administrations attempts to regulate talk radio and internet blogs and control free speech will come in a future post on Florida Pundit.
You can watch the interview with Gavin Newsom here. Fast forward to 5:40 minutes into the interview for the victim remark.
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Fox News reports on a strange anomaly when in Google searches for Islam.
If you type “Christianity is ” into the Google search field you get a list of suggested searches, many of them implying an unfavorable view of Christianity:
The same happens for Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism:
One would expect similar results when searching for “Islam.” Yet this is what happens:
Google does not suggest a single search. Is Google censoring searches people are conducting on Islam?
Fox News reports:
According to Google’s Web site, the query suggestions that appear as you type are drawn from from searches you’ve done (if you’re logged in), searches done by users all over the world, sites in the search index and ads in Google’s network.
The company also explains that “We try to filter out suggestions that include pornographic terms, dirty words, and hate and violence terms. If you encounter a term that should not be suggested, please let us know by posting in the Google Web Search Help Forum.”
Perhaps the returned results are so inappropriate that all results have simply been turned off, an option some Internet users label ‘cowardly.’ After all, search for hot-button items such as “scientology is” or “Muhammad is” and the results are even more offensive.
A Google spokesman explained that the weird absence of results is just a software problem: “This is in fact a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.” But the company would not respond to requests for clarification.
An intriguing corollary: Google offers search suggestions for future tense queries as well. Ask “Christianity will” and Google suggests “Christianity will end, it will disappear,” and “Christianity will end.” Ask the same about Islam and Google notes that “Islam will dominate the world” and “Islam will destroy Europe.”
The statement that this is a software bug is not credible. Google has automated algorithms to build these suggested searches. Unless someone has created code to block specific searches they would show up. Clearly, someone has blocked common searches on Islam. Why is it more appropriate to block negative or offensive search on Islam than any other major world religion? Clearly, Google can’t block everything. As Fox News reports, searching for “Muhammad is ” yields plenty of results that will incense Muslim fanatics.
Bing, Microsoft’s competing search engine, provides the following suggestions for Christianity and Islam:
Apparently, Microsoft does not feel compelled to censor searches. This is indeed a strange reversal in the image of the two companies.
Google is the most pervasive search tool on the internet. It is critical for Google’s preeminent status to stay above any suspicion that it introduces biases in its searches. Google needs to clarify whether this is official Google policy or the work of a rogue programmer and rectify this issue immediately.
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As criticism of Obama increases, the administration’s attacks against Fox News, talk radio and the US Chamber of Commerce become increasingly ominous. We should pay attention and publicize the administration’s statements particularly those by Mark Lloyd, Barack Obama’s “media diversity czar.”
Lloyd is no friend of free speech and has sympathies for Hugo Chavez’ policies of suppressing opposition. In a 2006 book he stated the following:
It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.
[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.
He likes Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s approach to free speech:
In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.
The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.
How far will Obama go if opposition to his policies threatens his Congressional majorities in 2010 and his re-election in 2012?
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