Freedom of Screech
I checked the First Amendment and others in the Bill of Rights. There is no constitutional guarantee for Freedom of Screech.
Freedom of Speech is definitely protected, especially from Congress, but it’s easy to subvert that provision if broadcast news media are interested only in showing purple-faced people who bellow and scream and froth at the mouth. Maybe its time local police forces begin to take seriously the right to free speech in the town hall meetings congressmen are trying to conduct on healthcare.
Dick Armey’s hooligans, equipped with a sheet of twisted stalking points — and frenzied by bootcamp coaching on how to shout down everyone in the meeting with deafening invective — enter such meetings under the pious banner of Free Speech.
What they’re really doing is denying the exercise of free speech to everyone else at the meeting.
It’s a novel theory of constitutional law. In a room of 200 citizens, only one screeching alien – or four or five – is endowed with an inalienable right to be heard.
Towns and cities don’t have a mandate as guardians of the Constitution, but they do have disorderly conduct ordinances. If I have ever in my life seen disorderly conduct, it’s the behavior of Armey’s armies. So off to jail with them, until there’s time to hold a hearing in which they can try their luck angrily berating a judge.
These graduates of the Michael Vick School of Manners are bussed in by the HMO and pharmaceutical lobbies to destroy healthcare reform by destroying public dialogue.
The corporations contributing to such abuses aren’t guilty exactly of disorderly conduct, but theirs is a conspiracy (though their lobbying groups bear glorious patriotic or scientific names) to deprive people of their civil rights and freedoms, including not onl;y free speech but also freedom from intimidation and threats of violence. So I don’t see why their managers shouldn’t go to jail as well. Their constitutional entitlement is to the dignity of an indictment and a trial, at which, one hopes, the witnesses will not be shouted down.
As for Fox News and talk radio, they’re flying the banner of Free Speech to cover their scare talk, smears, distortions of fact, and incitements to hate-crimes which have proved so effective in their war on reproductive rights.
That’s a more slippery case. You can’t charge Glenn Beck with being a toon, which he is. Or a creep. Or a slime mold – that’s unpalatable but not illegal.
But the FCC is not supposed to grant licenses to broadcasters who pose a clear public nuisance or public endangerment.
For example, those who abuse the their access to the airways in defiance of community standards and encourage assassination of the president and other government officials – maybe it’s time to start suspending a few licenses.
Those broadcasting frequencies, after all, are not the private property of Rupert Murdoch; their use is a shared entitlement for public benefit, dedicated to a well informed, civil society.
Of course shutting down Fox News and hate radio would open the federal government to charges of behaving dictatorially rather than democratically. But the rabid right is already hoisting posters showing Obama as Hitler and hanging congressmen in effigy, so it could be argued they’ve renounced any belief in democratic principles and declared them moot. Still, if they object, they could be offered the choice of being water-boarded 86 times, which they consider perfectly legal.
We may be spared this crisis of conscience and principle, however, if advertisers rally to yank their support of the offending broadcasters, as they are now doing in the case of Glenn Beck.
Seven or eight sponsors have pulled out of Beck’s nightly obscenity, leaving Rupert Murdoch to do what he hates most in in the world – lose money.
Once the culprits have all been rounded up, they should be provided with short pencils (golf scoring pencils would do) and very small pads of paper on which to express their views. These could then be recited on You Tube by mina birds — continuing the tradition that the screechers have no idea what they’re talking about.
To keep Dick Armey out of trouble, his lobbying firm could be given the contract to train the birds, though strictly forbidden to cripple their left wings.
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Glenn Beck’s advertisers today included the Wall Street Journal. Hmmmm. Doesn’t Murdoch own that too? Is he losing advertisers so fast he has to shove stage props in the open slots?
Comment by Barb — August 13, 2009 @ 8:05 pm
Wonderful! Rupert is paying himself — but also paying Beck to lose money for him. Next will come ads for the New York Post and Fox TV shows. His News Corporation reported earnings a couple of weeks ago, and I think they were already down roughly 75%, so hopefully this will accelerate the slide.
Comment by Al — August 13, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
More advertisers dropped Beck today — Conagra and RadioShack among them. The total is now over a dozen. Rupert’s losses are deepening, and he will have to put more of his own commercials on the show to keep up appearances — maybe an ad to sell his daughter’s bicycle?
Comment by Al — August 14, 2009 @ 9:30 pm
Beck-boys advertisers are falling with thundering thuds, which begs the question: If Beck (and, by extension, Murdoch) is paying the price for his blithering lunacy, why are his compatriots in underarms? Surely, Rush Limgaugh, Bill O’Reilly and the ever-odious Sean Hannity have mouthed obscenities equally as virulent as those of the bubble-brained Beck, but their advertisers seem to take no notice. Oh, well. As long as there are stupid people – and the right to stupidity is guaranteed by the Constitution – there will be hate radio. And there will be hate radio because stupid people need someplace to tell them where to spend their money.
Comment by Steve Alber — August 17, 2009 @ 10:46 am
Good point — but they’ll get theirs. In Beck’s case, he apparently went over everybody’s line by insisting repeatedly that Obama hates white people. He also got weird with a comparison between Obama’s programs and the holocaust, eugenics, etc. that left four guests staring and saying not a word for five minutes. Limbaugh and O’Reilly have come close to that but have (so far) escaped the Imus moment. Still, I think advertisers will begin to question the wisdom of inviting boycotts and trashing their own reputations by sponsoring the three baboons you mention plus many on talk radio. Meantime, as a nominee for the Strange Bedfellows medal — Murdoch is courting Imus for a slot on Fox Business(Financial?) Channel, which has failed to attract an audience.
Comment by Al — August 17, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Monday night Keith Olbermann reported that the number of advertisers dumping Glenn Beck is now over twenty. Sounds like a trend.
Comment by Al — August 18, 2009 @ 2:58 pm