Not Free Speech

Albert

In todays other commentary, Ed Herman has laid waste the pretensions of pundits bleating over the plight of poor abused David Horowitz that they are sincerely concerned about free speech. But there is more to the situation…so let's address another aspect.

Setting aside mainstream media hypocrisy, what is our best response to Horowitz's ad entreaties? Should a periodical run his ad or not? And what else ought to occur?

First, advertisements are not speech. They are a commercial service wherein an audience is sold to a client. Debates about ads are therefore miscast as a free speech issue.

Beyond free speech, however, media access is also very important. But media access should not be a function of the money that one has, and thus there should be no right to buy media access. That is, in any desirable society human audiences should not be sold to anyone, in any manner. There should be no paid ads at all.  Nor should media have to prioritize attracting audiences that advertisers will pay to “buy.” Nor should media have to worry about including only content that paves the way for successful advertising. But putting aside my preferences for the future of media, in the current world what norms should apply to taking and rejecting ads?

Imagine the New York Times rejecting an ad about ending a U.S. War on the grounds that the Times didn't like the ad's content. Anti-war activists would be outraged. But why? I think it is because the NY Times and other mainstream newspapers purport to provide their audience with objective and neutrally assessed news and analysis. They say they have no ideological norms guiding their choices. In not taking the anti-war ad, however, they would be violating that claim (as they do daily on every page, though that's another matter, of course). An intensifying factor in our anger at the Times in such a case would be that even if 75% of the country was interested in the anti-war ad's content and even if the ad was demonstrably accurate, its critical viewpoint would likely only be able to get into the Times, or into public visibility at all, by being a paid ad. Thus, to cut off this option of media access would be to close the last door to visibility.

Now suppose instead that we are talking about the same ad being submitted to The Nation (I can't use Z as an example, because we don't take paid ads, only free ones). The Nation would run such an ad, of course. But suppose the ad submitted to The Nation favored the war. Would it be incumbent on The Nation to run that ad too? It seems to me the answer is no. And the reason is because The Nation has made no claim to its readership to be a neutral delivery system. Rather, The Nation claims to have a point of view, and since the ad isn't within the editorial scope of their stated point of view, it would be a disservice to their readers to provide it. In other words, the same norms should apply regarding ads as apply regarding content.

The point is there is no freedom of speech at stake in accepting or rejecting paid ads. It is not incumbent on a periodical to take paid ads that it editorially doesn't like on free speech grounds. On the other hand, there are journalistic norms having to do with access which may make it proper to take an ad despite not liking it, whether we are talking about our hypothetical anti-war ad or about the ad from Horowitz. The Times should take such ads, period, and clean up their editorial pages and news to be broad and encompassing of diverse orientations, too. The Nation should make both its editorial and its advertising choices in accord with its stated priorities and agenda, accepting the anti-war ad and rejecting the Horowitz ad. The New Republic might reasonably opt to do the reverse. But how do these principles apply to a university newspaper?

Campus papers in most instances probably do claim to provide a neutral and encompassing look at news and events, being more like the Times in that respect, than like The Nation. If they instead have a clearly stated editorial priority, that would be very relevant. But campus papers also have limited space, skimpy resources, and are meant to serve the campus community, and so have to make choices among competing submissions. Solely at the level of journalistic principle, I wouldn't get too upset at a campus paper for rejecting Horowitz's ad, or for running it.

However, Horowitz is of course despicable and there is nothing that says that if one runs his ad one can't also run an editorial, or an article, or articles that address the same topic. My own take is that the campus papers should have run the ad, mostly to avoid the obvious trap that Horowitz had set, but also because it is marginally the more principled act if they describe themselves as disinterested news vehicles, and then they should also have run an editorial and a sidebar and related articles not only on the specific topic of the ad, with many viewpoints and including a piece like Herman's, but also articles about Horowitz himself, properly critical and caustic. This would have been an infinitely more instructive response to his shenanigans, in my view.

What about students on the campuses? I think pretty much the same thing goes. A good protest is to demand of the papers that they run an analysis thoroughly debunking Horowitz's pernicious arguments, not just run the ad itself. Of course all this takes more work, but it is worthwhile work.

So, I am a somewhat critical of the editors who refused the ad, thereby falling into Horowitz's trap and arguably minimally violating a reasonable journalistic standard regarding ad access, and I would be quite critical of any editor who accepted the ad but then didn't give space to the broader issues so as to debunk Horowitz and explore important matters in constructive ways. All in all, though, I don't think this imbroglio was very significant compared to the infinite list of violations of journalistic integrity, responsibility, and just plain old honesty that are ubiquitous in mainstream journalism all over the country.

There is, regrettably, however, one more thing to discuss. In the (online version of) Progressive Magazine of March 18th, its editor, Matthew Rothschild prominently writes that ads are indeed covered by free speech norms. More, he tells us that periodicals shouldn't editorially judge ad content and that, referring to the editors who rejected Horowitz's ad and to the students who demonstrated against the papers who accepted it, “to resort to intimidation, to engage in gang suppression of speech, is an old and discredited tactic of Brownshirts everywhere.” Even supposing that one thought that to reject Horowitz's ad or to demonstrate against a paper accepting it was wrong, this is pretty amazing rhetoric. “Brownshirts?” That's the kind of nasty provocation and slander you'd expect from the likes of Horowitz himself, surely not from Rothschild.

In any event, the reality is that in this country we very much need massive and militant demonstrations designed precisely to compel new mainstream media policies at the New York Times, the Washington Post, all dailies, the TV networks, and so on and so forth. And these demonstrations should precisely try to raise pressures and costs to the people who run these institutions that not only intimidate them, but that literally coerce them to alter their coverage of all manner of events and issues. This doesn't mean we bomb the news outlets or assassinate the reporters who we disagree with; but it does mean using popular pressure to influence coverage. What is Rothschild talking about when he tars demonstrating against the choices of a media institution as being intrinsically tantamount to Nazi rejection of free press or free speech? I hope he didn't really intend to communicate that because the reality is that to pressure media in our society is not inherently anti-free speech, but can instead propel free speech, especially regarding mainstream media writ large.

Rothschild also says that a periodical should not see itself as making choices on behalf of its readers. He says of the editors: “It's not up to them to shield their readers from ideas that may be `inflammatory` or to set up shop as censors who are empowered to make decisions on which ads are `appropriate` and which are `inappropriate'.” “They should not discriminate against advertisers on the basis of their political beliefs. This is fundamental.”

I am inclined to say how about rejecting crap?, and leaving it at that. But I think I ought to clarify as well that a publisher is precisely an institution which gathers or generates from among all possible material a subset that it deems worthy of its readership. How does it decide what subset is worthy and what subset isn't? There will be various norms involved, depending on the type of periodical and on its editorial criteria. But shouldn't the same norms apply inside each periodical for both its articles and its ads? Why should money (the fee for ads) somehow trump other norms? And so, would Rothschild publish the Horowitz ad, or one against abortion, or one for the elimination of child labor laws …and even do so without comment…yet reject articles with the same agenda? Or would Rothschild say, we have readers who expect from us a progressive slant and approach to presenting news and analysis. They are entitled to that same level of attention to their desires regarding who we sell them too. But regardless of what Rothschild would himself say or decide, to opt for the latter orientation is hardly to put on a Brown shirt.