There are way more important things going in the world right now. But anyway:
Al Roker blogged yesterday that Don Imus must go. (Now it turns out Imus is gone, permanently, at least from MSNBC.) Today, in response to feedback, he wrote:
My freedom of speech was questioned. Some of the complaints that came in fell in that same category; I was denying Don Imus his freedom of speech. Far from it. Don Imus has the right to say whatever he wants, however hateful, stupid or uncaring. He DOES NOT have the right to say it on public airwaves or on the cable broadcast of a publicly owned company. That is a privilege, just as you do not have the right to have a license to drive a car. It is a privilege. Privileges can be revoked if certain criteria are not met.
Amen. I can’t read Don Imus’s mind and don’t know what the appropriate response is. But I am happy when people correctly point out that freedom of speech is a right that is enforced against governments, not against private entities. A private entity can do whatever the hell it wants when it comes to speech. If a private entity bans your speech, you still have freedom of speech — the freedom to speak somewhere else. If a government bans your speech, you don’t have any alternatives. (This leaves out the issue of what happens when a government bans speech in only a certain venue, of course.)
Granted, freedom of speech is more than just part of the Bill of Rights in this country, it’s a principle that pervades our culture; when people yell “freedom of speech!” they’re usually arguing for the principle.
That’s fine – as long as they realize that that principle holds no water as a legal argument.
Frankly, I was shocked by Imus’s comments, mostly because I thought he died a decade ago. Someone should check his “sell by” date.
But seriously, you make an excellent point about freedom of speech. Well done.
Thanks for this post. It did help clarify things for me. It’s easy to confuse the public airwaves with the public sphere.
I’ve never listened to Imus. I had been vaguely aware of him due to advertizing, but I had never actually listened to him. I’m just unconfortable by the enormity of the reaction to this event.
Granted, what he said was mean and vulgar, but in perspective it’s not nearly as atrocious as anything Ann Coulter has said. Maybe he has a history of offensive statements and that this is just the last straw? Part of me wishes that he had said something a little bit more extreme so as to justify the intensity of the outrage. It doesn’t seem severe enough to warrant his total annihilation.
I wonder if there would have been such an outcry if he had made some kind of “female basketball player = lesbian” slur?
Thanks for reminding me that use of radio and TV is not a right but a privilege, and that the people who own the equipment and sponsor the airtime have the right to determine how that time is used and that the public has the right to pressure the owners and sponsors with protests and boycotts if they disagree with those decisions, and that this is not the same as the government forbidding speech and punishing those who disagree with it.
But it does point out how the media is not public but really the private property of the corporations and that it’s only within very narrow limits that we have any influence over what is broadcast.