Free speech as disease, or cure?

Law, Politics, Religion,

David Cole takes a look at suggestions for banning various forms of offensive speech and comes away unconvinced:

Such proposals to regulate hate speech—whether “two-pronged” or not—are flawed, for principled, legal reasons, as well as strategic, political considerations. As a legal matter, any attempt to penalize speech because of its offensive content contravenes the First Amendment’s bedrock principle that the government should not be in the business of defining what messages are permissible or impermissible. Arguments for regulating hate speech often take the same form as those made by defenders of laws prohibiting flag burning: if the content of the expression is offensive, and the speech itself is deemed of negligible value, it should be suppressed. But the last thing we need in a democracy is the government—or the majority—defining what is or is not a permissible message.

Second, defining “hate speech” in a way that draws a clear and enforceable line between that which deserves protection and that which can be prohibited is an elusive, and probably impossible, task. Ruthven’s proposal distinguishes between criticism and “insult,” an approach eerily reminiscent of the one Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has adopted in defending the prosecution of journalistsfor “insulting” Turkey. Waldron’s proposal draws similarly vague lines between speech that offends, which he would protect, and speech that denigrates the human dignity of individuals or groups, which he would not. Canada prohibits “any writing, sign or visible representation” that “incites hatred against any identifiable group.” Ireland prohibits “blasphemous” speech that is “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion.”

Such laws empower the government, or a jury, to draw lines between legitimate criticism, satire, and public comment on the one hand, and “insulting,” “abusive,” or “hateful” speech on the other. Is there any reason to be confident that government officials or juries will do a good job of this? And as long as the lines are so murky, many people will be compelled to steer clear of legitimate expression that some official or jury might, from its own viewpoint, deem over the line after the fact: this would stifle free speech and lead to self-censorship. Ruthven himself seems ambivalent about whether Rushdie’s depiction of Mohammed in The Satanic Verses is “insulting,” and therefore should be prohibited, or an example of artistic criticism that should be protected.

He concludes:

There is a place for limits. I am a professor. I do not tolerate, in my classroom, disrespectful speech of any kind, because it interferes with the learning environment that I seek to foster. I am also a father, and have a similar view with respect to the need for respectful speech around the dinner table. A responsible newspaper publisher might well decline to print an article that its editors were convinced was likely to spark violence. But these limits are not imposed by law, but by social norms and ethics, which are in turn informed by discussion, dialogue, and culture. Such norms are quite powerful, and ensure that for the most part, people do not use their freedom of speech irresponsibly. In those isolated instances where freedom is exercised irresponsibly, it is far better to employ more speech to condemn it—as President Barack Obama did recently in response to the YouTube video—than to empower the state to limit speech by punishing dissidents deemed hateful or insulting.

An apology tour…for France

Politics, , , ,

The New Republic‘s David A. Bell contrasts France’s approach to its checkered past with that of the United States:

Is your president a socialist who has repeatedly apologized for his country? If you are an American, the answer to this question is no, despite apoplectic Republican claims to the contrary. If you are French, however, it is most certainly yes. Not only is President François Hollande a proud Socialist; this year he has made two high-profile apologies for France. This summer, on the seventieth anniversary of the notorious “vel d’Hiv” roundup of Jews in Paris. he gave a speech acknowledging the country’s guilt in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, And this past week, he ended official denials that the Parisian police had carried out a massacre of Algerian protestors in 1961, and paid homage to the victims. The two statements say a great deal about French public life today, about the country’s relation to its history, and about its widening differences from the United States.

Both of the incidents for which Hollande apologized, in the name of the French Republic, were long hidden from sight. After the liberation of France in 1944, a battered and demoralized population consoled itself with the myth that all but a few traitors and criminals had resisted the Nazi occupation. The deportation of some 76,000 Jews to the death camps was blamed on the Germans. Only slowly, and in large part thanks to the effort of North American historians (especially Robert Paxton of Columbia) did the full sordid story emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the French had in fact supported the collaborationist government of Marshal Philippe Pétain for several years. Many had applauded, enthusiastically, anti-Semitic policies modeled on those of the Nazis. And while it was the Germans who demanded the deportation of Jews from France, the job of identifying, arresting and transporting these Jews was carried out entirely by French authorities, including the horrific, days-long incarceration of 13,000 Jews in the “Vel d’Hiv”—an indoor bicycle racetrack—without adequate food, water or ventilation…

In the United States, sentiments of this sort, apropos of the darker episodes in American history, are anything but uncommon in university classrooms. In politics, however, they have become virtually taboo. In the civil rights era, American politicians could speak frankly and eloquently about the ways that slavery and institutionalized racism stained the American past. In the 1980’s, Congress could pass legislation acknowledging the wrong of Japanese-American interment during World War II, and granting compensation to its victims. But in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing,  inviting debate on its morality.  The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.

Greetings from the strangest Congressional election of 2012

Politics, ,

U.S. Representative Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. of Illinois (son of the reverend) continues to stay in virtual hiding during high campaign season, as he has all summer and into the fall, but appears likely to win reelection anyway:

Since June, Mr. Jackson, a Democrat and the son of the civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, has been on medical leave from Congress and has made no official appearances in the district that he represented since 1995, or anywhere else. His office has disclosed that he was treated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for bipolar disorder and in recent weeks has been recovering at his home in Washington.

While the recorded call — an effort to talk directly to constituents, Mr. Jackson’s campaign said — was the first clear sign of Mr. Jackson’s involvement as Election Day approaches, few here were expecting a ramp-up of campaigning now. The possibility that Mr. Jackson might yet appear in person on the trail seems remote; recent news reports have suggested that Mr. Jackson might require additional inpatient treatment, and someone close to Mr. Jackson said on Saturday that he was likely to soon return to the Mayo Clinic.

“I am starting to heal,” Mr. Jackson says on the recording. “The good news is my health is improving, but my doctors tell me the road to recovery is a long one. For nearly 18 years I have served the people of the second district, I am anxious to return to work on your behalf, but at this time it is against medical advice, and while I will always give my all to my constituents, I ask for your continued patience as I work to get my health back.”

Even without a real campaign and despite recent revelations that federal authorities were investigating the possible misuse of campaign funds by Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson is likely to win re-election, political experts here say. Mr. Jackson is well known, particularly compared with his opponents (a Republican, an Independent and a write-in candidate), and the district leans firmly Democratic.

Violence in your backyard

Politics, , ,

After yesterday’s horrific bombing in Beirut, just a kilometer or two from where I lived this summer and just two blocks from where I spent several afternoons and evenings, Maya Mikdashi wonders, “What is a Car Bomb?”

It is surreal to wake up to news of a car bomb back home, now thousands of miles away. Immediately, the war shaped body is both numb and preoccupied with images of death and destruction. The mind wanders and sutures the past, present and future seamlessly. Phone calls, emails, and texts begin. The space between a call and its response seems immense, and the time it takes to hear from blood and choice family-particularly when they live or work or frequent the targeted neighborhood-is bloated with the macabre.

But what is a neighborhood? In times of violence, and in places shaped by seemingly unending violence, neighborhoods are always contracting. To put a distance between you and an explosion is to imagine a logic to violence, and a logic to safety. It happened in Lebanon. No, it happened in Beirut. No, it happened in Achrafieh. No, it happened in Sassine. No, it happened on one particular side of Sassine. Finally, it happened on one particular street and near these particular shops. “We are fine,” I hear from my sister. “It was two blocks away so don’t worry.” These are statements we grew up with, when car bombs and regular bombs and snipers and checkpoints mapped our lives. Now we use these same words, passed on from one generation to the next…

A car bomb is not a car bomb. It is a spectacle. It is a statement. It is shock and awe. In Lebanon, it is an incitement to memory-both short and long term. A warning that life is cheaper than TNT, that blood runs faster than fire-extinguishing water, and that car bombs and snipers and checkpoints and bombs are always already here, waiting to break the surface of the present.

As an outsider working in Beirut, I felt as if the city were perpetually on edge, teetering on the precipice of succumbing to the mass violence that has raged on for a seeming eternity, now just 60 miles to the east in Damascus. I hoped then, as I do now, that I was wrong.

Does this election even matter?

Politics, , ,

Frank Rich isn’t at all convinced:

But isn’t the tea party yesterday’s news, receding into the mists of history along with its left-wing doppelgänger, Occupy Wall Street? So it might seem. It draws consistently low poll numbers, earning just a 25 percent approval rating in a Wall Street Journal–NBC News survey in September. The tea-party harbinger from 2008, Sarah Palin, and the bomb throwers who dominated the primary process of 2012, led by the congressional tea-party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, were vanquished and lost whatever national political clout they had, along with much of their visibility (even on Fox News). So toxic is the brand that not one of the 51 prime-time speakers at the GOP convention in Tampa dared speak its name, including such tea-party heartthrobs as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Scott Brown, who became an early tea-party hero for unexpectedly taking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, has barely alluded to the affiliation since.

All this evidence is misleading. As one conservative commentator, Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway, wrote during the GOP convention, it means nothing that Republican leaders don’t mention the tea party anymore. “In reality, of course the Republican party of 2012 is pretty much the tea party at this point,” he wrote. “One need only look at the party platform and listen to what the speakers are actually saying to recognize that fact.” He saw the tea party as “likely to see its influence increase after the November elections regardless of what happens to the Romney/Ryan ticket”—and rightly so. Though the label itself had to be scrapped—it has been permanently soiled by images of mad-dog protesters waving don’t tread on me flags—its ideology is the ideology of the right in 2012. Its adherents will not back down or fade away, even if Obama regroups and wins the lopsided Electoral College victory that seemed in his grasp before the first debate. If anything, the right will be emboldened to purge the GOP of the small and ideologically deviant Romney claque that blew what it saw as a “historic” opportunity to deny a “socialist” president a second term.

Trees of the world, rejoice!

Media, Technology, , , , , ,

Newsweek is shutting down its print version at the end of the year:

Tina Brown, founder of the Daily Beast Web site and the driving force behind its merger with Newsweek, announced the move on Thursday in a message on the Daily Beast.

“We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue,” Ms. Brown said in a message co-written with Baba Shetty, the recently hired chief executive.

The all-digital version of the magazine will be called Newsweek Global and operate on a paid subscription model. The name Newsweek, in spite of its trouble in print, still has value in terms of international licensing, as well as several conferences Ms. Brown has created.

Andrew Sullivan, whose Dish blog is part of the Tina Brown-run Daily Beast family that controls Newsweek, gives his take:

…[W]hen asked my opinion at Newsweek about print and digital, I urged taking the plunge as quickly as possible. Look: I chose  digital over print 12 years ago, when I shifted my writing gradually online, with this blog and now blogazine. Of course a weekly newsmagazine on paper seems nuts to me. But it takes guts to actually make the change. An individual can, overnight. An institution is far more cumbersome. Which is why, I believe, institutional brands will still be at a disadvantage online compared with personal ones. There’s a reason why Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are named after human beings. It’s because when we read online, we migrate to read people, not institutions. Social media has only accelerated this development, as everyone with a Facebook page now has a mini-blog, and articles or posts or memes are sent by email or through social networks or Twitter.

And as magazine stands disappear as relentlessly as bookstores, I also began to wonder what a magazine really is. Can it even exist online? It’s a form that’s only really been around for three centuries – and it was based on a group of people associating with each other under a single editor and bound together with paper and staples. At The New Republic in the 1990s, I knew intuitively that most people read TRB, the Diarist and the Notebook before they dug into a 12,000 word review of a book on medieval Jewish mysticism. But they were all in it together. You couldn’t just buy Kinsley’s perky column. It came physically attached to Leon Wieseltier’s sun-blocking ego.

But since every page on the web is now as accessible as every other page, how do you connect writers together with paper and staples, instead of having readers pick individual writers or pieces and ignore the rest? And the connection between writers and photographers and editors is what a magazine is. It defines it – and yet that connection is now close to gone. Around 70 percent of Dish readers have this page bookmarked and come to us directly. (If you read us all the time and haven’t, please do). You can’t sell bundles anymore; and online, it’s hard to sell anything intangible, i.e. words, because the supply is infinite. You no longer control the gate through which readers have to pass and advertizers get to sponsor. No gateway, no magazine, no revenue – and massive costs in print, paper and mailing.

I know a bit about these things, having edited a weekly magazine on paper for five years and running this always-on blogazine for twelve. It’s a different universe now. And to me, the Beast’s decision to put Newsweek Global on a tablet and kill the print edition is absolutely the right one. To do it now also makes sense. To have done it two years ago would have been even better. Why wait?

Felix Salmon is, shall we say, less than convinced that this move is going to work out:

It’s hard to make money in journalism, and even harder to make money in print journalism. But here’s what I don’t understand: invariably, every time a print publication fails, it announces that it’s not going to die, it’s just going to “transition to an all-digital format”. Newsweek, of course, is no exception. But this is supposed to be the clear-eyed, hard-hearted world of Barry Diller:

If doesn’t work out? Move on! “Sell it, write it off, go on to the next thing,” he says.

Once upon a time, Newsweek was a license to print money; from here on in, it will be a drain and a distraction. Merging it into the Daily Beast never made a huge amount of sense, and now it’s being de-merged: instead, its journalism “will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web”. Some of it, I guess, will be syndicated to the Daily Beast.

The chances that Newsweek will succeed as a digital-only subscription-based publication are exactly zero.

Well, I suppose we’ll always have TIME for covers like these.