Tag Archives: First Amendment

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The Legacy Networks are Now Supplicants

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The constant churn of media mergers now keeps these companies indebted to the largesse of Trump, who abuses federal agencies by using them as tools to enhance his power.

With American authoritarianism in ascendency, we are witnessing the decline of independence in traditional outlets of American broadcast news. The three original networks have all taken actions to placate the President, who is on a continuous retribution crusade. The weapons of choice to unsheathe the power of the federal government is the approval of major corporate mergers by the Federal Trade Commision or the Department Of Justice, and regulation of airwave use through the Federal Communications Commission. The issue often arises because mergers and transfers of ownership have been common in the mass media for decades.

For a time in the middle of the last century the three original networks were content with espousing the position that they existed for the public good. The best owners thought of broadcasting as something like a civil necessity: a logical extension of the view, since they owned many of their affiliates. Owners were willing to accept modest profits in favor of being good corporate citizens.  Though the first form of the Federal Communications Commission was initially set up to bring order to the rush of broadcasters to use various frequencies, it would also seek guarantees from station owners that the public airwaves would be used to contribute to the public good.  (But to be clear, network affiliates with access to the airwaves need to be licensed. But as with other American media outlets, networks themselves do not need government licenses to operate.)

By the 1980s, the networks were rapidly turning into banks for investors, while divesting many of their entertainment and publishing assets. Key managers are now more likely to come with a financial rather than production background. Mergers are second nature to them.

Corrupting the FCC

Until now no one understood that the FCC should have any claims on an affiliate because the Chair of the agency did not like their network’s politics. The agency was never meant to censor broadcast content, as Brendan Carr did last month in forcing Disney/ABC to silence Jimmy Kimmel Live!  A better and different tradition was set by FCC Chair Newton Minow in the early 60s when he urged broadcasters to be less timid by producing nationally significant programming.

As we know, late night host Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the President, and more recently made brief comments about the assassination of Republican Charlie Kirk. That was enough for Carr to have Kimmel silenced, lest ABC’s affiliates have their licenses revoked.

The Chinese cannot offer negative comments about President Xi in their broadcasts. Nor can Russian entertainers freely challenge President Vladimir Putin. These leaders maintain power on their own artificial islands of enforced adoration. In his own way Trump has joined them in seeking to crush oppositional speech, abusing the role of the FCC and other federal agencies, and in defiance of the right of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The heat of political retribution also lays behind the decision of CBS—once a network with impressive independence—to cancel the popular Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert has the best ratings of all the competing shows in the evening daypart. It also remains to be seen if the Comcast-owned NBC, with its own late-night hosts and a Trump accusation that they peddle “fake news,” will resist. David Ellison, the new head of Paramount Skydance, including CBS, is reportedly working with his multibillionaire father to also gain control of Paramount, Warner Brothers, and CNN. The Ellisons’ wealth comes from the Oracle empire, illustrating how American tech companies pile up media assets, making billions to spend on even more federally approved mergers.

The founder of CBS in the 1920s was also the son of a rich father who happened to be in the cigar business. But the constant churn in media companies has taken an ominous turn in how they now actively seek the largesse of the current President, who uses federal agencies as personal tools to enhance his power. It is hard to overestimate the breach of the traditional American separation–imperfect, to be sure–between media owners and specific administrations.

In what is a dangerous and new trend, our tech industries increasingly seem to have capitulated specifically to the President’s efforts to reign in programming that he might find offensive. We could extend the analysis to Apple Computer, Google, and a number of “big tech” companies. There are accusations, for example, that Google is resisting A.I. summaries of news reports speculating on the President’s health.

No nation completely escapes tensions between their powerful media businesses and governments that would like to have more content control. But the protection of freedom of speech and of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution. Right now, this bedrock idea gets only lip service from the White House, and seems to have no vocal defenders even among the digital giants.

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‘Incitement’ Should Not be Protected Speech

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                                                Safejournalists

We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting violent attacks.

Our political and legal institutions are lagging badly in dealing with twenty-first century communication forms that enable acts of violence against others.  The sources of this rhetoric of hate may be politicians of various kinds, nativist groups that have formed online communities, or others using live forums.  All are threats to the nation that we seem ill-prepared to handle.  To add to the challenge, bloodshed motivated by hate has been made worse by a President whose billigerence has placed him in the chain of causes that have led to violence.

No one wants to give ground on protections for Americans to speak and publish at will. The First Amendment is our birthright. Dissent is often a necessary source of influence for needed reforms. The rights of advocates should always have a presumptive position in any discussion that would alter their protections.  Even so, we are facing threats from especially from two quarters that should have the attention of law enforcement officials everywhere.

Incredibly, as we have noted, one source of the problem is the President himself.  We are in a period dominated by unprecedented presidential bullying that a reasonable listener could understand as sanctioning attacks on members of the press and opponents.  This week, when a person in a Trump rally suggested shooting border crossers, Trump simply smiled and laughed it off: further evidence of his stunning moral vacancy.

In 2018 Trump praised a member of the House of Representatives, Greg Gianforte, who assaulted a journalist and knocked him to the floor at his Bozeman Montana office. Trump applauded this aggression at another rally, noting  “any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.” It’s part of a larger pattern of sneers and taunts often directed at national journalists who are often separated from a jeering MAGA crowd only by a rope line. Some news organizations have had little choice but to hire protection for their correspondents from mobs fired up by the President. That’s how bad it’s become.

In yet another recent rally Trump talked about reproductive health clinics as if they were in the business of murdering babies. His specific choice of words included “executing babies,” followed by a chopping gesture that we might see in a butcher shop. This kind of talk was apparently enough to motivate at least one man, Matthew Haviland, to threaten kill “every Democrat” and other pro-choice demons he imagined, triggering a rare response from the F.B.I’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting attacks on other Americans.

The second source of this problem is even more ominous because it is also omnipresent. It is hate speech that is easily spread via extremist manifestos online.  Most terrorism experts have given up on the old law enforcement bromide of the “lone wolf” shooter: a characterization that might have once been used to explain gun attacks similar to those on American synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh. Now, the more common analysis is that individuals are connected by racist or anti-immigrant websites that still get First Amendment protections.  Apparently even haters have their chat groups.  John Earnest, the attacker in San Diego, was reportedly motivated by online rhetoric from the recent New Zealand mass murderer, who was trying to exterminate Muslims.

Our hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results. 

Online manifestos functioning as calls to action against “alien” groups are all over the internet, sometimes taken down by individual platforms like Facebook, and sometimes allowed to stand.  Groups may be motivated by anti-semitism, racism, hostility to immigrants and others. The problem is enormous because one platform that might reject content can be replaced by another. There is always an internet server somewhere inside or outside the United States that will host poisonous content.

To be sure, an internet that has turned into what the New York Times has called a “sea of hate” is beyond the easy control of any one nation.  Like most digital media, content easily slips through political boundaries.  Even so, we could be doing more to curb homegrown threats.

Should we Protect Hate Speech that Targets Others?

For the most part, hate speech in the United States is protected.  A 1969 Supreme Court Case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, allows vitriol to exist unless it is likely to incite “imminent lawless action.”  But few federal judges then or now want to prosecute speech on this premise.  There is a long legal tradition to err in favor of the hothead expressing verbal hostility. But this hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results.  While most Americans would accept the rights of even a Nazi group to march or a group of white supremacists to gather, others might question why incitement is so narrowly defined.  For example, English law allows charges to be brought against a person for “incitement to racial hatred.”  Would our admirable record of tolerance of free speech be significantly harmed by a similar prohibition suggesting a violent response?

Smarter minds than mine need to begin to sort all of this out.  But it appears that our laws and constitutional protections are far behind our technology and the coarsening of our rhetoric.  We now have robust networks for the dissemination of hatred, even while basic norms of civility have withered.