Free Speech 2

All the BS talk about free speech in social media made me think of a sad but all too true matter of fact. My local newspaper, owned by a conglomerate that operates “local” newspapers throughout the southeast of Pennsylvania, has a strict policy that it will not accept nor publish letters that express any criticism of the management of the newspaper.

The stricture is very broad. I’ve had letters summarily rejected because I’ve pointed out the grammatical and logical solecisms that appear in the paper. Just today, for instance, a column headed “Today’s birthdays” begins with the following entry: “1547—England’s King Henry VIII died at age 55.” As errors go, that’s not in the range of a Mount Everest; but it is ridiculously stupid and as good as erases whatever seriousness the paper might lay claim to.

 

Still, I’ve never thought of the paper’s policy as being in restriction of free speech. It’s a private enterprise, after all, and its owners can choose to publish what they decide to publish and exclude what they decide to exclude. So too printing presses, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, radio stations, TV channels . . . all of them are guided by editorial principles that are congenial to the owners’ point of view.

 

When Zuckerberg or Musk make the argument that they will not allow fact checkers to vet the posting on their online versions of publications, I am therefore more than skeptical. It’s obvious that the rejection of fact checking is entirely partial. If I were famous enough to be followed by several million Twitter users, and if with such a following I were to ridicule Musk, I know that I would be banned. So much for free speech—except that it seems to me entirely within Musk’s right to censor his site. So too Zuckerberg and any other owner of a private publication of any sort.

 

The First Amendment is crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The key term in the amendment is “Congress,” and because the power to make laws is explicitly the purview of Congress, the point extends to the government as a whole. In short, then, the government of the United States is constitutionally prohibited from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

 

It's not Zuckerberg or Musk who are prohibited from silencing speech, in other words. It is the government. In light of that fact, therefore, the newly imposed restrictions on the speech of government agencies and employees strikes me as profoundly unconstitutional. There can be no reference in government documents to “woke,” as they call it, issues, like gay rights or the historical contributions of Black Americans or climate change, or anything that troubles the buzzing brains of the president’s MAGA acolytes.

 

Where does the right of the government to censor speech come from? Is that not simply an unconstitutional prohibition? And if we simply let that unconstitutional act slide by, what other unconstitutional act will we accept?