Copyright berkshireeagle
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” The anthemic howl of Janis Joplin singing Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” tears through my mind these days, when we have everything to lose. The reason the First Amendment is the first is that without freedom of speech, and its identical twin freedom of the press, there is no democracy. The losses mount up daily as a toxic brew of media consolidation, antidemocratic governance and an Executive employing federal muscle for retribution make a mockery of our first freedom. The all-too-human tendency to suppress whatever one doesn’t want to hear is not new. Supposedly the “newspaper of record,” The New York Times in particular has a bad habit of selective coverage. During the nearly six years of World War II, coverage of the Holocaust slipped onto the Times’ front page a scant 26 times among 24,000 front-page articles. Only six of these stories noted Jews as primary targets on page one, versus vague “persecuted minorities” or “refugees.” It was all the news the paper saw “fit to print.” It still is. When excuse-mongering for today’s wholesale assault on freedom of speech and of the press, it is easy to find nongovernmental precedents. The left did itself no favors when it took an important cultural advance with the #MeToo movement too far at times, as in the case of Minnesota Sen. Al Franken. Franken, himself a former comedian, was hounded out of office largely over a sophomoric video and an unwanted kiss. I wonder how many people would survive bricks thrown at that glass house. Given the depredations of the current president, Franken was an amateur in a pro league. But machinery of state did not force Franken from office. When government leans on the press in a way that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, condemns: Houston, we have a problem. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, acted like a “mafioso,” in Cruz’s words, when he threatened action on ABC’s license over Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks. Carr was not just wrong in his behavior; he is so ignorant of the law that it seems he has no idea about his own agency’s role and powers. Stephen Colbert — himself the victim of CBS’ timidity over his own program set for cancellation — put it best in describing Carr’s misunderstanding of “community values” when Colbert said: “You know what my community values are, buster? Freedom of speech.” I spent enough years at ABC News to be well aware of FCC mandates, which are concerned with having enough programming that is in the public interest, not weighing unfairly into elections and bad words. If you don’t remember comedian George Carlin’s 1972 monologue “Seven words you can never say on television,” you can still hear it on YouTube. Not among those words were Jimmy Kimmel’s ostensibly offensive “the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” In poor taste? Maybe. Worthy of conservative ABC station owners Nexstar and Sinclair pulling Kimmel off the air? Hardly. Check out Saturday Night Live sometime. The poison is not in the loose words of the left or right but in the unprecedented push into authoritarian modes of suppression of speech. The line is getting long. First Voice of America fell, then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CBS, ABC and on and on. In defunding CPB, the primary target of the right might have been National Public Radio, whose supposed liberal lean has made it a longtime bogeyman on Capitol Hill, but the insidious advance of media suppression is making its way to tamer targets. The PBS NewsHour may be in the crosshairs in red states, in which stations that are state licensees — chartered and, in some cases, partially funded by the state — are likely to be feeling pressure to drop the program. This is a deck of cards. Just as with multiple station owners taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air, if state-owned stations in red states fear a financial cudgel and drop the PBS NewsHour, underwriters could follow suit as coverage of markets diminishes. This is how the world of fundamental American freedom ends, not with a bang but a steady stream of whimpering. As CBS and CNN get gobbled up and move to the right, Disney pushes ABC’s buttons, NBC severs ties with MSNBC and public media withers, there will be little left to save. In London, near the hipster area of Brick Lane, graffiti artist SubDude recently updated a famous 1946 poem “First They Came” by German Lutheran pastor Martin Neimooller. I stood before the mural of the new version for some time this spring, pondering the artist’s words, set against an American flag: “… Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak out for me.”
