Free Speech. Really? (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Ellis Cose is here to talk about THE SHORT LIFE & CURIOUS DEATH OF FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA. That's the title of his provocative new book on one of our essential, and embattled, American rights, by one of our most prolific journalists. An essay he wrote as a high school student started him in journalism, and over his long career he's written a dozen books, from THE RAGE OF A PRIVILEGED CLASS, a best-seller, to DEMOCRACY, IF WE CAN KEEP IT – his monumental history, published this summer, of the first one-hundred years of the American Civil Liberties Union. Throughout his long career in journalism, he's been a contributor, columnist and editor for major publications and a fellow at leading research centers on politics and economics as well as civic engagement and race. Steeped in some of the critical debates of our times, he's grown increasingly concerned about democracy's fate under the combined weight of technology, political corruption, and inequality. Here to talk with Ellis Cose is Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: Ellis Cose, I'm very glad that you could join us today, and I appreciate very much the book that brought us together THE SHORT LIFE & CURIOUS DEATH OF FREE SPEECH. It's good to be with you.
ELLIS COSE: I'm delighted any time we can get together.
BILL MOYERS: You report in this book that America has been experiencing a full-blown free speech crisis. What do you see when you use that term, a full-blown free speech crisis? Sum it up for us.
ELLIS COSE: I think it's a crisis on several levels. I think it's hard to talk about it without talking first a little bit about how we evolved our current definition of free speech. Because we tend to think that free speech is something that's been with us as a country forever, that it's been with us since the founding. And that's both true and not true. It was part of the Bill of Rights, so yes, it's been there for a long time. But in the 1790s, those principles were violated. You have the Alien and Sedition Acts. And throughout the 19th century it was illegal to speak out against any number of things, including slavery.
BILL MOYERS: And one of my favorite stories, in 1833, when the Missouri editor Elijah Lovejoy took up the cause of ending slavery he was told by the good citizens of his town that, and I'm quoting, “Freedom of speech and press does not imply a moral right… to freely discuss the subject of slavery.”
ELLIS COSE: And part of the reason for that was because the Bill of Rights was not considered something that applied to the states. But the long and the short of it is that until after World War I, free speech, as we understand it now, didn't exist in America. World War I brought on a crisis. The government passed a series of laws that essentially outlawed speech critical of the government. So the combination of the war and the war on dissidents left us with some extremely repressive speech policies. And it was out of that combination of things that the ACLU ended up forming to articulate a rationale for speech which had been totally crushed after World War I. And the important part that I'm trying to get to is that underlying all of that was a rationale. And the rationale was that free speech was what protected democracy.
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BILL MOYERS: Do you have a working definition of free speech? I have relied on the simple notion of free speech as the right to express an opinion without government restraint. The government cannot tell you what you can and cannot say. Do you accept that as the basic baseline of free speech, that the government cannot restrain your opinion?
ELLIS COSE: I will accept that as a definition of free speech if you say that under certain circumstances which present a danger to society or to others, then the government does have the right to limit free speech. I mean, there's the classic, you don't shout fire in a crowded theater. But we've always had this tension between the right to absolute speech and the right to speech that somebody or other considers dangerous or harmful. And that continues to resonate today with the whole debate around hate speech.
BILL MOYERS: After I read the book, I wrote down a number of questions that grew out of it for me. For example, does the guarantee of free speech give me the right to lie on this podcast?
ELLIS COSE: The short answer is yes, it does. Because the problem is that one person's lie is another person's opinion. It doesn't give you the right to slander people. It doesn't give you the right to libel people. But in effect, it does give you the right to lie, particularly in political speech.
BILL MOYERS: Does it give the president the right to lie every time he opens his mouth, to keep shouting over and over that the recent election was a fraud when it was actually free and fair. My point is that the president, any president, has the advantage, doesn't he?
ELLIS COSE: Of course he does, he—
BILL MOYERS: –when he lies, he lies to millions those—
ELLIS COSE: He had—
BILL MOYERS: Those who believe him don't even have such reach. They can open the front door. All of us can open the front door and say, “He's a liar.” But the damage is done.
ELLIS COSE: Bill, you're taking us full circle, which is the reason that I say free speech is endangered. It's not shared equally. The president, other people with access to media, with access to unlimited capital, have a lot more free speech than you and I have. Free speech is not a commodity that's shared equally in society, and it's becoming less and less so.
BILL MOYERS: And that's the danger you're writing about, with some very strong exposition, analysis, and truth telling in here.
ELLIS COSE: And I think it's only getting worse. I mean, you talk about the president's right to speech. Congress has tried on various occasions to limit the amount of money that flows into politics. But the 2010 Citizens United decision basically said that companies have the same rights as individuals to free speech.
BILL MOYERS: Corporations are people, in effect.
ELLIS COSE: Yeah, corporations are in that effect people, even though corporations don't die, these corporations don't necessarily have to be U.S. citizens, these corporations don't have to answer to anybody, they don't have to be transparent. And it let loose basically billions of dollars that can go into influencing political dialogue, which is hard to counteract. Because what is clear is that Congress people, senators respond a lot more to people who fund their campaigns than just people who have one vote to give them.
BILL MOYERS: Let me read you what I wrote in the margin when you were writing about this. “The ultra-rich casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife contributed nearly $220 million in the recent election cycle, all of it to conservatives and Republicans, and a whole lot of it going to dishonest advertising.” So I said to myself and to you, “So Ellis, who has more free speech? The Adelson or an everyday citizen who contributes $100 to the same election cycle?”
ELLIS COSE: And the answer's obvious. It's the person who has enough money to gain access to shift political policy. Americans sort of realize that, which is one of the reasons there's so much frustration. If you go back to the original debates that shaped the way we look at free speech in America today, they were led in large measure by Oliver Wendell Holmes and–
BILL MOYERS: Justice Brandeis.
ELLIS COSE: And their arguments essentially are, look, good speech drives out bad speech, truthful speech drives out untruthful speech. If you want to get to the truth of what's happening in society, you need to have speech as free and as open, as broad as possible. Because the right to free speech and speech itself is what fuels social knowledge and what fuels democracy. If you accept that proposition, which actually sounds reasonable—
BILL MOYERS: That good ideas drive out bad ideas.
ELLIS COSE: Right. It's a reasonable proposition, but it's not true. I don't believe that truths drive out lies. I mean you mentioned the president who was lying about the results of the election and has convinced, according to what poll you look at, upwards of 70% of Republicans that he was cheated out of an election. It doesn't matter that he's lying. They believe that particular truth that he is giving them. Facebook has spent a lot of time justifying its policy, which basically is to let politicians lie. And their justification boils down to a justification for free speech. The First Amendment has nothing to do with what kind of speech private corporations decide they're going to limit. That's just an excuse that Zuckerberg is hiding behind. Because what the First Amendment prohibits is the federal government making rules and regulations, also state governments prohibiting certain types of speech. So once you open the floodgates to that kind of speech – which should be self-regulated by Facebook and other institutions themselves – you contribute even more to the lopsided dialogue we have in this society, where those with influence, with money, are allowed to dominate the conversation because they have the resources to do so.
BILL MOYERS: You probably saw that The Atlantic magazine had an article in which the writer, Adrienne LaFrance said it had become a “world-historic weapon.” It's grown to an unprecedented size, and in doing so, I'm quoting her, allows the worst parts of humanity to go viral. She says Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, of targeted harassment, of terrorist recruitment, of emotional manipulation and genocide. And she puts it right there on the table when she says, no one company or person should retain so much power. Is she right?
ELLIS COSE: I don't think she's wrong. Part of the problem is that when you have social media, which depends on views or on clicks to make money, there's an incentive to promote certain types of speech which provoke a highly emotional reaction. Because that's the kind of speech that causes people to move, to pass things on. Well, what provokes a highly emotional reaction? Well, hate speech and angry speech, crazy speech, but everything that's counter to a rational discussion. Rational reasoned dialogue does not create the kind of emotional reaction that causes stuff to go viral. And the social media model is predicated on disproportionately promoting things that do go viral. And part of the problem is that when you have an institution, like Facebook, and a leader like Zuckerberg who basically decides, I'm going to just be content neutral. He's not being content neutral. He's favoring certain types of content, many forms of which are very harmful.
What provokes a highly emotional reaction? Hate speech and angry speech, crazy speech, everything that's counter to a rational discussion.
BILL MOYERS: What do we do about it if we say they're just acting on their own free speech? They're doing what they want to do because they have the right to do it?
ELLIS COSE: Well, I see no problem with limiting the amount of money that flows into these kinds of institutions, particularly for misleading and lying ads. I think we're kind of stuck until we can figure out a way to change this. Which gets us to actually an even more revolutionary question: when we have a society and a democracy that is broken, and I think ours is in some ways broken now, how do you fix that? It seems to take some fairly radical measures.
