The High Cost of Free Speech
The mainstream media are like hostage negotiators in the hijacking of the American conversation. The hostages are the American public — and the negotiations are not going well. That’s my key take-away from a book titled “AntiSocial” by Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
The book is sub-titled: “Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
It is getting an understandable high level of attention from news media outlets around the country. Marantz spent three years — and these are my words, not his — “infiltrating, inoculating and ingratiating” his way into the living room caverns of the extremists spreading fake news and real hate in America.
That was the headline on an op-ed piece he wrote for the New York Times. The problem, according to his analysis, is that “trolls, bigots and propagandists” have managed to co-opt The First Amendment while - what he calls - free speech “absolutists” have managed to cop-out on how best to protect it from abuse. The backlash to his commentary, as discussed in this On The Media segment with Brooke Gladstone, was overwhelmingly negative. The ‘absolutists’ absolutely hated his analysis.
Against Free Speech Absolutism
As he himself says, he too was once an all-or-nothing supporter but he’s not so sure we can be “free speech absolutists” any more. Nobody wants to restrict free speech, of course, but the question is — how do you draw the line. Or to put it another way — when does ‘uncomfortable’ speech become ‘unacceptable’ speech?
Marantz tells several stories and provides several examples in the book, AntiSocial, of people who have used free speech principles to spread a “viral infection.” One in particular stands out — a man in California who has become “an expert in injecting fringe ideas into the national discourse.”
In an interview with Brian Stelter, host of Reliable Sources, he describes how the man made up a story about Hillary Clinton having a disease, did a Periscope with his fifty or so fellow extremists to come up with a hashtag along with some ‘catchy’ lines that would get them media coverage. He then shared it with his 5,000 followers on Twitter. It was picked up by the Drudge Report and Fox News…
And Then…
Marantz said he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself, but the next morning the story was in the morning newspaper.
“The way these people study you guys, the way they study us in the print media, they are trying to back engineer how they can break into the national conversation…(He succeeded)… He memed it into the national conversation.”
“It hits your lizard brain.”
It’s my favorite line from the interview. It’s Marantz’s colorful way of describing how such people hit the emotional hot buttons to get a response… any response. People who like it and believe it will share it, but the people who hate it and don’t believe it will also share it. Either way — it’s out there.
So, pick your cliche — free speech is a double edged sword… you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t… we have to take the bad with the good. All true. It is a complicated situation. The problem is that until we, who claim the profession of journalism, realize that and deal with that more substantively, we are going to continue to be hostage negotiators, uncertain of the outcome.
