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The First Amendment

In a primitive application of file-sharing, a friend loaned us a copy of the film Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's highly secretive yet theoretically voluntary rating system.

I shall not, at this moment, dwell on the gathering absurdity which obliges vast segments of society to find it necessary to legislate against the pleasure of others, to confine descriptions and depictions of love and life to whatever their particular experience of normal happens to be.

Nor shall I dwell on the suggestion that the studios used the HUAC hearings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the anti-communist blacklists which followed, as a way to seek to break the power of the Screen Writers' Guild.

It was a short moment, a brief reminder, which struck me again this morning reading the Lexington Herald. Something like 90 percent (I didn't write the number down; it's probably higher) of all media -- TV, film, music, books, newspapers, and magazines: the necessary components of our participatory democracy -- are controlled by six fully integrated multi-national corporations. Or is it fewer, now?

As the co-publisher of an independent magazine, those are terrifying numbers, and they suggest exactly how the deck has been stacked.

Wal-Mart has recently revised its magazine purchases, dropping a number of titles. We hear that you must sell 1.5 copies per store (per issue) to stay in the Wal-Mart system. This isn't a problem for No Depression, as we've never been available at Wal-Mart. But that's two thousand newsstands, located in some of our less affluent and more remote corners, which will now reflect even less diversity of opinion.

The First Amendment, of course, does not protect the business of speech, only the speech itself.

But a summary in the morning paper of recent Supreme Court decisions was chilling. By 5-4 decisions the justices decided that a high school student could be expelled for holding up a banner which read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a sporting event that was not on school property. "Schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use," Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority decision. Now, I'm going to presume that the kid who held up that sign was various kinds of a pain in the neck, but can that sign reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use? Please. And even if that were the case...

By another 5-4 decision the Court sliced into campaign finance legislation, ruling that the Federal Election Commission overstepped when it banned pre-election ads prepared by the Wisconsin Right to Life. "We give the benefit of the doubt to speech, not censorship," Roberts wrote. "The First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it."

Does it, still?

Posted by grant on June 26, 2007 9:12 AM | Permalink