Letters to the Editor
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state vs. private
Apologies for this long comment, but it grew beyond my control. KitchenGirl: I understand the difference between state-imposed sanctions on speech and those imposed by a private entity. I understand that the first amendment protects us only from the former. But am I wrong in saying that when we talk about free speech, we're talking about more than the letter of the Constitutional law? Free speech is a personal value--we (most of us, I assume) respect one another's right to speak our minds without being shouted down or bullied. In other words, it's a moral issue.
You may argue that in the example in question, Imus bullied those Rutgers women. I would say he mocked them, and lightly, passingly at that, and the punishment was nowhere near equal to the "crime." This wasn't hate speech--it was a bad joke from an unhip old man. (For the record, I always found this guy boring.) The fact is, Imus made a lame attempt at coopting some hip-hop speak. A big thing was made of it, and the insulted parties were free to fire back at him through the media. They did have the country's ear for a good few weeks.
But all this is to my mind beside the point. CBS has the right to fire whomever they want. What really bothers me is that otherwise intelligent, left-leaning people agitated to get this man fired for an off-color joke (which, by the way, is what CBS hired him to do, and what his listeners want from him). Sure, they had the right to do it. Everyone had the right to do everything that was done. But when we as private citizens hold the personal value of free speech in such contempt, it does whittle away at our individual rights as surely as any federal law. And living as we do in a democracy, public sentiment has a tendency to worm its way into written law.
KitchenGirl, in response to my question, you said that free speech is "as free as the consequences you are willing to accept for your actions." That strikes me as a rather thuggish interpretation of things, and a dangerous one. What if public sentiment were as hostile to, say, feminist speech as it is now to racist speech? What if TCF were fired by Salon for writing one such offensive article too many? Would you shrug and say that TCF has to accept the consequences of her actions? An unlikely scenario, I grant you, but the analogy serves to show how minority rights can be legally trampled. Surely you didn't applaud Bill Maher's firing, did you? How about the government's withdrawal of funding from the NEA when it didn't like the art? (An example of government censorship, sure, but those funds are a privilege, not a right.)
The same goes for you, fetboy: yes, I understand the difference between a whistleblower and a joke teller. But your characterization of this particular joke teller as "distasteful," "a nuisance" and spreading "hate and discontent" is all your personal opinion. Common decency may lead you to that opinion, but it should also lead you to the conclusion that you shouldn't impose your values on him. We agree that whistleblowers' speech should be protected by law because we value what they have to say. You may not value what Imus has to say--I sure don't--but at least value the idea that he should be able to say it. To argue that you'd die to protect his right to say it while agitating to get him fired strikes me as a hypocritical position. Of course losing your job is not the same as losing your freedom. But public opinion can silence unpopular speech with the threat of the former almost as effectively as the state can with the threat of the latter.
Now, I suspect you and KitchenGirl might respond that the Green Team and Imus are questions of community standards; that we in 21st century America will not tolerate "hateful" speech, and will agitate against it; that the I-man crossed the line, and he got what was coming to him. To some extent, I agree--we are a more open nation than we used to be, we tolerate racism and sexism far less than we used to, and those are good things. But those are personal, moral values (at least as far as speech goes), and the potential damage done to women and African-Americans by these jokes needs to be weighed against the damage done to this value of free expression. Imus is back on the air today with another company, sure, but I think the damage to our sense of free expression was already done by his very public firing. You may have come away from that whole episode thinking, "Great, a message was sent: racist, sexist slurs will not be tolerated by a decent society." I got a different message--that a loud enough mob can get someone canned for having an unpopular opinion.