THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505070039
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
In the December issue of Esquire, author Pete Hamill wrote a powerful, angry essay called ``Endgame'' that damned how Americans increasingly talk to each other in terms of hatred, malice, contempt and violence.
``As this dreadful century winds down, its history heavy with gulags and concentration camps and atom bombs, the country that was its brightest hope seems to be breaking apart. All the moves toward decency, excellence, maturity and compassion have been made. They seem to have come to nothing. Everyone talks and nobody listens.
``Boneheaded vulgarians are honored for their stupidity. The bitterly partisan debate on the crime bill in the U.S. Senate is remembered only for Al D'Amato's rendition of `Old MacDonald Had a Farm.' The Christian Coalition commandeers the Republican state convention in Virginia, and among the slogans on the wall is one that says WHERE IS LEE HARVEY OSWALD WHEN AMERICA REALLY NEEDS HIM? The American social and political style has been reduced to the complexity of a T-shirt.''
Six months later, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, more and more people, including President Clinton, have spoken out about what Newsweek labels ``toxic speech.''
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter recounts the most odious recent examples:
Mark Koernke, the militiaman who ``repeatedly goes on short-wave radio describing how to kill government officials.''
New York radio talk show host Bob Grant, who tells a dissenting caller, ``What I'd like to do is put you against the wall with the rest of them, and mow you down with them.''
Bob Mohan of KFYI Phoenix, who said of gun-control advocate Sarah Brady, ``She ought to be put down. A humane shot at a veterinarian's would be an easy way to do it.''
Radio talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy, who urges listeners to shoot agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who enter their homes (``Head shots, head shots - kill the sons of bitches!'')
Another bumper sticker, sold at some gun shows, that says, FIRST LINCOLN, THEN KENNEDY, NOW CLINTON?
Some also worry that political extremists have withdrawn from general public life and talk only to one another through narrow channels of communications - such as short-wave radio and ``newsgroups,'' electronic bulletin boards on the Internet.
``Today, extremist groups can use Usenet to swap their accusations of government malfeasance and treachery,'' Denise Caruso, the ``Digital Commerce'' columnist for The New York Times, wrote last Monday. ``And because these groups are so self-contained, these tales never have the benefit of being submitted to an outsider's reality check or corroborated in the process of being reported by the news media.''
On Thursday and Friday, journalists and computer specialists grappled with the role of journalism in a digital world during a conference hosted by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.
Nancy Maynard, former co-owner of The Oakland Tribune, described journalism as ``the social glue'' that holds society together by broadly distributing news and information.
Neil Postman of New York University, a cultural critic whose books include ``Amusing Ourselves to Death'' and ``Technopoly,'' called journalism ``an intellectual immune system'' that helps filter out a cancerous profusion of unwanted information.
His analogy can be extended to describe how strong, useful information - acting as white cells - can drive out the infection of vapid, unsubstantiated rumors and claims.
The parallel concept of a marketplace of ideas, in which good ideas drive out bad ones by virtue of their superior value, has long been cited as a reason that speech and the press should not be regulated by government. We should keep this concept foremost in mind as we evaluate proposals to restrict the media that extremists use.
For the marketplace model to work, we must test our own utterances - and those of mainstream political leaders and cultural commentators. Is what we say weakened by overstatement to the point it encourages, rather than combats, bad ideas?
Jonathan Alter says the hate-speech debate comes down to accepting responsibility.
``That doesn't mean the hate purveyors are responsible for wackos blowing up buildings, but that they - and everyone else - are responsible for trying to prevent such violence,'' Alter writes. ``Responsibility is when people in positions of authority (including movie, TV, radio and recording executives) assess the possible social consequences of what they disseminate. This should be elemental and obvious, but it isn't.''
As Denise Caruso concluded, ``The only cure for hate speech wherever it surfaces - in a newsgroup, on a radio show, in a magazine - is to let it be heard, and to speak out against it.''
Now we must worry about what to do when hate doesn't surface until it kills, when alienated and angry people don't come to the marketplace except to plant a bomb there. by CNB