Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 26, 1995 TAG: 9507260005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RODNEY A. SMOLLA
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the acrid exchange, McCain spoke bitterly of what it was like for him to be a prisoner of war in North Vietnam while McGovern and other anti-war protesters savaged the American government; McGovern countered by asserting that had his policies been followed, McCain would never have been a prisoner of war.
Then, in the midst of his vituperative opening of old wounds, McCain expressed a remarkably radical sentiment. He would never have attempted to silence the protesters, he asserted, for he cherished the rights of dissent and freedom of speech and press above all else; better to lose the war than surrender those liberties.
This was simply one small moment in the jangle of discussion and debate that now fills our mass culture around the clock - one moment in one argument on one issue on one news show. Yet it captured quite simply and eloquently a defining feature of the American persona. For more than 200 years, we have been a people with a radical commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. We fight wars to protect those freedoms. We would rather risk losing wars than give those freedoms up.
The First Amendment seems to have a magnetic attraction for cliche; it is a rare discussion about freedom of speech in which someone doesn't recite the admonition of Oliver Wendell Holmes that it does not include the right to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or the platitude that with freedom comes responsibility. These cliches do have a kernel of truth - as most cliches do - but we need to think with clear heads about what that kernel means.
Begin by thinking of how our First Amendment freedoms actually play out in the confusion we call modern culture. These are usable rights; one need not be a trained professional to wield them. Freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly are not the select reserve of politicians, pundits, preachers and pontificators. We live in a time of participation, a time in which politics, religion and even the press itself are being transformed from vertical top-down institutions, in which leaders speak down at the masses, to horizontal institutions, in which the masses speak for themselves.
The world saw this at its most primitive and powerful level when millions took to the streets in 1989 to fill the public squares of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and East Berlin to finally cast off the smothering curtain of communism and end the Cold War. At a more sophisticated level, changes in technology and mass culture have altered the way in which we communicate one to another. Personal computers, the Internet, fax machines, radio call-in programs, television talk shows and desktop publishing empower and invite us to join the fray.
Freedom of the press is something that most Americans think of as "belonging" to journalists. But we are all the press now.
The democratization of the press is not something new to the First Amendment tradition; it is rather a return to the roots. The framers of the Bill of Rights lived in a time of raucous democracy, in which pamphleteers and street-corner orators engaged in a truly public discourse, a discourse that ultimately gave us the Constitution we still cherish many generations later.
Consider again the bromide that with speech comes responsibility. If now we are all in a sense "members of the press," how shall we choose to exercise this power? The question is not what we are allowed to do under the First Amendment, but should do. A central challenge to us as a culture is to bring our wild-eyed individualism into balance with our desire to create a decent and humane national community. A starting point is simply learning to talk to one another as mature citizens.
Take, for example, the contemporary "electronic soapbox." There are two kinds of talk shows on radio and television, the ones in which people scream at each other, and the ones where there is some attempt at thoughtful and civil engagement. The first type of show touts itself as a robust example of vibrant public discourse, but this is a fraudulent masquerade. Most Americans in the real public have been taught not to behave that way, and screams and slogans do not make discourse.
In contrast to these shouting fests, which are really more about entertainment than journalism, there are the many examples of the conscientious press working as a watchdog, as the eyes and ears of the people, and as a forum for promoting a sense of community. This last function is too often overlooked.
From local newspapers and broadcast stations to electronic bulletin boards to national media outlets, the press, at its best, assists the disparate groups that comprise our culture to share a sense of common identity and purpose. As much as we may love to pillory the mass media, this community-building function is essential if the centrifugal forces of modern life are not to tear us apart. The professional press translates for us, enabling us to speak to one another.
This is something at which we all need practice. We must learn to speak across our specialties and enclaves. I am a law teacher, and I constantly harangue my students to speak and write English, not "lawyer." Academics and professionals once thought it part of their social responsibility to share ideas with the larger culture. Too often today, however, they traverse a self-contained world of professional conferences and journals, speaking in jargon understandable only to themselves. Worse, they often seem to feel no need or obligation to make their thoughts accessible or relevant to the practical world of free enterprise and politics in which the rest of the nation struggles, day by day, to make a little progress.
As our language becomes fractured, our community becomes fragmented. As a people, we need to rededicate ourselves to speaking across "party lines" - to learn to genuinely communicate, in two-way conversation, race to race, religion to religion, party to party, profession to profession. The interlocking freedoms protected by the First Amendment are, in the end, about communication and connection, challenging us to speak, and chiding us to listen.
Rodney A. Smolla is a law professor at the College of William and Mary and a fellow of the Annenberg Washington Program in Communication Policy Studies.
by CNB