The Problems With Free Speech

The Supreme Court reversed restrictions on corporate campaign finance reform, ignoring judicial precedent, striking down federal statute, one that had been based on honest-to-goodness bipartisanship, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. Corporations can now spend as much as they want to influence elections. So much for conservatives' disdain for 'judicial activism.' The five justices in the majority--who ostensibly are strict constructionists--were Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy. I expected better of Kennedy, for no particular reason other than I generally have positive feelings about the name Kennedy. The other four, obviously, were no surprise.

As if elections and campaigns weren't already too much about glamour and sound bites and money, rather than substance.

So, yes, that whole pesky Freedom of Speech question: how much does it apply to corporations? I guess, fundamentally, that is a tricky question, and I don't have enough knowledge of constitutional law to discuss adequately. Sounds like a good homework assignment, doesn't it? In the meantime, I can only go on my personal experiences with corporations. I worked for several years for a corporation. To be fair, they were very generous in compensating employees, and they donated money to all the right causes. But they have also been linked with companies and politicians engaged in environmentally-destructive mining practices out east, and more fundamentally, the core of what we were told to do was to create a perception in the customer's mind that they needed all kinds of accessories and data items (see "ringback tones", and yes, I am guilty of having ringback tones on my phone) that, realistically, they usually really didn't--I think this is why I have never been interested in an iPhone or the Droid--I got burned out on Smartphone Worship. Not that this practice is necessarily to be condemned, but it certainly does not make me trust a corporation's interest in any given election to closely parallel the public interest.

But corporations are not going to go away, and now they have even more clout and resources when it comes to campaigning, something that unions, for instance, generally won't be able to match. It's not as if we will be able to censor them, regardless of the validity of the claim of corporate free speech.

And perhaps we shouldn't try. Perhaps, if we are going to err, we should err on the side of more free speech, keeping in mind that corporate advertising is by nature going to involve illusions, lies, and misdirections.

It is easy to say, for instance, that a corporation like Fox "News" should be obliterated. With the abhorrent rhetoric coming from them, whether it is Britt Hume's patronizing "journalistic" statement that Tiger Woods should become a Christian, Rush Limbaugh's provocative statements regarding President Obama and Haiti, or Glenn Beck saying the President is racist, it is easy to despise them and--as The Daily Show demonstrates--it is easy to repudiate their claim of being fair and balanced, or even of being a news organization. That's the real problem with Fox: they have no intention of objectively reporting the news; they intend to make money, which is done by being provocative and entertaining. It may be unethical, but they have the right to broadcast the messages they want to broadcast, however repugnant those messages are.

So, then, what are we to do?

I think the healthiest path is to simply work to keep our perspectives out there, not let them be drowned out by corporate money-storms, and hopefully train people to think critically about where campaign ads are coming from and what special interests might be involved. It would not be an easy task, but perhaps it would be more useful and at least marginally less of a Sisyphean task than drowning out corporate influence all together.