Copyright © 1999 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Free speech

Public to First Amendment: Drop dead

By Dan Kennedy

Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the news media have "too much freedom." Thirty-two percent disagree with the proposition that "newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of a story." And 48 percent say that journalists should not be allowed to report government secrets.

Those are just a few of the depressing findings published by the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center in a new report, State of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment Center, based at Vanderbilt University, surveyed 1001 adults between February 26 and March 24 -- the immediate aftermath of the impeachment drama. Indeed, Paul McMasters, the Freedom Forum's First Amendment ombudsman, notes in an essay accompanying the survey that Clinton-Lewinsky fatigue was almost certainly responsible for a turn toward the negative since 1997, when the first survey was taken.

But though McMasters is surely right, the survey also contains ample proof that many Americans oppose basic First Amendment freedoms whenever those freedoms threaten comfortable middle-class sensibilities -- even when the news media are removed from the equation.

For instance, 57 percent of those surveyed said that public display of art that some "might be offensive to others" should not be allowed. Eighty percent said that people should not be allowed "to burn or deface the American flag as a political statement" -- a basic right the Supreme Court has upheld twice. Moreover, it's not just cultural conservatives who oppose the First Amendment: 78 percent said that people should not be allowed to use words in public "that might be offensive to racial groups," suggesting that the forces of political correctness have had a censorious influence as well.

The survey is surely bad news for the press, but it's worse than that. What emerges is a picture of intellectually lazy Americans giving thumbs-up or thumbs-down to different forms of speech purely on the basis of whether they agree with the opinions being expressed. This even extends to the subject matter of demonstrations: only 25 percent would ban pro- and anti-abortion rallies, but 52 percent would ban protests by "militia groups, white supremacists, skinheads, or Nazis."

As Nat Hentoff put it in the title of his 1992 book, Free Speech for Me -- But Not for Thee. Given that the First Amendment's strength can only be measured by its effectiveness at protecting the most loathsome and offensive forms of expression, it would appear that, absent a few courageous judges, freedom of speech would be entombed as a museum piece for pious patriots, trotted out occasionally for civic worship but stripped of all meaning and vitality.

The full text of State of the First Amendment can be found on the Web at http://www.freedomforum.org/first/sofa/1999/welcome.asp.