Editorials

This week Berkeley is remembering the grand excitement of the Free Speech Movement, at a time, 40 years later, when a sizable number of movement veterans are still around to reminisce. I wasn’t here in 1964 myself, so what’s entertaining for me is finding out which of my current friends and acquaintances who still live here took part in the action, considering who they are now. Landlords, teachers, corporate lobbyists, lawyers, stock market investors, gardeners, small business owners, farmers, political organizers, librarians…their jobs, if they still have them, run the gamut, as do their experiences over the last 40 years. What was remarkable about the FSM is that it swept up a broad cross-section of students who understood that it was a bad idea for a state university to ban free expression of ideas from its campus.  

It’s a week for nostalgia, but there are still plenty of live controversies today about what constitutes appropriate expression of ideas. In particular, there are two topics that can always raise a ruckus in any gathering, hate speech and heckling.  

It’s become popular in Europe, and even now in some parts of the United States, to ban what’s called “hate speech.” It’s a concept that’s loosely defined, which is one reason it’s a problem, but it most often is applied to speech which denigrates by allusion to race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual preference. European advocates of banning such speech refer to Europe’s experience with the rise of the Nazis to justify their position. In the United States, our tradition, bolstered by the First Amendment though often violated, has been that free expression of ideas in a democracy is a safety valve which lets us know when trouble is brewing. It’s one reason the Nazis never got much of a toe-hold here. 

Many universities, particularly private ones, have lately been seduced by the European concept, in the interest of maintaining order on campus, but it’s a bad idea. If hating is going on, better we should all know about. Just shutting up nasty people doesn’t put an end to whatever nefarious action plans they may be contemplating, and in fact it makes it harder for the rest of us to combat their influence with effective counter-speech. And it’s easy for those in power to slide over from banning “hate speech” to banning any form of expression of ideas which is annoying someone. Just last week we got a report that the Berkeley police, on orders from above, had been ticketing people who honked their horns to show support as they passed a union demonstration.  

The constitutional analysis of First Amendment rights often has two parts: the speaker’s right to talk and the listener’s right to hear. The second part is what’s the subject of active debate when heckling is the topic. Our letters column today has a typical expression of the anti-heckling point of view. The writer notes that a number of odious right-wing speakers (not his characterization, of course) have lately appeared on campus, standing at a podium in a publicly funded building, with a substantial sound system at their disposal, and, horrors, people who don’t like them have shouted insults from the audience, presumably without benefit of microphone. Some have even chanted outside the building. Now, if the hecklers came with their own PA system, one so powerful that they could drown out the David Horowitzs and the Michelle Malkins, the whiners might have something of a case, but that’s not what’s been happening. Before Malkin spoke on campus a couple of weeks ago, her sponsors, the California Patriot magazine and the College Young Republicans, put out inflammatory press releases drooling over her support of racial profiling and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Despite their best efforts, not much happened. Malkin exercised her constitutionally protected right to hate speech and a sizable number of hecklers loudly expressed their countervailing views. 

She came, she was heckled, and she left. Some newspapers believed the hype and covered the talk looking for excitement, but they reported on what turned out to be a non-event. We didn’t bother. In our view, that kind of exchange is what should be happening regularly on campuses, and is not news.  

Today’s letter writer also implies that a choleric candidate who trashed a few papers constituted a serious threat to freedom of the press. No, speaking for the press, that’s not the biggest problem we face. The biggest problems that newspapers face today are economic: on the macro level, concentration of ownership in a few super-rich mega-corps like Rupert Murdoch’s empire, and on the micro level, here in Berkeley, the refusal of some small-time merchants to advertise in the Planet because they wish some of our news stories could be suppressed or they don’t like our cartoons. Which is, of course, the signal to cue up the usual tune, A.G. Liebling’s signature refrain, frequently quoted, often misquoted, but still true: "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one" and can also afford to pay the operating expenses if advertisers don’t approve of what they say. 

M