The New York Times vs. Free Speech
The New York Times (NYT) is in the business of changing the American culture, especially what it perceives as really bad American habits. One of them is free speech.
In an article (Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech) the NYT tried to address the issue of the different approach that American judicial system takes on the important issue of free speech. The article is a marvelous study in the architecture of deceit. What is omitted and what is included create a much distorted picture of the issue at hand. It all starts in the first paragraph:
“A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.”
What is excluded from this paragraph, and the rest of the article, is any mention to what was “mocking and biting” in the Maclean’s article. It’s a very useful omission.
And it’s all more useful since the article proceeds to talk about racial epithets, Nazi regalia, the American Nazi Party marching in Skokie, Ill., Ku Klux Klan and other hateful stuff.
The reader is to infer that the content of the Maclean’s article came pretty close to all of the above anathemas. But if the NYT were to mention parts of the actual content of the Maclean’s article it would make the American case for free speech. Namely, that the effort to control or ban hateful speech ends up suppressing all speech no matter how well reasoned and defended.
Regulation and control of political speech by the state leads to its control by the governing elites and that’s what the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution tries to avoid. And this is precisely what the Maclean’s case proves.
Here is another paragraph from the NYT piece:
“But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.”
Someone should inform Mr. Lewis where the people who commit “acts of mass murder and terrorism” come from. Hint: countries with quite different traditions of free speech than the United States.
And here is another one:
“Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Association of Journalists, which have intervened in the case in support of the magazine, was measured in his criticism of the law forbidding hate speech.
‘Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.’”
We do know that the Canadian Association of Journalists does not subscribe to any sort “of marketplace of ideas.” We can see that in the writing. The uniform and compliant subscription to the command and control milieu of left-wing clichés proves as much.
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