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defrogThere’s been talk about the Supreme Court’s ruling on the First Amendment right of Westboro Baptist Church to protest funerals.
There’s also been talk about the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) being pressured to remove a rule banning broadcast journalists from reporting false or misleading news – supposedly so that a new Canadian news channel called Sun TV with connections to right-wing PM Stephen Harper can start doing for Harper and his followers what Fox News did for the GOP. (The CRTC has since decided not to remove the rule.)
The common thread: free speech limits.
Specifically: (1) do we allow dingbats to protest funerals so long as they’re not directly interfering with the ceremony, and (2) do we allow news organizations to make shit up and pass it off as reality?
The second one is more complicated than it looks because the CRTC issue is actually the product of a 1992 Canadian Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that Ernst Zundel had a free-speech right to tell people the Holocaust never happened, even if it isn’t true. Because of that decision, some govt officials have been petitioning the CRTC since at least 1996 to re-visit its rule about broadcasting false info.
Progressives have framed the CRTC case as a blatant admission by conservatives that Fox can’t operate anywhere that has a rule against false or misleading journalism. Reading the actual news stories (rather than RFK Jr’s HuffPo piece), I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening there, but it does call into question the social benefit of giving broadcast journalism outfits the same leniency as crackpot Holocaust deniers when it comes to truthiness.
That’s a hard argument to make (without looking like a blithering idiot, anyway). On the other hand, it’s complicated, of course – for example, do broadcast journalists have a free speech right to do reports on crackpot Holocaust deniers that willfully spout batshit? And at what point do the “okay, so we got our facts wrong” or “we just reported what our source said so don’t blame us” loopholes no longer hold water?
Anyway, now that the US has swapped objective news for highly subjective news where accuracy is tailored to serve specific sociopolitical biases, it’s probably a moot point.
As for the WBC case, I confess I half-expected it to go the other way – not because of the batshit content itself, but because of the funeral angle. The Supremes have limited speech for all sorts of reasons (many of which I don’t agree with, but a few of which I do – libel slander, fraud, inciting violence, etc), usually in the name of a public good outweighing the 1A’s importance. By most reasonable standards, protesting funerals arguably crosses a line.
On the other hand, as mentioned before, if the WBC had stormed the church or the cemetery and actively disrupted the service rather than doing it from a distance, the justices might have ruled differently.
The upside is that it doesn’t mean you now have to like the WBC or respect their stupid opinions. But the solution to the Phelps Batshit Train isn’t silencing them. It’s mercilessly mocking them.
Laughing at you not with you,
This is dF
There’s also been talk about the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) being pressured to remove a rule banning broadcast journalists from reporting false or misleading news – supposedly so that a new Canadian news channel called Sun TV with connections to right-wing PM Stephen Harper can start doing for Harper and his followers what Fox News did for the GOP. (The CRTC has since decided not to remove the rule.)
The common thread: free speech limits.
Specifically: (1) do we allow dingbats to protest funerals so long as they’re not directly interfering with the ceremony, and (2) do we allow news organizations to make shit up and pass it off as reality?
The second one is more complicated than it looks because the CRTC issue is actually the product of a 1992 Canadian Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that Ernst Zundel had a free-speech right to tell people the Holocaust never happened, even if it isn’t true. Because of that decision, some govt officials have been petitioning the CRTC since at least 1996 to re-visit its rule about broadcasting false info.
Progressives have framed the CRTC case as a blatant admission by conservatives that Fox can’t operate anywhere that has a rule against false or misleading journalism. Reading the actual news stories (rather than RFK Jr’s HuffPo piece), I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening there, but it does call into question the social benefit of giving broadcast journalism outfits the same leniency as crackpot Holocaust deniers when it comes to truthiness.
That’s a hard argument to make (without looking like a blithering idiot, anyway). On the other hand, it’s complicated, of course – for example, do broadcast journalists have a free speech right to do reports on crackpot Holocaust deniers that willfully spout batshit? And at what point do the “okay, so we got our facts wrong” or “we just reported what our source said so don’t blame us” loopholes no longer hold water?
Anyway, now that the US has swapped objective news for highly subjective news where accuracy is tailored to serve specific sociopolitical biases, it’s probably a moot point.
As for the WBC case, I confess I half-expected it to go the other way – not because of the batshit content itself, but because of the funeral angle. The Supremes have limited speech for all sorts of reasons (many of which I don’t agree with, but a few of which I do – libel slander, fraud, inciting violence, etc), usually in the name of a public good outweighing the 1A’s importance. By most reasonable standards, protesting funerals arguably crosses a line.
On the other hand, as mentioned before, if the WBC had stormed the church or the cemetery and actively disrupted the service rather than doing it from a distance, the justices might have ruled differently.
The upside is that it doesn’t mean you now have to like the WBC or respect their stupid opinions. But the solution to the Phelps Batshit Train isn’t silencing them. It’s mercilessly mocking them.
Laughing at you not with you,
This is dF
