Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
Not to get into the details, but there is at least a plausibility argument that “speech should be free only when it is free”. If you have to pay someone (or lots of someones) to speak on your behalf, why should your use of them as a mouthpiece be protected? If the people doing the actual speaking (or broadcasting) genuinely agreed with you, and thought it was worth saying, you wouldn’t have to pay them to say it...
Another, amusing, point is that the whole mechanism of broadcast licensing is a massive restriction of freedom of speech. True freedom to speak via broadcast would allow everyone to flood the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously, drowning each other out in interference. That would destroy a public good of course, but once you admit that it is OK to restrict free speech to preserve a public good, you lose the whole “free speech is absolute, and must be protected” argument.
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it’s OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it’s OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like “the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I.” Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide… though it still doesn’t allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
Quite true: If I genuinely care about the “differential suppression of ideas” then I will want to avoid suppression of the ideas of the poor by crowding them out of public discourse e.g. by flooding the airwaves with the ideas of the rich. There are more types of suppression to worry about than legal suppression.
However, this is now getting overly political, and off-topic...
That would probably fall under time or manner restrictions. Most free speech absolutists mean that speech should be free in a way that is independent of content. Time or manner restrictions are generally seen as ok by even most self-identified free speech advocates. The danger and ideological objection is to content based restrictions.
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
Well since even printing presses aren’t free, that would destroy freedom of the press even in its original meaning.
There are other ways to solve this problem, e.g., treat spectrum as a property right and interference as trespass. In fact the (US) courts were moving in that direction before the 1934 federal power grad.
On printing presses not being “free” either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists’/editors’ discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) because no-one is paid to say anything in particular. So the journalists say what they agree with and think is worth saying. It pattern matches to an instance of free speech that we think is worth protecting.
2) Funding comes from a tyrant who owns the whole business, and uses it as a propaganda rag. He orders the journalists to print what he tells them, whether or not they agree with it, whether or not they believe it. If they don’t, they get fired. If they tell anyone what happened, they are sued under non-disclosure agreements.
This doesn’t seem like free speech in either sense (the speakers are being coerced), and doesn’t pattern-match to anything obviously worth protecting.
Cases where the funding comes from advertising look a bit more interesting. An initial pattern-match is that the ads themselves aren’t free speech that we particularly want to protect (outright lies about Snakeoil or distortions about competitor products can be restricted by an advertising standards body). Whereas any news or editorial comment is protected free speech, provided it is cleanly separated from the advertising, and the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content. If a particular story was run because the advertiser demanded it, that isn’t protected. And so on.
On your other remark about spectrum being a property right: possible, but notice that it is still a massive restriction on free speech (by rights of property now, rather than by legislative censorship). And it shows up some of the problems with broad property rights; seems too similar to making air a property right, with trespass for anyone who breathes it without the owner’s permission.
Please note that “the advertiser doesn’t have any control of its content” doesn’t always hold: advertisers have the power to blackmail editors/newspapers with “if you publish that paper that attacks us, we won’t put advertising in your columns anymore”. They can exert a form of censorship, and induce self-censorship reactions “no, we won’t publish that article about the working conditions in company X, because company X is paying us a lot in advertising and we don’t want to upset them” even without company X having to do any explicit blackmail. This is not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, this is why advertising funding is an “interesting” case and falls between the extremes. One solution is “firewalls” between the department selling advertising space and the editorial team, so that explicit threats of blackmail can’t get through. The paper might need to show evidence of such firewalls to claim protection for pieces which are labelled as comment but look suspiciously-like paid-for advertising.
What is most difficult here is “self-censorship” whereby the editor knows that if he runs a particular story, then the advertising will dry up, and the paper risks going out of business. But this is not in principle different from dilemmas on readership such as “If I run this shocking story about what our troops are up to abroad, then I’ll sound unpatriotic, lose readers, and go out of business”.
There is self-censorship in almost all speech contexts (“If I say that, my friends will think I’m an idiot”, “If I post that, it will get down voted”). But the important point is that what emerges through the self-censorship filter is protected. The intuition here is that we don’t want to impose even more filters.
Or even go one step further: a group of people threaten to boycott companies that advertise on shows saying politically incorrect things.