Free Speech is a Myth in America

Dear Wendy

I appreciate your faith in the constitutionally protected principle of “Free Speech.” But I have a different view. Free speech is a myth, an opiate, in America. Free speech in and of itself is meaningless without an audience. Until the internet came along access to that audience was restricted by the owners of the access (newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, movies, etc.). In principle we all have free speech but we do not have the means to distribute that free speech. Thus free speech has been reduced to a commodity to be controlled by a few property owners who own the distribution rights.

When free speech is placed into the domain of property owners, these property owners decide, based upon their own privately held property interest and based upon their particular social class interest (which they call a community interest), what should be distributed for consideration by the masses of people. Rarely will these property owners allow a point of view disseminated that will fly in the face of their own narrowly defined interest. And when they do on those rare occasions, it is because a power struggle has broken out between rival groups within the elite which requires mobilizing the masses temporally in order to prevail in resolving the immediate issue.

When Bush was beating the drums for making war on Iraq, a public discussion in all the national newspapers about American imperialism emerged . As soon as the issue was resolved (in favor of Bush and the neocons) the talk about imperialism disappeared. Another more recent example revolves around the financial melt down. Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times (9/6/09) narrowly defined the failure to predict the banking collapse within the profession of economics as due to the ascendancy of the "Freshwater School of Economics" centered around the University of Chicago. But Krugman also pointed out that the "Saltwater Schools" located within east and west coast elite universities also failed to predict the coming disaster. He concluded that “...economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly.” The problem with Krugman’s analysis is his failure to spotlight schools of economics that had predicted the meltdown (e.g. Stagnation Theory centered around Monthly Review Magazine).

The overall long term effect of a small elite controlling the free speech distribution rights is to narrow the public debate. Issues are framed according to what is responsible debate and what lies outside the mainstream. Once an issue has been narrowly framed and widely distributed seeping down to every level in society, anyone attempting to open up and widen the debate within social institutions and at any institutional level are automatically, in a knee jerk fashion, looked upon with suspicion and quickly marginalized. Thus when you wanted to write an anti-Vietnam war piece for the Neff High School newspaper, the pro war/anti war debate had already been resolved in favor of war and the new debate concerned itself with what strategies should be implemented in order to win the war. By 1967 your antiwar views were considered irresponsible.

With the rise of the internet, an avalanche of free speech outlets circumventing the distribution privileges of private owners has emerged. People are able to speak to each other and do it in a wide variety of venues thereby opening up and widening the debate over the issues of the day. Since I don't know enough about how internet information is accessed and distributed I don't know how important the internet really is. Should the internet become a major player in debating important issues uncontrolled by the distribution elites then that would be a victory for real free speech. How long this will be allowed to continue? I suspect, should it become a threat to those elites, controls will be put in place and free speech will again become a controlled commodity, a myth in America.


November 2009