The Peculiar Case Of The First Amendment Absolutist As A Victim Of His Own Position

Yes, I do mean that the current understanding of the First Amendment is seriously wrong if democracy is the desired outcome and will have to be changed.  "First Amendment Absolutism" in reality, instead of the imaginations of those who spout the phrase, turns out to benefit the wealthy owners of the media it frees from fact checking.   "First Amendment absolutism" is a blind faith that elevates, among other things, the ability of our well-entrenched, wealthy establishment to dominate the media that has a real, political effect and to use it to sell lies that benefit them to people who are unable to fact check to find out that they are being sold lies that disadvantage and endanger them.   They are left unable to cast an informed vote and if they go to the not inconsiderable bother of discovering the truth, they are in danger of the election being decided by an effective margin of voters who have been successfully seduced into believe those lies.  The lines turning what is civic necessity, finding the truth in a tsunami of lies thrown at the country by the lying, corporate media, turning that necessity into a matter of individual responsibility while letting the mass media which lies off the hook is exactly what the "First Amendment absolutist" line does.

Allowing the rich and powerful to lie and deceive for their own benefit through the loudspeakers that the media is has proven to be as big a danger to democracy as an invading foreign army and far more dangerous than subversive infiltration from abroad.   The lesson taught in this area in the past two centuries is that media selling lies can get large numbers of people killed, the selling of climate change denial shows that these people can successfully endanger us all with those lies.  And the Republican-fascist success in politics over the past half-century, accelerating in the past 40 years, even as Republican policies have been a disaster for the majority of us, prove that that flaky theory worked up on behalf of the mass media by lawyers and law scribblers in their pay proves that.

One of my favorite examples of what happens when such an absolutist meets the reality of what they advocate is the case of the journalist and First Amendment activist, the late John Seigenthaler, among other things a fixture at "The First Amendment Center" and an adviser to Robert Kennedy, a special assistant to the Attorney General under him, one who was beaten up by white supremacists when he was working to enforce anti-segregation orders of the Supreme Court.  His later career was as the founding member of the "First Amendment Center" and a promoter of the particular interpretation of that amendment I'm criticizing. 

When some anonymous "editor" at Wikipedia inserted a "biography" of him accusing him of, among other things,  being involved in the murders of both John and Robert Kennedy, this great figure of "freedom of speech, press" suddenly found he didn't like the results of that so much when he was its target.   He found the Wikipedia establishment sluggish if not reluctant to remove the slur against him and, to his even greater rage, that the "information" that Wikipedia included for many months was picked up by such other online media as automatically repeat the contents of Wikipedia - machine "intelligence" doesn't seem to have a capacity for fact checking.   I would imagine that Seigenthaler realized through his belated personal experience that a freedom to lie could impinge on HIS reputation and he wined that online media wasn't subject to the libel laws, the very same libel laws that his ideology had advocated the more traditional media be freed from.   Though in Seigenthaler's case, there was little chance that he would suffer any real damage from it, as a well known fixture of the establishment there was no chance he was going to be discriminated against or fired on the basis of outrageous lies.   He would certainly not suffer any ill effects due to lies told about him as a white male. 

It is a massive irony that when "The First Amendment Center" wanted to find an authoritative voice to represent a danger to the Sullivan Decision, it went to one of its major beneficiaries,  Antonin Scalia, appointed by another beneficiary of it, Ronald Reagan.

“Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia continued. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’ But the living constitutionalists on the Supreme Court, the Warren Court, simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea any more.’”

Scalia was using the case as an illustration, and there’s no immediate likelihood that Times v. Sullivan will be overturned. But the justice’s comments serve as a reminder that the protections afforded by that decision are not engraved on a monument — and America’s news media can’t afford to take them for granted.

Well, it's true that up till the time of the Sullivan Decision politicians who were lied about by the media could sue.  They didn't all that often and they didn't always win, but, then, the media used to be more careful about not publishing lies before the decision.  The ability to sue had a real effect in preventing the sort of regime of lies that has ensued.  The media might not be accused of being honest before Sullivan but they were less dishonest than what we're left with, today with the 24-7 cabloids and hate-talk radio setting the ever lowering standards of what they say on-air to millions, to be quoted in everything from their rival cabloids to the upper reaches of the NPRs and New York Times level of the media.  

But consider the massive irony that it is the Scalias who oppose equality, who promoted white-male supremacy and who have nearly uniformly favored the wealthy and their corporations who came to dominate through lie and slander campaigns in the mass media.  The period of Republican and now Republican-fascist domination is a product of the media which is freed to lie in the interests of its owners.  

The mass media put the movie and TV actor, Ronald Reagan, into office through a systematic years and now decades long campaign of vilification of liberals and the undermining and mockery of the entirely more qualified Jimmy Carter.  They covered up for the ever erratic and, eventually, senile Reagan.   That kind of "freedom of the press" to lie on behalf of right wing politicians to the benefit of oligarchs is the actual product of the Sullivan Decision and its line of decisions.  

In the case of Seigenthaler, his fame as the man who was beaten up by white supremacists, it is a pathetic irony that his professional-ideological stance is what produced the very media that is now campaigning to put a overt white-supremacist in the White House.  It is more than ironic that an ideological group which cites Scalia as a danger to press freedom is in favor of the very press which used its privilege to lie to put him on the court.  Antonin Scalia was a total opponent of equality for those without money and power, those who were not white males, his career was dedicated to protecting the privileges of rich, white men.  If you want to see how such a thing might not have been noticed by the "free speech-free press" advocates, I would suggest you look at the pictures of the white male "experts" listed at The First Amendment Center, a joint project of the Newseum and Vanderbilt University, one of the Southern ivy-equivalent institutions, the kind of folks Scalia served. 

This is the thing that I held that liberals were suckers for.