by Steven Hill
Free Press Contributor
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked the part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 concerned with indecent material on the Internet, First Amendment advocates can all breathe a sigh of relief.Or can we?
The parts of the Telecommunications Act that remain are far more damaging to the First Amendment than the subsection known as the Communication Decency Act, which the high court ruled unconstitutional.
Taken as a whole, the Telecommunications Act has been a kind of "free trade" agreement for the corporate media. The bill deregulated the telecommunications industry and made takeovers and mergers even easier. Disney's subsequent takeover of ABC created the world's largest media company. Rupert Murdoch has been slowly adding to his media empire. Many experts predict the Telecommunications Act will inevitably result in select gang of media conglomerates.
Why then, has so much of the protest and litigation focused singularly on the Communication Decency Act?
The media giants love to manipulate anti-censorship arguments.
The Turner Broadcasting System used an anti-censorship argument in Turner Broadcasting System v. Federal Communications Commission in its case against a 1992 federal law that requires cable systems to set aside up to one third of their channels for local broadcasts. Anti-censorship arguments have also been used to fight set-asides for minority-owned businesses of frequencies for cellular communication services, to fight limitations on how much frequency any existing cellular company can control in a given service area, to fight campaign finance reform laws and restrictions on commercial speech and advertising, and to sue "truth in advertising" laws that prohibit political campaigns from knowingly making false statements.
By misusing anti-censorship arguments, the wealthiest media companies are grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of an unregulated market. For huge media conglomerates, anti-censorship policies are the opposite of anti-trust policies.
So, before we celebrate too wildly the Supreme Court's acceptance of an anti-censorship argument to strike down the Communications Decency Act, we better ask ourselves: have we won the battle only to contribute to losing the war?
Effective speech in the modern age is not free. In fact, it's quite expensive, and very few can afford it. Those with the most money inevitably end up with the most speech. Certainly one of the goals of the First Amendment should be to enhance - in the words of free speech champion Justice William Brennan - a "robust public debate" of significant social issues.
The robust-debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers - like Disney, NBC, or Rupert Murdoch - in order to give others a chance to speak. Or at the very least, it's necessary to turn up the volume of others who can't be heard, with policies like the Fairness Doctrine, an amplified public broadcasting system, the National Endowment for the Arts, and set-asides.
Who but the government has the capacity to provide such access? If the government isn't allowed to regulate corporate behavior - media or otherwise - who can? Yet this is exactly the type of regulation that the Telecommunications Act's anti-censorship policy cuts off at the knees.
In order to be useful in the modern age, the First Amendment must be able to distinguish between the "cheap" speech of most individuals and small institutions, and the "wealthy" speech of multinational corporations and rich individuals. But the anti-censorship approach treats corporations as individuals, and treats volume as content. It has a single fundamentalist standard for the First Amendment that seeks only to handcuff the government in matters of speech. It doesn't recognize that market forces can also be an enemy of free speech.
The entire Telecommunications Act should have been opposed, but not because the government should never act a referee in matters of speech. Rather, it should have been opposed as an infringement on the public discourse, which is increasingly being dominated by multinational media corporations and market forces. This would have required a more nuanced and sophisticated attack than a civil libertarian anti-censorship argument can muster.
If we are to imbue the First Amendment with democratic and egalitarian values, we will have to divest ourselves of the naive notion that Big Brother comes only in the guise of government or law enforcement bureaucrats.
Big Corporation is also watching you, and trying to gobble up all the public speech it can. And it is using anti-censorship arguments to further its goals. We should be wary about helping to fashion a legal hammer that will be used to bludgeon us over the head.
Steven Hill is a San Francisco Internet consultant and a former program director of an Internet Service Provider. He formerly lived in Seattle and worked on proportional representation issues.
Eric Nelson
Parish, whose main pieces in Eat the State! are reprinted in the Stranger, puts his politics up front. His staffbox proclaims, "We want an end to poverty, exploitation, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, environmental destruction, television, and large ugly buildings, and we want it fucking now."
But Parish also has a nose for news. He has been one of the few outlets in town to critically cover a dangerous scheme at Hanford whereby a bunch of promoters seek to restart a test reactor to produce tritium for the government under the guise of also producing medical isotopes for cancer treatments. Local pols, including Sen. Patty Murray and Governor Gary Locke have jumped all over this hare-brained scheme, and Parrish has called them on it.
With slick production by Lance Scott, and toons by Tom Tomorrow, Eat the State! is a great item on the local media menu. Subscribe at PO Box 85541, Seattle WA 98145. Back issues on the Web: www.scn.org/news/ets.
"Were trying to pull our resources together and have a more effective presence," reports organizer Eric Galatas, who also helps produce Citizen Vagrom. (Check out local video stores for a free rental of Vagrom's Freewaves tape.)
Galatas just returned from a New York alternative media conference, Freeing the Local Media. Representatives from major North American cities, South America and Australia knocked heads on how to form an international network that ties together local indepedent media.
Organizers from the Los Angeles Alternative Media Network are even thinking about a satellite network.
More down to earth, said Galatas, are attempts in Seattle to link local grass-roots groups through internet sites and media development. One such attempt is the Rain Terminals sponsored by the Speakeasy, now in about 10 cafes around town. Speakeasy hopes to have 28 terminals by the end of the year, providing free net access and ports through which local organizations can get the message out.
The Free Press
Eat the State!
It may not go down with much of sugar-coating, but local activist and media meister Geov Parish has put out over 40 issues of Eat the State!, an eight-page newsletter with trenchant commentary on a range of political and economic issues. ETS has a great blend of pissed-off, sarcastic writing with polished writing and layout.
Indie Media Coalition
One and a half years after it formed, the Seattle Independent Media Coalition is gathering steam. Last month the coalition sponsored Freewaves, where local indie media types showed their wares and gave the usual rant against big media consolidation.
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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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