Tag: Free speech

Bush boosts Michael Moore

You can’t make this stuff up. The Bush administration has given a huge boost to Michael Moore’s upcoming documentary, “SiCKO,” by investigating a trip he took to Cuba. The New York Times reports that Moore may have violated the travel ban by taking sick 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba in order to seek free medical care.

As a publicity stunt, what Moore did pales in comparison to what the White House has done for him. Moore’s having great fun with it on his Web site, and, as this Google News search shows, the administration’s attempt to intimidate Moore has garnered worldwide attention.

What the Bushies seem not to understand is that if you’re going to attempt to exercise Putin-like controls over your critics, you need Putin-like powers. Fortunately, they never quite succeeded in getting those powers — although they certainly tried.

Online speech, offline punishment

Over the past year or so, students have become increasingly savvy about the downside of Facebook and MySpace. In talking with my students and in reading their stories for journalism classes, it’s clear that they know if they post photos of themselves drunk and/or in compromising positions, potential employers will somehow find out about it.

What they may not know is that college and university officials themselves may be cruising around Facebook — and going after students who’ve posted content they don’t like. In the current Phoenix, Greg Lukianoff and Will Creeley report that students have been singled out and punished for posting content that is obnoxious and racially insensitive, but that nevertheless is protected by the First Amendment. They write:

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the speech codes, censorship, and double standards of the culture-wars heyday of the ’80s and ’90s are alive and kicking, and they are now colliding with the latest explosion of communication technology. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the largest battleground yet for student free speech. Whatever campus administrators’ intentions (and they are often mixed), students need to know that online jokes, photos, and comments can get them in hot water, no matter how effusively their schools claim to respect free speech. The long arm of campus officialdom is reaching far beyond the bounds of its buildings and grounds and into the shadowy realm of cyberspace.

Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and Creeley is a top official with FIRE.

The Dixie Chicks and Clear Channel

The Boston Globe editorial page today runs a curious correction: “An editorial Tuesday misidentified the radio chain that pulled the Dixie Chicks from its country stations’ playlists in 2003. It was Cumulus Media, not Clear Channel Communications.” The editorial is linked from the correction.

Well, now. The way the Globe first had it is certainly the way I remember it. What happened?

To begin with, you will not be surprised to learn that Clear Channel itself loudly pats itself on the back for not doing what a lot of us think it did. Here’s what the corporate Web site says in part:

MYTH: Clear Channel radio stations banned air-play of the Dixie Chicks after political comments.

FACT: The radio company that banned the Dixie Chicks was Cumulus Media, not Clear Channel. That company also hosted the CD-smashing ceremony outside its Atlanta, Ga. headquarters, during which bulldozers crushed the group’s CDs. Simon Renshaw, the Dixie Chicks’ manager, told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in July that Clear Channel Communications did not ban the group’s music and had received a “bad rap.”

According to the blog Facing South, published by the Institute for Southern Studies, Cumulus‘ behavior was indeed more outrageous than Clear Channel’s — so much so that U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once warned the company that its actions were turning it into a symbol of everything that’s wrong with media consolidation.

Still, it’s not as though Clear Channel stations never banned the Dixie Chicks. In March 2003, two Clear Channel stations in Jacksonville, Fla., dropped the Chicks following Natalie Maines’ “we’re ashamed” remarks about President Bush at a concert in London. So did the Clear Channel station in San Antonio, Texas, where the company is headquartered. And that’s just based on my quick Googling this morning.

Clear Channel also organized pro-war, anti-Dixie Chicks rallies across the country, featuring the loathsome Glenn Beck. And this Wikipedia entry strikes me as a pretty balanced summation of the charges against the company:

There is speculation that Clear Channel … may have directed their stations to [ban the Dixie Chicks], but the company states this was solely the work of local station managers, DJs, and angry fans. Some critics of Clear Channel, including the editors of Rock and Rap Confidential, say otherwise, claiming that Clear Channel executives, in a bid to gain support for various policies they were pushing in Washington, instigated the boycott among its country music stations to send a message to other musicians that criticizing President George Bush’s administration could hurt their careers through reduced airplay, etc.

It looks to me as though the original Globe editorial was true but not accurate. The correction is accurate but not true. Will the third time be the charm?

An allegation of intimidation

Lucas Mearian, a reporter for the trade publication Computerworld, writes on his blog that the John Hancock insurance company is using legal threats in an attempt to intimidate him and his editors into disappearing a story. Mearian writes:

Today, I received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a lawyer with John Hancock asking me if I’d obtained a legal release to post a story about the company. “No,” I said. I was then told by a rather zealous attorney that I must immediately take the story off our Web site.

Mearian comes back with the First Amendment, which is a very good comeback indeed.

Note to John Hancock’s lawyers: I’d be happy to post your response.

A lot more than inconvenient

In what reads like a culture-war parody, the Washington Post reports that a father who’s an evangelical Christian has intimidated public-school officials into not showing Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

What really makes this story special is that the father, Frosty Hardison, who lives in the Seattle suburbs, actually accepts the reality of global warming — with a twist. The Post’s Blaine Harden writes, “The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is ‘one of the signs’ of Jesus Christ’s imminent return for Judgment Day.”

So even though Hardison refers to “An Inconvenient Truth” as “that propagandist Al Gore video,” it appears his problem isn’t with Gore’s findings (which amount to nothing more than the consensus scientific view) but, rather, that Gore thinks we should do something.

Yet Hardison won. The screening was canceled, and the teacher has been told she’ll receive a disciplinary letter for not seeking permission to show a “controversial” film.

I’m not familiar with Hardison’s community, Federal Way, Wash., but it’s probably safe to say that it has more in common with Cambridge and Ann Arbor, Mich., than it does with Lubbock, Texas, or Tupelo, Miss. It is incredible — and incredibly disturbing — that school officials would cave in to the idiosyncratic religious views of a few outspoken parents.

The public schools’ mission, after all, is to teach science. If that tiny minority of scientists who deny the existence of human-caused global warming wants to speak up, well fine. It’s possible that they’re right. But Hardison’s complaint has nothing to do with science. If he can’t handle reality-based education, let him home-school his seven kids.

By the way, I know I’m late to this. Check out Google Blogsearch for what others have been saying.

The Pentagon’s spies

For some time now, the ACLU has been trying to determine the extent to which the Pentagon has spied on antiwar groups. For instance, in my annual Muzzle Awards roundup for the Phoenix last Fourth of July, I noted that ACLU chapters in Maine and Rhode Island had joined efforts to force the Defense Department to turn over records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Well, yesterday we learned a whole lot more. Bloomberg reports that 2,821 organizations or events involving Americans were logged into a database of terrorist threats, known as TALON, as of December 2005 — and that 186 of those involved antiwar protests organized by the Quakers and other groups.

The ACLU observes:

The Pentagon’s misuse of the TALON database must be viewed in the wider context of increased government surveillance of U.S. citizens. With the help of phone companies, the National Security Agency has been tapping phones and reading email without a warrant. The FBI has gathered information about peace activists, and recruited confidential informants inside groups like Greenpeace and PETA. All of these actions are part of a broad pattern of the executive branch using “national security” as an excuse for encroaching on the privacy and free speech rights of Americans without adequate oversight.

You can read the ACLU press release here, and the full report (in PDF) here.

Ironically, the ACLU news comes at the same time that we learn the Bush administration has worked out a deal with the FISA court over the NSA’s wiretapping program. Don’t you feel better?

Muzzling Valerie Plame

The never-ending story of Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA operative who was exposed by columnist Robert Novak in the summer of 2003, has taken another odd turn.

According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the CIA has blocked a book that Plame wants to write on the grounds that it would endanger national security. Incredibly, Plame would not even be allowed to write that she once worked for the CIA, though hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists have reported exactly that.

No doubt the so-called Plame scandal is a big, honking mess. Originally some critics of President Bush (including me) believed the White House had leaked to Novak, Matt Cooper, Judith Miller and others in order to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had proclaimed in a celebrated New York Times op-ed piece that his skeptical report on Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger had been ignored.

That theory became less likely when we learned last August — from Isikoff and David Corn of The Nation — that the original leaker was Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state who’d been an internal opponent of the war in Iraq. Nor has it helped that Joe Wilson has proven less than credible (see these Daily Howler posts). Yes, Dick Cheney’s former chief aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, faces charges for his alleged role in outing Plame. But at this point it’s hard to believe we’ll ever get to the bottom of this.

But why censor Valerie Plame? No, a former CIA employee should not be allowed to reveal secrets if doing so would make us less safe. But this seems aimed more at stopping a book that would prove embarrassing to the Bush administration — and it calls to mind this piece of lunacy, from just a few weeks ago.

The price of censorship

Mockery, in this case. We can only be thankful that the Bush administration’s attempts at silencing its critics are so ineptly ludicrous. Like Moe Howard, President Bush’s dictatorial tendencies are consistently undermined by his inability to enforce his will.

Today the New York Times publishes the redacted version of an op-ed written by former government officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, the husband-and-wife team that was censored even though they insist there is no classified information in their essay. Leverett and Mann’s article, complete with blacked-out sections, is here; their introduction is here.

The longer essay on which their op-ed is reportedly based remains online.

As that noted civil libertarian Curly Howard would say, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”