Free speech in a time of smears

Somehow, though, otherwise sophisticated and intelligent friends and family treated every word of the Palin e-mails as the gospel truth. They fretted about the Obama smears and laughed at the rubes who fell for them, but when a similar effort was directed their way they believed it, no questions asked, and then amplified and repeated the message. Sometime during this two-year odyssey of a campaign, people lost their minds and misplaced their capacities for rational thought. What they never lost was the ability to make themselves heard loudly, frequently and idiotically.

Any time falsehoods are spread this widely, there is an understandable temptation to restrict people's ability to smear their political opponents. The problem with that is where to draw the line - the question of what constitutes a "smear" and what a legitimate attack is hotly contested this year. Are Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-American tirades or an African witchhunter blessing Palin in bounds or inappropriate? With the rise of alternative media and our generation's particular reliance on the internet for news and political information (which is a very good thing most of the time), this problem is not going away any time soon.

As the target of most of the nastier attacks, Obama has been the candidate most willing to try to silence opponents. One of the low points of the campaign was Obama's attempt to have two St. Louis prosecutors and the sheriff of a St. Louis suburb who supported Obama level criminal libel charges against anyone who made what they decided was a false attack on their chosen candidate.

The officials eventually backed down after Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt (R) went nuclear on them, but the precedent is incredibly frightening even if the officials never followed through on the threats. Since this story broke in the midst of the market meltdown and the day before the first presidential debate, it did not receive much, if any, major media attention.

This is important not as an isolated incident but as one in a series of moves by which the United States' unique protections on free speech are being undermined from both the right and the left. On the left, there is a propensity to restrict politically incorrect discourse. This is best exemplified by the proliferation of campus speech codes and the ongoing legal problems of conservative Canadian journalists Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, who are being prosecuted by so-called "Human Rights Commissions" for re-publishing the Danish cartoons and writing an article critical of some aspects of Islam.

While Michael Davidson '09 called attention to the speech code epidemic in an op-ed in The Daily Princetonian earlier this year, the trials of Levant and Steyn have received almost no attention on this side of the 49th parallel. In one of the few articles on the subject, The New York Times seemed to embrace the same kind of stringent restrictions on "hate speech" found in Canada and Europe. Obama's attempts to use the force of law to silence critics are, unfortunately, in keeping with this international trend and are potentially part of the proverbial "slippery slope."

Conservatives, meanwhile, have embarked on a parallel campaign to delegitimize certain forms of dissent and artistic expression. Rudy Giuliani's crusade against a painting displayed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, various attempts to ban the "Harry Potter" books or books depicting homosexuality and accusations of anti-Americanism leveled against war critics are all examples of the enduring appeal of censorship. The chilling effect of the USA PATRIOT Act on freedom of association and expression is the most important recent example of this phenomenon.

With the Democrats probably headed for overwhelming dominance in D.C., they will have the opportunity to indulge their inclination for increased restrictions on "incorrect" speech through a resurrected "Fairness Doctrine" and other means. I hope for our country's sake that they resist this urge and instead move to give all speech the protection it deserves. No matter how much I disagree with what Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann says, I'll defend to the death their right to say it.