Anticipating Constitution Day (Monday, September 17th), the
First Amendment Center has released the results of its annual
survey assessing our support for constitutionally protected
freedoms. While I was pleased to learn that support for freedom of
religion, speech, and the press — as a matter of general principle
— remains stratospherically high, I was troubled by some of the
results.
Consider this, for example: while a heartening 64% of the
respondents could name freedom of speech as one of the freedoms
enshrined in the First Amendment, less than 20% — yes, that’s less
than 20% — could name any of the others. And if someone can’t
without prompting say that the First Amendment protects freedom of
religion, how could we expect him or her to remember that there are
establishment and free exercise clauses, or to understand their
implications.
Suffice it to say that on this front — call it civic literacy
— we educators have our work cut out for us.
When you move from the general principles to the details —
where the rubber hits the road — things get worse. While a healthy
93% of respondents regard freedom of the press as “essential” or
“important,” many of them (40%) think that the government can
require broadcasters to report positive news in exchange for being
permitted to use the public airwaves.
Some version of the Fairness Doctrine, abandoned by the FCC in
1985, garners the support of over 60% of the respondents. Requiring
television and radio stations to offer liberals and conservatives
equal time may seem fair — we all learned to share in preschool,
didn’t we? — doing so would actually limit the range of opinions
available to us on the airwaves. Fearing that everyone and his
brother would demand equal time, broadcasters would shun
controversy.
But it gets even worse: roughly the same proportion of
respondents would extend the Fairness Doctrine to newspapers. While
there’s at least a case to be made that radio and television
stations can be regulated — which isn’t the same as “should be
regulated — because they’re given the opportunity to profit from
the use of a “scarce” public medium, newspapers are different.
They’re private entities that do not and should not require the
permission of the government to operate.
If I don’t like the editorial stances of my local paper, I can
find or found a more congenial source of news and opinion. The
response, in other words, to a perception of news and editorial
bias is competition, which, with the proliferation of news and
opinion sources, we have in spades. If you’re a conservative and
don’t like the “MSM” (mainstream media), there’s Rush Limbaugh,
redstate.org, Power Line, and The American Spectator, to
name just a few. If you’re a liberal who thinks that the New
York Times doesn’t challenge the Bush Administration with
sufficient vigor, there’s the DailyKos, TPM Cafe, and so on.
That’s why, in the end, I’m troubled by the gap between our
general and particular opinions about First Amendment freedoms.
We’re devoted to them as “essential” or “important,” but only until
our schoolyard notions of fairness kick in. Then we’re quick to
call in the nanny state to make everything equal.
Now, I’m one of the first to affirm that our rights can’t be
absolute, that “ordered liberty” requires that they be “civilized.”
What this survey seems to indicate, however, isn’t a nuanced
understanding of the requirements of ordered liberty, but rather a
reflexive (and — dare I say? — juvenile) preference for fairness
and equality, even at the expense of a reasonable liberty.
As I said, we educators have our work cut out for us.
