I checked the First Amendment and others in the Bill of Rights. There is no constitutional guarantee for Freedom of Screech.
Freedom of Speech is definitely protected, especially from Congress, but it’s easy to subvert that provision if broadcast news media are interested only in showing purple-faced people who bellow and scream and froth at the mouth. Maybe its time local police forces begin to take seriously the right to free speech in the town hall meetings congressmen are trying to conduct on healthcare.
Dick Armey’s hooligans, equipped with a sheet of twisted stalking points — and frenzied by bootcamp coaching on how to shout down everyone in the meeting with deafening invective — enter such meetings under the pious banner of Free Speech.
What they’re really doing is denying the exercise of free speech to everyone else at the meeting.
It’s a novel theory of constitutional law. In a room of 200 citizens, only one screeching alien – or four or five – is endowed with an inalienable right to be heard.
Towns and cities don’t have a mandate as guardians of the Constitution, but they do have disorderly conduct ordinances. If I have ever in my life seen disorderly conduct, it’s the behavior of Armey’s armies. So off to jail with them, until there’s time to hold a hearing in which they can try their luck angrily berating a judge.
These graduates of the Michael Vick School of Manners are bussed in by the HMO and pharmaceutical lobbies to destroy healthcare reform by destroying public dialogue.
The corporations contributing to such abuses aren’t guilty exactly of disorderly conduct, but theirs is a conspiracy (though their lobbying groups bear glorious patriotic or scientific names) to deprive people of their civil rights and freedoms, including not only free speech but also freedom from intimidation and threats of violence. So I don’t see why their managers shouldn’t go to jail as well. Their constitutional entitlement is to the dignity of an indictment and a trial, at which, one hopes, the witnesses will not be shouted down.
As for Fox News and talk radio, they’re flying the banner of Free Speech to cover their scare talk, smears, distortions of fact, and incitements to hate-crimes which have proved so effective in their war on reproductive rights.
That’s a more slippery case. You can’t charge Glenn Beck with being a toon, which he is. Or a creep. Or a slime mold – that’s unpalatable but not illegal.
But the FCC is not supposed to grant licenses to broadcasters who pose a clear public nuisance or public endangerment.
For example, those who abuse the their access to the airways in defiance of community standards and encourage assassination of the president and other government officials – maybe it’s time to start suspending a few licenses.
Those broadcasting frequencies, after all, are not the private property of Rupert Murdoch; their use is a shared entitlement for public benefit, dedicated to a well informed, civil society.
Of course shutting down Fox News and hate radio would open the federal government to charges of behaving dictatorially rather than democratically. But the rabid right is already hoisting posters showing Obama as Hitler and hanging congressmen in effigy, so it could be argued they’ve renounced any belief in democratic principles and declared them moot. Still, if they object, they could be offered the choice of being water-boarded 86 times, which they consider perfectly legal.
We may be spared this crisis of conscience and principle, however, if advertisers rally to yank their support of the offending broadcasters, as they are now doing in the case of Glenn Beck.
Seven or eight sponsors have pulled out of Beck’s nightly obscenity, leaving Rupert Murdoch to do what he hates most in in the world – lose money.
Once the culprits have all been rounded up, they should be provided with short pencils (golf scoring pencils would do) and very small pads of paper on which to express their views. These could then be recited on You Tube by mina birds — continuing the tradition that the screechers have no idea what they’re talking about.
To keep Dick Armey out of trouble, his lobbying firm could be given the contract to train the birds, though strictly forbidden to cripple their left wings.