All Posts Tagged With: "free speech"
Free Press & Aid in Africa
Andrew Mwenda is incredible. Sometime in the middle of his talk you will hear Bono speak out. It makes me not like Bono. The TEDBlog covers the feud between Bono and Mwenda.
One of the best economists out there, William Easterly, has a short blog post on Mwenda. Mwenda established a newspaper in Uganda, The Independent, after being frustrated by government censorship of the newspaper that previously employed him.
A study in self-funding
Today Rich Miller at Capitol Fax referenced a study that illustrates the folly of self-financed campaigns, and observes that the Illinois GOP should take a lesson from this recent history.
* And a study of the 2008 election results shows that self-funding candidates don’t do well at all…
49 Congressional candidates spend $500,000 of their own money, and of them, only 6 House candidates and 1 Senate candidate won.
Perhaps the saddest case of this was Sandy Treadwell, who ran against Kirsten Gillibrand in NY-20. Treadwell poured in at least $5.9 million of his own money. (Gillibrand spent $3.6 million, but only $250 of that was her own money.) The return on Treadwell’s investment: priceless. If by ‘priceless,’ you mean losing to Gillibrand by a 23-point margin.
The Illinois GOP might take that as a broad hint to stop recruiting those self-funders.
As usual Miller is spot on. If you can’t convince your people and your party to support your campaign, it’s a good hint that you’re not a viable candidate.
Too often wealthy candidates are surrounded with people afraid to tell them bad news, or the egos of the wealthy are spurred on by staffers who want to keep getting a check. And when you’re many months, hundreds of hours, and tens of thousands of dollars in to a campaign, its hard to recognize sunk costs, and hard to tell when to stop.
This is also a good sign for our democracy. Folk’s don’t like it when it looks like you’re just buyin’ it. An interesting question, would more aggressive federal campaign finance reform reverse this trend? It’s really hard concoct campaign finance legislation that could constitutionally limit the ability of a candidate to spend their own money on their campaign. Does limiting PACs, lobbyists, and contribution amounts give self-financed candidates an unfair advantage?
Free Speech on Campus and Sham Economists
Free speech advocates on campus did a great job beating back the bureaucratic gulags that sought to censor faculty and University of Illinois employees from expressing political beliefs. President White sent out a University-wide email softly retracting the censorship attempts of the University’s Ethics Office.
One of my academic heroes is Stanley Fish. His only regrettable trait is being employed by the New York Times. Fish’s was formerly employed by the University of Illinois-Chicago and he spoke on campus a few years ago. His relationship with Illinois has led him to pay attention to our situation and to write about it in the New York Times.
Paul Krugman is Britney Spears. Just as Spears produces awful pop music, so too does Krugman produce awful, biased economic analysis. I will not pretend to be intimately familiar with the esoteric academic economic literature, but my instinct (and Prescott’s as well) is that Krugman’s contribution falls short of the incredible accomplishments that have earned the award in the past. Awareness of economies of scale and application of their principles to international economics seems like a trivial and logical step – not an innovation deserving of the award.
There is a zero percent chance that he would have won the Nobel Prize without being a prominent liberal columnist at the New York Times. I actually support attempts to popularize economics in mainstream media and believe that Krugman should be commended for doing so. However, the award is specifically given for a contribution to the field of economics, which I do not believe includes popularizing it. The Nobel Committee granted the award under the guise of his yawnable economic contributions:
By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity.
In a slightly technical post, I have criticized Krugman’s commitment to economic truth in the past. If you support Krugman’s winning of the award, you will find some ammo in Greg Mankiw’s post.
Political speech at Illinois
This week was a victory for free speech at Illinois. President B. Joe White retracted a wrongheaded ethics policy that restricted political speech. White eventually did the right thing, but he displayed a startling lack of common sense and waiting almost three weeks to revoke the policy was a failure of leadership.
The Free Press Effect
I have long thought that the freedom of the press to be the most significant human right. It is the thick cement foundation of all other rights and privileges due to citizens of a free country. Below I have posted some links to free press rankings around the world and some graphs that neatly summarize the findings. I’m not claiming a causation, but notice the correlation in the world maps between freedom of the press and perception of corruption. Stopping corruption and bribery and embezzlement is one of the keys to economic growth and development, so it is interesting to think of the possibility that a free press could cause economic growth by stemming corruption.
Freedom House’s Global Survey of Media Independence:
Freedom House Map:
Corruption Perceptions Index 2007:
Movies, Churches, and Freedoms
So I live down the street from the Uptown Theater in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. It’s a great old single-screen theater with facilities and presentation that are probably the best I’ve ever seen (though the Moolah in St. Louis is up there too). I recently saw a screening of the final cut of Blade Runner at the Uptown and was very impressed, and I recently learned that it hosted the world premier of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The point being that while I’ve only been living in DC for a few months, I’ve already grown rather affectionate toward this theater.
You can then imagine my disappointment when I learned that the Uptown is planning to rent out the theater to a virulently anti-gay evangelical megachurch. The McLean Bible Church wants to make the theater home to one of nine satellite “campuses” designed to create a “spiritual beltway” around Washington. The church’s senior pastor, Lon Solomon, has said homosexuality is a “bridge to despair, confusion, loneliness, depression, promiscuity, guilt, self-hate, loathing and self-destruction, but Jesus Christ can set you free,” and the church has an “Out of Darkness” ministry that offers treatment for various “forms of sexual brokenness,” including “same-sex attraction.”
Many of the residents of Cleveland Park have raised objections to the idea of their neighborhood becoming home to an extension of this church. The church needs a zoning variance in order to conduct its operations at the Uptown, which requires approval from the city’s zoning board.
The neighborhood’s Yahoo! group became host to much of the debate. One poster wrote, “I do not welcome any anti-gay or anti-lesbian group to the neighborhood. I will not tolerate hate groups.” Another wrote that he opposes the church’s “Hezbollah model toward establishing a theocracy.”
One gay resident disagreed, writing that it is “positively un-American to try to use the zoning law to keep a religious institution out of the neighborhood because you personally detest its theology and social and political beliefs.”
While the idea of the Uptown renting its space to this church makes me sad, I’m also uneasy about the idea of restricting it from doing so (it’s hard to argue this isn’t a First Amendment issue, right?). This is especially true since single-screen theaters like the Uptown have been struggling financially recently, and leasing to this church could help it stay in business and keep it from being “turned into a Walgreen’s,” as another gay resident of the neighborhood argued. I really love this theater, and if renting it out to hate-mongers keeps it from closing its doors, I feel like I have to say go for it, don’t I?
It is, however, utterly moronic that churches like this get tax-exempt status. The senior pastor says things like, “Any political candidate that espouses gay rights, we have a responsibility to ensure that they never get into office. If they do, the consequences to this nation will be dire…It’s a fight we dare not lose.” Why religious organizations get tax-exempt status at all is beyond me, but this isn’t even a religious organization, it’s a political one (and likely a fairly powerful one at that).
Anyway. The whole thing makes me a little depressed. Maybe I should go see a movie.
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week
My position-taking, at times, is a bit of a high-wire act. In recent days and weeks, my opposition to religious belief has been laid out in some depth (see the comments here and here for the most recent examples). In the somewhat more distant past, on the other hand, Billy and I have exchanged blows over my “political correctness,” or my tendency at times to call for restraint where others might perceive a free speech interest (most notably here).
There’s a fairly obvious tension here, and it comes to a head with issues like Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which is coming up this Monday. It was started by conservative academic David Horowitz in an effort to “confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the War on Terror and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”
Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford and the editor of the Boston Review, and Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown, discussed the week on bloggingheads.tv (a fantastic site that everybody should visit regularly) here (the whole diavlog is good, but this the part about Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week). Watch the whole discussion, but what caught my attention in particular was this exchange:
Cohen: There’s a long tradition of thinking that Nazism was Christo-fascism, [that] this was Christian antisemitism. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but there’s a long tradition of thinking that by sincere and decent people, that this is Christian antisemitism’s ultimate expression. Now, I think it would be awful if people stopped talking about Nazis and the Holocaust in Germany and started talking about the Holocaust committed by the Christo-fascists, even though you can argue the case that those were the roots of that. And I think it’s absurd to think that Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants, whatever their form of Christianity, who think that the Holocaust was…a hideous evil, would say, “Oh, you know, Christo-fascism, that doesn’t mean me.” They’d be offended by it, they’d be disgusted by it. And the idea that it’s okay to talk about Islamo-Fascism because there are people who make a defense from within Islam for the use of terror[ist] bombings, that that makes it okay to talk about Islamo-fascism, I think that’s ridiculous, as ridiculous as thinking that it’s okay to stop talking about Nazism and start talking about Christo-fascism.Loury: Yeah, well, you know, when 50 Cent, the rapper, was being questioned aggressively about the use of “bitches” and “hoes” and all that kind of rhetoric, his answer on one occasion was, “Well, you know, there really are bitches and hoes in the ghetto.” And, I mean, the fallacy of the reasoning is that because one might be able to find an instance in which someone’s behavior might be more or less accurately described with one of these pejorative terms doesn’t undo the damage that’s done to an entire class of people by the routine use of the term… And the fact that there are Islamists who behave like fascists doesn’t undo what seems to me to be the damage done by the easy, widespread, public evocation of this construction.
This is tricky territory for me, since I’m always eager to point to Islamist terrorists as an example of how religion can damage a culture, but at the same time, I have to agree with Cohen and Loury on this. Disagreeing with religion because it can lead to dangerous ideas is entirely separate from using a term that helps to equate an entire religion with an evil ideology. I believe that religion in all forms hurts people, and that even moderate Muslims should abandon their faith since even their moderate adherence to religion enables a harmful method of thought. But nuance is essential here, and sensitivity to members of all religious faiths is paramount if atheists such as myself are to have any hope of not being pegged as hateful and intolerant. That goes for Christians, Jews, and everybody else as well.
It is wrong, therefore, to argue that Islam causes radical, terrorist ideologies, which the use of the term “Islamo-fascism” implies. It’s important, I think, for people not to make that mistake, or to make the mistake of arguing that Christianity causes homophobia or sexism. More accurately, religion enables these hateful ideologies, is used to justify these ideologies, and, most importantly, constructs an impenetrable wall around these ideologies because religion does not subject itself to reasoned analysis.
I don’t want to get into yet another debate over religion (we’ve covered that ground ad nauseam). I would, however, be interested in hearing some discussion on the use of the term “Islamo-fascism,” and whether it’s a term that is appropriate to use in our discourse.
Bagging the Question
Rich Miller over at the great Capitol Fax has asked his question of the day in response to some local communities pushing to ban people from wearing baggy pants, “Question: Do you think the government – any government – should have the right to tell people how to wear their pants in public?”
Here’s my answer, what’s yours?
It is true, as some commentators have already noted, that the style looks ridiculous and callow.
But, as Mr. Miller has aptly stated, that is not the question. The question is whether the offense of having to “see someone’s behind” outweighs society’s interest in allowing individuals to express themselves through clothing.
What kind of an expression is this? People, especially young people, express themselves through clothing as an instant notice to strangers as to what class or social dynamic that person belongs to. Politicians wear suits to gain instant respect and credibility and to signal to people that they are a serious or important member of society. Young people in Danville wear baggy pants, perhaps, to express their dissatisfaction with the social norms of their parents and to signal to strangers of comparable age that they are not a “prep” or a “jock” or a “nerd,” but instead that they belong to whatever class of people wear baggy pants. So clothing serves at least two functions (1) signaling to other members of society what class or niche you belong to and (2) as a social critique of people who do not dress that way.
We can draw a fair analogy between this situation and freedom of speech cases that have reached the Supreme Court. Since Holmes’ great dissent in Abrams v.
I am also concerned that this kind of a law will have a disparate racial impact, because from my experiences African-Americans tend to favor the baggy pants style more than whites. I suspect this would be less of an issue in
To be more eloquent and succinct: this is absurd.
Another View on a Subject Recently Discussed
Peggy Noonan, always a personal favorite of mine, has an interesting take on the dissemination of information in our culture.
Tom
Society of Professional Journalists – Code of Ethics
Below I have pasted the entirety of the Code of Ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), which is the primary umbrella for American journalists. It has been around since 1909. I was once on the Executive Board of the UIUC Chapter.
A member of the SPJ Ethics Committee, Jerry Dunklee, a journalism professor at Southern Connecticut State University, said this to journalists who asked for his consultation:
I told the reporters I would have used the material from Cho. It’s not an easy decision. These kinds of decisions require a balancing of the public’s right to know about a major news event with sensitivity toward victims and survivors. Journalists are trained to ask who, what, why, when, where and how. In this terrible story, we knew the answers to all of these questions … except Why. Why did this young man go on a killing rampage? His own words and pictures can get at part of that question. It’s an important part of this story.
Furthermore, NBC took many precautions and steps before airing the video, it wasn’t a happenstance decision or process. Their process is detailed here.
I was in the journalism program for a couple of semesters at UIUC and I recall that every professor I spoke with vehemently advocated printing the news and allowing the public to decide its worth, rather than hiding the news and deciding on behalf of the public. The Society and the Code as a whole consistently stand in favor of publishing rather than censoring, disseminating rather than parenting, and informing rather than protecting:
Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society’s principles and standards of practice.
Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Journalists should:
— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.
— Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
— Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.
— Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.
— Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
— Never distort the content of news photos or video. Image enhancement for technical clarity is always permissible. Label montages and photo illustrations.
— Avoid misleading re-enactments or staged news events. If re-enactment is necessary to tell a story, label it.
— Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story
— Never plagiarize.
— Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so.
— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
— Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.
— Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
— Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.
— Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.
— Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.
— Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection.
Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.
Journalists should:
— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
— Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.
Journalists should:
— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
The SPJ Code of Ethics is voluntarily embraced by thousands of
writers, editors and other news professionals. The present version of
the code was adopted by the 1996 SPJ National Convention, after months
of study and debate among the Society’s members.
Sigma Delta Chi’s first Code of Ethics was borrowed from the
American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1926. In 1973, Sigma Delta Chi
wrote its own code, which was revised in 1984, 1987 and 1996.