The recent debate through a Community Rights lens.
By Paul Cienfuegos
I have been surprisingly foggy about how to parse this in my own mind for months now. The fog just lifted!
From a Community Rights (CR) analysis/perspective, the problem is not that people are being allowed to get away with saying vile and hateful things as protected speech. The problem is that We The People are continuing to allow large business corporations to have decision-making authority over what speech will be heard and marketed and widely distributed, and what speech will not be given these benefits.
Take Fox News for example. As you’ll note in these two links below, one of my favorite analysts these days, Anand Giridharadas, is now telling the world that he thinks Fox News should be banned.
Fox News Corp is an absolutely enormous corporation, but in a truly democratic society, at least through the CR lens, any corporation (including media corporations) must follow the minimal standards, requirements and prohibitions that are drawn up in their charters – in modern times known as their Articles of Incorporation. We The People have always had the constitutional authority to define (not merely regulate) what corporations are allowed to do, and even more importantly, to be.
If minimum standards, requirements and prohibitions were set up for ALL media corporations to follow – and additionally if We were determining, democratically, that media corporations should never be allowed to become the monsters in scale that they now are – I do think that this free speech controversy would have never exploded in the way that it has. And the sad (but somehow also hopeful) reality is that it’s never too late for us to institute these new laws. But to do so, We would need to stop the blame game, Left vs Right, and instead bring a laser focus to issues of scale and required rules of engagement for all who lead media corporations.
Ultimately, it’s not about reigning in free speech. It’s about reigning in what large corporations are allowed to do and be, and recovering our sovereign authority over their boards of directors.
Journalist Wants Fox News BANNED