Free Speech and the Press in the United States
Freedom of speech is not about being able to degrade others or chatter mindlessly – it is about being able to voice one’s concern about issues that affect the citizens of the United States and the future of our nation, which is always the youth. Any legitimate democracy depends upon the freedom of individuals. If the people do not have freedom of speech, then what do they have?
Freedom of the press is not about watching television or reading magazines in the supermarket – it is about the engagement of the public at large in the creation of its own media-publications and programs. Freedom of the press is about contributing to the media instead of adopting the superficial messages that are broadcast everyday, while the ulterior motivation lurks between segments as the advertisements.
Together, freedom of speech and the press were meant to help educate the people at large and to encourage public discourse and dialogue about relevant and urgent issues. Through exercising these freedoms, people have the opportunity to express themselves, which is central to any legitimate democracy. The rights of freedom of speech and the press are worth little when kept in reserve.
Legitimate democracies consist of a majority and a minority regarding various issues and factors. Majorities and minorities are arbitrary and contingent in that they change over time. What was called “conservative” yesterday, a person may consider “radical” and short-sighted tomorrow.
For there to be informed voters who forge their own destinies through the bodies of their government, there must of necessity be a diversity of ideas, information, and perspectives. When only one perspective is portrayed in the mass-media, then there is little discussion, dialogue, or communication whatsoever.
The variety of ideas, points-of-view, and feelings, relies directly upon each person’s right to speak freely, whether in private or in public. With almost 300,000,000 people in the United States, a focused discussion or dialogue seems impossible, yet the potential of the mass-media must not be underestimated. It is like a child that must be cultivated and developed to get the best out of it.
Diverse perspectives and a variety of viewpoints influence the general level of awareness in the public at large. Without a variety of ideas, there is little democracy. Democracy is the representation of diversity, and it is a process through which a clear majority or consensus can be reached regarding specific issues. Without a variety of options, there is no choice – without choices, there is no freedom.
The mass-media in most countries has been among many misused tools seized upon by governments. Whereas the government in practically all nations “protect themselves” with the military when necessary, the mass-media in countries around the world have nothing with which to defend themselves – more often they are used as tools for political and economic propaganda.
Through the mass-media, people are heard by their neighbors across the country, whether it be through radio, television, film, or published writing. More conventional examples of media are the mail and telephone. Freedom of speech is crucial to democracy, but without access to the mass-media, the public does not hear much from “the people” themselves.
There are filters and obstacles that exclude most of the 300,000,000 people in the United States from engaging and participating in the mass-media, which seems to be a logical step for any nation that claims its governing bodies are composed of the people to serve the people. Primarily, the obstacle is money.
In general, freedom is a birth-right, not something that a nation or any human being can give to another. The only way for a nation to free people is not to enslave them socially, economically, or emotionally. Freedom is inalienable, which means that it cannot be transferred from one person to another, much less one nation to another.
Freedom is a right with which a person is born – with which every person is born. Freedom is a quality and trait of individual human beings, not the quality of any nation on the earth. No nation can be free except through the people who live in it. There is no freedom except through the individual people in society at large – any other freedom is a fraud and a fantasy.
Freedom is a spiritual struggle more than a political one – and liberty is far from automatic even in the United States. Without money, it is almost impossible to remain free. If a person has a car, but he or she has no money, then there is trouble with registration or insurance. These are laws in Texas at least. When money is necessary to follow the law, and many of the laws, then something is wrong.
When a person gets pulled over for the expired tag on the car, even if nothing is wrong with it, then he or she quickly accumulates more “crimes”. For a poor person, more violations of the law equates to more money – the problem is, the State wants money that the people do not have.
When the person cannot pay money that is demanded by a State, then an arrest warrant is issued for him or her – and freedom of any kind is hard to come by when a person is incarcerated. Hopefully, using the car as an example, the same thing that has happened in Texas – where the State demands money in exchange for a “legal” status – has not happened in the mass-media of the nation.
Freedom of speech and the press are dependent upon each other, and the mass-media is desperately needed by the people in order to transmit messages, to communicate information, and to allow the people to hear each other’s voices. If the raw drive for corporate-profits have wrecked the potential of the mass-media, then the creation of another version of it is necessary.
For too many years, the people have heard how even the presidential candidates misuse the mass-media to smear their “opponents”. It is as if the mass-media were some kind of a classroom where high-school kids gossip about each other instead of a public forum where citizens hear about the most urgent problems that face our nation and the world.
How are political candidates able to exercise these crucial rights while millions of other people cannot even pay what the local or state government would demand from them – to companies for mandatory car-insurance that one may never even need? Can any democracy be legitimate where there is such inequality?
Somehow, the candidates are allowed on television – naturally, they buy their spots, or others buy “airtime” for them. These candidates appear to exercise their rights to freedom of speech. Because they are on television, and certainly because they are interviewed as subjects in magazines and newspapers, they engage in freedom of the press.
When these candidates are not speaking freely in the truest sense about the most important and urgent issues – but playing a game, projecting a personal image, or degrading others out of insecurity – then it is another wasted opportunity for even the political candidate to exercise his or her rights, no matter what the result – even if the result is winning an election.
For the full-effect of freedom of speech, it depends on freedom of the press. Freedom of the press depends too much on money and too little on the independence of thought, ideas, and insight. The people of the United States should think about what kind of “democracy” the rest of the world sees from the outside – it is the dollar-signs that drive the people inside.
