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Pornography, Privacy, and the Bias of Media
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11656 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
4,598 Words |
| Author
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Ernest van den Haag
Ernest van den Haag, recently retired as John M. Olin
Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham
University, is currently a distinguished scholar at the
Heritage Foundation. This is a revised version of a paper
first read in January 1990 at a conference on "The Ambiguous
Legacy of the Enlightenment" held at the Claremont Institute
in Claremont, California, to be published in a forthcoming
book. |
In a democracy, the government depends on the consent of the governed. It can be ousted by a vote and must allow the opposition freedoms of speech, print, and assembly - which can be used to persuade voters to oust it. Hence, wherever there is democracy, there is a free press - a press free to report whatever different editors, reporters, and owners want to report, and free of any government control. A free press is an essential part of democracy, and democracy is necessary and sufficient for freedom of the press. No dictator could survive a free press; therefore no dictator tolerates it.
No wonder then that, on the whole, a free press favors democracy, even though in every democracy there are papers that do not. In democratic Germany before Hitler, there were some pro-Nazi papers; in the United States, we have the Daily Worker, a communist paper; in democratic France and Italy, communist parties run major newspapers and influence others. They use the freedom granted them by a democracy to undermine it in favor of a communist dictatorship that would abolish all freedom.
Note here, in passing, that the major media in the United States are less closely and pervasively linked with political parties than they are elsewhere, where the partisanship of at least some major media is often taken for granted, and one can reach objective conclusions only be reading several papers.
Note further that in the United States the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly guarantees that "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press." By various means, this guarantee has been extended to the states. There is similar legal protection for freedom of speech and of the press in practically all democracies.
In the United States, this protection was originally meant to keep the exchange of ideas and opinions, particularly political ideas and opinions, free of government interference. It has been widened by the courts. On very dubious grounds, the courts in the United States protect freedom of expression, rather than merely the freedom of speech and print mandated by the Constitution. Now "speech" may well include speech over radio, on TV, and in movies, and the ''press" certainly includes books, newspapers, and magazines. But "expression" is a far wider class, of which speech and print are but a narrow subclass. Expression includes dance, pictures, architecture, music, clothing, or nudity, bodily functions, and so forth. These expressions may deserve protection against government control, but they are hardly
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