Crowded Theatres

During the Baltimore riots in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., destruction and looting were rampant throughout the downtown areas, police cordons were everywhere, and the scene generally was chaos. Throughout the riots, reporting in the newspapers and on radio and TV was strangely muted.  Afterwards, I asked an acquaintance who was a radio news reporter what had been going on; he told me that the media had voluntarily self-censored its reporting of the worst incidents to avoid making a bad scene worse.  So, to this day, some of the worst incidents go undocumented and unknown to the general public.  He could have claimed, as some media free-speech advocates do today in regard to the release of the blatantly anti-Muslim movie which set off the middle-eastern rioting, that freedom of expression required reporting everything.  But back then, even the New York Times reported only “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Most of the stridently (a pejorative, but it fits) free-speech advocates are in support of having no restrictions at all on the internet.  While there is some merit to their cause, there also is some excess.  They, mostly from the U.S., think like the teenager in terms of unrestricted freedom rather than responsible liberty.  They perhaps grossly understate the importance and the role of the internet in our current society.  Being from the U.S., they should know that one person’s freedom ends at the end of the other peoples’ nose, and that freedom of expression “does not include the right to shout ‘fire’ in the middle of a crowded theatre.”  Those are understandings of the responsibilities of liberty, not irresponsible freedom, established long ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. Freedom of expression does not include incitement to riot.  And evidence of damage to the other person’s nose includes, in the case of the anti-Islamic movie, dead bodies and burning buildings.  More recently, the Supreme Court ruled that you can not be required to serve as the conduit of another's expression.  In other words, freedom of expression includes the right not to express the views of another.

Nowadays, the internet is a crowded theatre for the whole world.  The days are past when the web was the private playhouse of the cognoscenti, and saying anything, no matter how outrageous, was speaking to a highly tolerant private audience.  Wildly variant values, deep misunderstandings, and restless mobs roam the aisles.  We are far yet from generally acceptable norms of “community” behavior in the internet theatre that would legitimate governmental censorship, but far enough along to know that responsibility for consequences goes with expression.  The right not to express becomes even more important.  That is why the self-censorship of Google in restricting access to the movie from parts of the Middle East was appropriate, and might have not gone far enough.  The internet has grown up.  It’s time for some of its sponsors to do so as well.