Free Speech

Free Speech Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
by Stacie Adams
April 14, 2007
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr07/Adams14.htm

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Don Imus and his ilk are the price you pay for living in a freewheeling democracy. If you want your media and speech regulated by authority figures, move to some despotic country of your choosing…
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…Regulating speech, for any reason, is a disastrous proposition. Very few people find what Imus said appealing and it truly would be no great loss if he was never heard from again. But what I wonder and fear is this: who’s next?


Firing Don Imus Stinks
4/13/2007
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2007/04/firing-don-imus-stinks-no-no-for-rude.html

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Because, ultimately, what happened to Imus happened because of his speech, and if you wanna, say, giggle when the Rude Pundit attacks someone, then Don Imus gets to say his non-FCC violating insults. Yes, the Rude Pundit's aware that there's a qualitative, historical, and ethical difference between calling white conservative evangelicals nasty names and calling a women's college basketball team "whores," but it's still speech. Hate speech is speech; yes, sadly, angrily, we must call it "speech."

The Rude Pundit's concern can be divided into two incompatible areas with cliched names: the slippery slope and the sacrificial lamb.
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…Advertisers, too, knew where they were putting their ad dollars. Like the lefty blog that gets Ann Coulter book ads (and doesn't decline them, it should be noted, because the blogger doesn't want to be seen as "endorsing" the products that advertise on the blog), companies know exactly who they are trying to reach and why. They knew the demographics of the show. They knew the content. No one involved is innocent or clean. And, to turn this shit around another way, yeah, if all the advertisers pull out, then, yeah, good capitalist society that we are, that's a reason to take Imus off the air. But that's not the reason we were given, even if it is the real cause.

But once Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, et al are chased from the air, what next?...
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…That Imus is taking the hit for the place of that speech in our culture and the endless degradation that cuts across race and class lines. And that, now that Imus is off-the-public-air, we can, like this blog will, move on to other things rather than get down to the nitty-gritty of curing the diseases that have plagued this nation since it began.
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