IP: ELEGY FOR A FREE PRESS

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

EDITORIAL
+
by Joe Shea
American Reporter Correspondent
Hollywood, Calif.
12/21/95
censors
free


      ELEGY FOR A FREE PRESS
    by Joe Shea
  American Reporter Correspondent


 We still find it hard to believe that our President will betray
the First Amendment and his duties to the Constitution of the United 
States by signing into law the censorship legislation contained in the
larger telecommunications reform bill, but that now seems inevitable.
 Frankly, for one reason or another, that will almost certainly 
mean the death of The American Reporter, a brave, struggling, desperate
little journal that tried to make reporters owners of their destiny. 
 Most reporters are not very brave, though, perhaps preferring to
watch from the sidelines than to be in the trenches, and subscribers are
not sufficiently generous to keep us going.  Now that we have also taken
upon ourselves the task of challenging the Congress of the United States
and the President, our fate is probably sealed.
 It is painful to contemplate spending the next two years in a
Federal prison for violating a law that violates the First Amendment, but
it is very possible that all the lawyers in Congress, and all the lawyers
that work for them, and all the lawyers that work for the lobbyists, have
devised a scheme that will not discomfit five Justices of the United 
States Supreme Court.
 In that event, the jail terms and fines associated with our 
challenge to the legislation will surely prevent our further publication.
That will be a small tragedy in most lives, though a great one in ours.
We know how badly the world needs a free and independent press, and how 
badly the corporate giants want a controlled, pliable press.  Congress 
has given the latter their way.
 It would be our observation that as long as they are paid every
two weeks, most journalists will go along, loudly protesting all the
while, but resisting the appeal to civil disobedience their own hearts
must make.  Few have distinguished themselves in this debate, and those
that have are still contributing to The American Reporter. 
 We will continue to publish at least long enough to produce the
article by Judge Steve Russell of Texas, that is to be defended in the
courts by attorney Randall Boe of Arent Fox, Kintner, Plotkin and Kahn.
 We know it is difficult for most Americans to see the relationship
between a word they consider obscene and the right to be unquiet in our
speech.  To understand, they will have to realize that untrammeled speech
is a threat to those interests that hope to soon control the Internet. 
 In the pay-as-you-go Cyber Disneyland of our immediate future, the
Net's strong cables of self-created connections will become strands of
angel hair pasta and a fiber optic lure to the unwary.  Not only the
classic "seven dirty words" but words that recreate lovemaking or voice
the reality of human experience will be forbidden.
 Indecency is not the world of slaughter and depredation found in
Bosnian war crimes or the gluttonous hoarding of public money from the
poor, nor the vast poverty of spirit our entertainment industry creates,
and not the ugly deaths of children shot down in the streets of New York, 
Chicago and Los Angeles.
 These are unoffensive, but the anger they arouse, the language of 
uninhibited love and the celebration of freedom in which their expression 
is contained, is now to be offensive and obscene.
 We love our country more than we should, or would we not be so
hurt to see its blessings betrayed.  Of all of those, none is greater than
the right to speak and write freely, and none is more worth dying for.  We
have vowed to challenge the law that would diminish those rights, and we 
will.  We expect that others will follow, at a safe distance.
 To do less would be to avoid the responsibility of Americans to
defend with all our heart and might the tenets of our freedom and our
precious Bill of Rights. 


          -30-


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                      The American Reporter
          Copyright 1995 Joe Shea, The American Reporter
                       All Rights Reserved