“Reporters Aren’t Above The Law”: The Media Shouldn’t Have Freer Speech Or Special Immunities From Investigation
Secret government investigations into speech protected by the First Amendment should alarm all of us. But we all have the same First Amendment rights; reporters don’t have freer speech. And giving reporters a special privilege to withhold evidence too often leads to lazy reporting in which nameless “official sources” get to make false accusations against innocent people without any accountability for either the government or the press. Instead of lobbying for a special privilege, reporters should consistently fight for more liberty for all Americans, including greater freedom of speech and greater freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Associated Press is understandably outraged that the government used secret subpoenas to get phone records that might reveal who leaked classified information to the news wire. But the real problem is not that the government is investigating the AP; it is that the government is investigating speech about government operations. That would be just as troubling if the targets were non-journalists.
The government claims the AP’s reporting contained classified information, but that’s hard to avoid when so much of what the government does is classified. The temptation to overclassify and underdisclose must be very powerful; each administration promises greater transparency, yet each turns out to be worse than the last. That frustrates the control we’re supposed to have over our government.
Media companies think the answer is to give their employees special immunities from investigation. But reporters aren’t always right, either. Sometimes they team up with government leakers to wreck the lives of innocent men and women whom the leakers want to disparage publicly, like Steven Hatfill, Wen Ho Lee or Richard Jewell. When that happens, the victims have rights too. Reporters (like everyone else) have a duty to provide the evidence necessary to do justice. No one should be above the law.
A better answer is to tighten the rules for when government can act in secret and provide more protections for whistleblowers. That gives us the benefit of more public discourse about public policy without giving the press a license to smear.
Our government does too many things in the dark, and the press is often at its best when it shines a light on previously unknown programs or policies that we ought to debate publicly. We need laws that help the press shine a light on government actions, not laws that permit reporters to join government officials in the shadows.
By: Mark Grannis, Debate Club, U. S. News and World Report, May 16, 2013
“Freedom For The Few”: Corporations, Miniature Governments With Their Own Undemocratic Governance Structures And Election Systems
We should be done by now with the idea that a corporation is a single thing. Corporations contain a multitude of conflicting interests and are much more like miniature governments with their own governance structures and election systems than is commonly recognized. While these structures are far more hierarchical and undemocratic than we require of our public institutions, Americans should not be resigned that this is the best or the only way the private sector can be structured.
The debate over corporate disclosure currently going on at the SEC exposes some important fissures within the modern American corporation. On the one hand, corporate managers and their allies have argued that corporations should be able to engage in political activities without having to disclose how much they spent or who that money went to. But there is a subtle slight-of-hand to this argument. It conflates the overall interests of the corporation with the desires of management and directors. What proponents of this view really mean is that management and directors should be able to make political expenditures without getting any input from shareholders or other constituencies within the corporation.
On the other side of the debate, shareholders and shareholder advocacy groups have been calling for greater disclosure regarding how corporate money is spent in politics. Shareholders have pointed out, rightly, that management’s political activities are not necessarily good for business. The money spent on political activity is money that shareholders might otherwise see reinvested in the company or have paid out in dividends, and it is money they have residual legal claims to. And, importantly, it often expresses political views that shareholders have no interest in supporting.
Shareholders have been introducing and voting on proposals to improve disclosure. But even when these measures pass, they are merely advisory and do not bind managers. It’s simply not the case that corporate political spending reflects the views of all the people who make up a business. Under existing corporate law, these intra-business disputes already tend to be resolved in management’s favor. And right now it is only management and directors whose views are reflected in political activity. It’s also noteworthy that employees’ interests aren’t even a part of this picture.
In spite of all that, management continues to push back against shareholders. Likely emboldened by Citizens United, proponents of management-dominated corporate speech have begun to claim First Amendment freedoms against their own shareholders. Consider this rather surprising statement from former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins:
shareholder activists, including unions, state pension funds, and ‘socially responsible investors,’ have increasingly turned to shareholder proposals to selectively burden American businesses exercising their First Amendment rights.
Leaving aside the fact that nobody has First Amendment rights against other private actors, this is an extremely bold assertion. This is tantamount to saying that the interests of management should trump all others and that neither private nor public actors should be permitted to interfere.
Frighteningly, recent developments have begun to enshrine this pro-boss, pro-management bias elsewhere in the law as well. This trend can be seen in a number of settings. During the last election cycle, a number of journalists were reporting that employers were asserting a First Amendment right to trample on the voting rights of their employees. In the ongoing fights over the Affordable Care Act, a number of employers have asserted a constitutional right not to pay for employees’ access to birth control and reproductive health services. (And in the religious non-profit setting, the Obama administration appears prepared to give them the exemption they were seeking.)
Corporations are a “they,” not an “it.” And it’s vitally important that this “they” doesn’t only mean corporate management. More democratic private sector institutions would be an important start. But we need a new constitutional framework for understanding people’s positive rights in the private sector as well. Freedom under the First Amendment doesn’t simply mean, as Paul Atkins might like, protecting bosses from public and private accountability. It means empowering a variety of people, shareholders, workers, communities, and the broader public, to shape the political conditions they live in.
By: Anthony Kammer, The American Prospect, February 6, 2013
“A Need To Exercise Judgment”: When The First And Second Amendments Clash
Battles over either the First Amendment or the Second Amendment often share similar dynamics, with defender/exercisers of the amendments arguing that the freedoms granted by the founding fathers are (nearly) absolute, and should not be modified just because sometimes people get hurt by them. But the issue gets stickier when a situation pits the First against the Second.
A newspaper in White Plains, N.Y., has enraged local (and not-so-local) gun owners by publishing an interactive map revealing the names and addresses of gun owners in the area. The information is public (and New York’s Freedom of Information Law is fairly expansive), so it’s not as though the newspaper unearthed secret documents or data and published it. What’s different now is that the Internet and other technology allows a newspaper—and for that matter, any blogger or website commentator—to make public information very, very public—so much so that the people affected feel they have been violated.
Some of the gun owners reacted aggressively, posting the names and addresses of editors and reporters at the Journal-News (including the guy who does the puzzle page) and making not-so-veiled threats against the journalists’ safety. The Journal-News has been unfazed, and is seeking similar gun owner information from another county to publish. That county is balking, and the paper is ready to go to court. Since the information is public, experts believe the paper will likely win, a victory for the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, the paper has been forced to hire armed guards at two of its offices to protect employees in light of the threats. That, in a way, is a victory for the gun owners and their interpretation, at least, of the Second Amendment. The First Amendment is in full force on the paper’s website, but without the Second Amendment, editors and reporters might not feel safe publishing it. On the other hand, were so many guns not so easily available, perhaps they might not have felt threatened in the first place.
There will surely be a discussion in Washington—though perhaps not much action—on gun safety and gun rights. And newspapers will continue to defend the right to free speech. But in both cases, there’s an issue of sheer judgment. Sure, some information is available to the public and should be. Does that mean newspapers should make it that much easier to learn? Some newspapers routinely report the names and salaries of public employees—even low-level employees. It’s not secret, and the workers are paid by public funds. But is it really necessary to publish what most of us consider private information? There’s an undercurrent of judgment to such lists, as though the public employees have to defend every penny they make (while well-paid CEOs of privately-held companies do not).
The names of convicted sex offenders are also public. Should newspapers publish these names, perhaps with an interactive map? To a parent, the answer might be a no-brainer; wouldn’t you want to know if a pedophile was living in the neighborhood? But publication of such information also makes it virtually impossible for an ex-con to return to society. He or she would be shunned, even in danger, wherever he went. How does someone become part of a noncriminal community in those circumstances?
Gun owners are not by definition criminals, of course. But guns are dangerous weapons if they are in the wrong hands or if there is an accident. Surely, many people would want to know if someone in their neighborhood had a gun. But is the publication of the information itself not just a little provocative? And perhaps it’s also a bit revealing—the anonymous people who posted threatening comments on the Internet (along with the addresses of Journal-News employees) probably weren’t the sort of people, prior to the controversy, neighbors feared would shoot them. But their aggressive reaction to the Journal-News list suggests some of them might have a dangerous streak.
Exercisers of the First and Second Amendments are understandably vigilant in defending their beliefs. But both should exercise judgment as well.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, January 3, 2013
Since Corporations Are “People”, They Should Have A Pledge Of Allegiance
Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren’t people. (I’ll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)
The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.
These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders’ money, big corporations are violating their shareholders’ First Amendment rights because shareholders aren’t consulted. They’re simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they’re throwing around, we don’t have enough money to be heard.
And they’re indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn’t think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.
Romney’s belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it’s now upwards of 300 times.)
But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?
And if they don’t take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers — are you listening?)
Here’s what a Corporate Pledge of Allegiance might look like:
The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance to the United States
The [fill in blank] company pledges allegiance to the United States of America. To that end:
We pledge to create more jobs in the United States than we create outside the United States, either directly or in our foreign subsidiaries and subcontractors.
If we have to lay off American workers, we will give them severance payments equal to their weekly wage times the number of weeks they’ve work for us.
We further pledge that no more than 20 percent of our total labor costs will be outsourced abroad.
We pledge to keep a lid on executive pay so no executive is paid more than 50 times the median pay of American workers. We define “pay” to include salary, bonuses, health benefits, pension benefits, deferred salary, stock options, and every other form of compensation.
We pledge to pay at least 30 percent of money earned in the United States in taxes to the United States. We won’t shift our money to offshore tax havens and won’t use accounting gimmicks to fake how much we earn.
We pledge not to use our money to influence elections.
Companies that make the pledge are free to use it in their ads over the Christmas shopping season.
By: Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Reich Blog, November 8, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 