From the foundation of the United States, free speech has been one of the most important pillars upon which our society rests.
Recently, the Supreme Court made a decision allowing corporations to fund political advertisements during election season. The decision has drawn both praise and ire and has been written about and discussed everywhere, from television news to the Washington Post to The BG News.
The question of whether the Court was right or wrong is simple: they missed the mark totally. However, much of the discussion we are hearing has been missing the mark totally, too.
At issue was whether corporations have the right to pay for political advertisements during election campaigns. A movie, effectively what is referred to as a “hit piece,” about Hillary Clinton was the catalyst of the discussion. The Court ruled in favor of Citizens United’s right to release the movie.
According to The New York Times, the Court “vastly increased the power of big business and unions to influence government decisions [Jan. 21] by freeing them to spend their millions directly to sway elections for president and Congress.”
The key word of the Times’ analysis is “directly.” All the Court really did in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission was continue a process started by Ronald Reagan and accelerated under George W. Bush — bringing Washington politics out of the “darkened rooms” and into the open.
Think about how frequently your political messages are funded by corporations. FOX News is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, a gigantic multimedia corporation worth billions of dollars. It also owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. Each of these are highly editorialized, particularly FOX, yet there doesn’t seem to be much concern about what these people are saying.
Everything you see on TV or read in a major newspaper or magazine is funded by some powerful special interest or corporation. There are, of course, lights in the tunnel — independent or non-profit entities, dissident publications like Z Magazine and online sources such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which may not directly provide news but enable you to properly analyze what you read in, say, The Times.
The issue, of course, has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It is for this reason the Court’s decision in CU v. FEC doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it does others. Corporations have all the power they need and are going to do what they want anyway.
Freedom of speech is the most valuable freedom Americans have. As much as Americans are told they live in the “freest country in the world,” there are lots of countries with comparable amounts of freedom — nearly every other major power, in fact — but Americans do enjoy a unique degree of speech freedom.
But freedom of speech is nothing without freedom to be heard. This is what corporations have which most Americans don’t. Even if the Court had ruled differently, and deemed “Hillary: The Movie” in violation of the McCain-Feingold bill, Citizens United would still have far more access to the ear of any given American than most ordinary people ever would.
In fact, losing at the Supreme Court might have been a public relations boon for Citizens United. Americans believe ardently (and correctly) in freedom of speech. If an organization like Citizens United were “deprived” of it, they could have run the conservative talk show circuit and turned a legal failure into a public opinion victory.
With midterm elections coming up, and Republicans looking (or pretending to look) poised for a Congressional takeover a la 1994, expect this issue to be a very big deal on news programs come election time. But don’t be misled.
The significance of the Court’s decision is less in the change in policy and more in the bringing of what has always been done to the surface.
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