COVID-19's Challenge to Free Speech

Note: For a video version of this rant, click HERE.

In 1963 the Speech Association of America (SAA) adopted a "Credo For Free And Responsible Communication in a Democratic Society." The SAA later became the National Communication Association, and reaffirmed the Credo in 2017. 

As someone who regularly teaches a course called "Freedom of Speech in the United States" and relies on First Amendment freedoms to provoke students, produce blogs, and engage in other forms of activism, I find myself coming back to the Credo often. Regularly reminding myself of the Credo's six principles helps me to make sure I am holding my students and myself to high standards worthy of the life and death struggles for freedom that preceded us and continue to this day. 

We free speech advocates have always assumed that active use of First Amendment freedoms enhances civic health. COVID-19 challenges that assumption, as we now find ourselves in a bizarre and disturbing place where some citizens insist that "peaceful assembly" includes the right to risk infecting oneself or others with a deadly disease at a public gathering. Huge segments of social media and cable television denigrate and distort peer-reviewed medical findings while amplifying junk science. Meanwhile, the President of the United States treats daily briefings as a kind of Open Mic Night where he feels free to riff on whatever comes to his mind, even to the point of suggesting that ingesting bleach or disinfectants might cure the virus. In another essay I've argued that these types of bullshit, bluster, and bullying tactics are never particularly helpful in any context, but are absolutely useless when confronting a novel coronavirus. 

Forgive me for having to state what is or should be an obvious point: Just because an act of communication might technically deserve First Amendment protection, it does not follow that that same act of communication is responsible. In "normal" times, irresponsible communication in the public sphere certainly produces negative consequences, from distracting our attention away from urgent issues to defaming good people to delaying actions needed to fix what's broken in our society. 

In the COVID-19 era, the irresponsible communicative acts of distraction + defamation + delay = DEATH. (I want to say that we can and must do better, but my fear is that the response will be "OK Boomer."). 

What follows is the Credo for Free and Responsible Communication in a Democratic Society. Please read it, reflect on it, and use it as a way to hold yourself and others accountable for your and their communication practices. Be especially mindful of the admonition in principle #5 that we should "expose abuses of the communication process." Those abuses, some of which I mentioned earlier, are having a profoundly negative effect on our ability to loosen the deadly grip of the coronavirus on our nation and world. 

Here is the Credo: 

Recognizing the essential place of free and responsible communication in a democratic society, and recognizing the distinction between the freedoms our legal system should respect and the responsibilities our educational system should cultivate, we members of the Speech Communication Association endorse the following statement of principles: 

Principle #1: We believe that freedom of speech and assembly must hold a central position among American constitutional principles, and we express our determined support for the right of peaceful expression by any communicative means available. 

Protesters, many of them armed, berate security officers at the Michigan State Capital. Though protesters had their temperatures checked before entering the building, we know that coronavirus carriers are often asymptomatic. Can this possibly be a form of "peaceful expression?" (photo from BBC News)

Principle #2: We support the proposition that a free society can absorb with equanimity speech which exceeds the boundaries of generally accepted beliefs and morals; that much good and little harm can ensure if we err on the side of freedom, whereas much harm and little good may follow if we err on the side of suppression. 

Principle #3: We criticize as misguided those who believe that the justice of their cause confers license to interfere physically and coercively with the speech of others, and we condemn intimidation, whether by powerful majorities or strident minorities, which attempts to restrict free expression. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has faced the most hostile reaction to stay-at-home orders, from threatening signs to armed militia members showing up at her private residence. Polls show support for the governor's coronavirus actions even as strident protesters try to coerce her into retreat.  Masses of people who understand and accept the need to maintain stay at home orders until there is a clear downward trend in coronavirus cases--with full knowledge of the economic harm the orders are causing their communities and them personally--are the true "silent  majority." 

Principle #4: We accept the responsibility of cultivating by precept and example, in our classrooms and in our communities, enlightened uses of communication; of developing in our students a respect for precision and accuracy in communication, and for reasoning based upon evidence and a judicious discrimination among values. 

Principle #5: We encourage our students to accept the role of well-informed and articulate citizens, to defend the communication rights of those with whom they may disagree, and to expose abuses of the communication process. 

[Note: Chris Hayes' exposure of "coronavirus trutherism"is a good example of how a public sphere pundit can expose abuses of the communication process. MSNBC is not a great news and opinion network, and not everything on Fox is awful; but one of the worst media tragedies of our time is that the loyal followers of each will never see the segments worth seeing on the "other side." Fox viewers really do need to see this segment by Hayes--it might literally save their lives.] 

Principle #6: We dedicate ourselves fully to these principles, confident in the belief that reason will ultimately prevail in a free marketplace of ideas. 
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Will reason ultimately prevail in the free marketplace of ideas? Given the extreme levels of misinformation and disinformation--some of it shared innocently on social media but much of it promoted willfully by bad faith actors--I am not sure that reason WILL prevail. We need to prepare ourselves for what will in our public sphere probably be a long period of malicious efforts to distract us from the urgency of the crisis at hand and defame  those good faith actors doing all they can to lead us through it. Distraction and defamation will succeed only in delaying actions necessary to help solve this terrible problem. Remember, distraction + defamation + delay = death. 

Some seem to think that reason would stand a better chance of prevailing in the marketplace of ideas if private sector social media companies would simply censor all of the bad faith nonsense out there. If history has taught us anything, it's that censorship does not stifle stupidity, and more dangerously any censorship regime gives too much power to whoever decides what communicative acts are "in" and what communicative acts are "out." You might love the censor when he shuts down what you despise, but it's only a matter of time before he cancels you too. 

If people of goodwill refuse to act, then documents like the Credo For Free and Responsible Communication in a Democratic Society are nothing more than pious platitudes on a page. I urge all of us to digest the principles and take an honest inventory of where we come up short. Monitoring my own communicative weaknesses and pledging to do better puts me in a much better position to expose the weaknesses of others. The alternative is to continue living in tribal, self-righteous bubbles overflowing with BS, bluster, and bullying. How's that working for us?