Ann Coulter is not at Fault
Wed Jun 27, 2007 at 02:24:14 PM PDT
Watching the sad spectacle of Ann Coulter cavorting in her own sad filth on the Chris Matthews show inevitably tempts us to be angry with her. But Ms. Coulter is emphatically not the problem. Nasty fools spouting messages of hate can be found with no difficulty. They are everywhere. There is an infinite supply of them.
Chris Matthews is not the problem either. Being the sort of showoff clowning personality he is, Matthews will do anything for attention, money, ratings... you name it, Chris Matthews will debase himself to get it.
More after the jump...
MSNBC is closer to the problem, but still not at the crux of it. Like every other business, MSNBC exists to make money. Since Chris Matthews and Ann Coulter attract viewers, and since viewers attract advertisers, and since advertisers pay enormous sums to MSNBC, it is natural and understandable that MSNBC puts Matthews and Coulter on the air. Their antics are too remunerative for MSNBC to resist.
Having eliminated Coulter, Matthews and MSNBC as the culprits in creating the sort of profitable freak show we have watched over the past few days, who is left to blame?
Oddly, I think the U.S. Constitution, and specifically its First Amendment, are to blame, in a special sense. When the First Amendment was written, ink on paper constituted the most powerful medium of communication known to our species. The well-known quotation, something like, "Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one," turns out not to have been the critical failing one might have expected, simply because small-scale use, for a fee, of existing printing presses was and continues to be quite reasonably cheap. Pamphleteers have never been seriously impeded from disseminating their words by the expense of printing them; rather only by political suppression. And the First Amendment as we now know it has turned out to a near-perfect solution to the problem of politically repressed speech.
But today's media climate could not be more different from that in which the drafters of our Constitution were immersed. While they were surrounded by printed matter in vast, controversial, unkempt profusion, our days are instead filled with loud and carefully crafted messages of persuasion, delivered over electronic media whose power to implant ideas is beyond anything the drafters could have envisioned. With radio and TV setting the standard for decisive political speech, where do the pamphleteers stand now?
The answer, of course, is Nowhere. It is not economically possible for any but the wealthiest among us to purchase spare capacity on the national radio and TV networks. Freedom of the electronic "press" literally now does belong to those who can afford to own, or at leaset purchase time from, a gigantic media outlet.
The net result of mixing an obsolete First Amendment with huge amounts of money and almost inconceivably powerful electronic communications is simple: speech is no longer remotely free.
Implausible as it may sound, I believe we are forced to consider amending our constitution to move at least some electronic communication into the U.S. system of checks and balances. We need rational regulation of these expensive media resources. Nothing else is going to help solve the current media dilemma, whose severity is demonstrated by the recent, sickening Ann Coulter fiasco.
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