Time to embrace a spirit of debate - Placebo Effect

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Words to remember these days, it seems. Well, perhaps that needs some clarification. After all, a newspaper, magazine, Web site, or any such media outlet is not a governmental organization and cannot sensibly be accused of "censorship" in the sense of having technically violated a person's First Amendment rights. If, for example, I wrote a controversial piece expressing some of my unconventional and shocking opinions and submitted it to newspapers, any of them, be they The New York Times, the News-Letter, or even the Texas City Sun, would be perfectly within their rights if they were to decline to publish it. Their commitment to the right to speech and public debate which is at the center of the spirit of journalism and the First Amendment might be questioned, but they would technically not be violating my Constitutional rights.

So it would not have concerned me overmuch if my friend and colleague Tom Gutting had had his column simply killed by his editor as inappropriate, simply not something the paper wanted to print at that particular juncture. That's what editors are there for, after all: to determine what goes into the paper. What bothers me far more are the attendant circumstances - the article was published, and following a storm of public criticism, the publisher, Les Daughtry, bowed to pressure, pulled it off the paper's Web site, and apologized. Then, going further, he pronounced that the column had made him "ill," and went on to describe at length his personal disgust on reading the piece, to give a half-hearted refutation of some of Tom's points (which were, in the cases cited, statements of opinion, and thus somewhat difficult to refute on a factual basis), and to deliver a paean to Bush's leadership. The interesting thing, of course, is that one gets the sense that what is behind these sentiments throughout the column is not really personal indignation, but rather fear. One gets the distinct impression that Daughtry is desperately afraid of what will happen to him as a result of Gutting's column. Not really a good attitude for a newspaperman to take. On the other hand, who could blame him, when the administration cautions, as White House press secretary Ari Fleischer did, that "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do." I'm not exactly concerned about "disappeared" becoming a term in this country, but rhetoric like this from governmental officials is unsettling to say the least.

What is distressing is not the events in and of themselves, but rather the attitudes behind them, the attitude which makes it out to be not only advisable, but in fact a positive good, to shy away from debate of important subjects.

I am not opposed to accountability. At the very center of the concept of free speech is the notion of accountability, of being willing to take responsibility for one's ideas, of being willing to have them challenged. Speech without accountability is merely noise, and cannot lead to any productive results. If one is willing to debate one's convictions, however, as so many people have said this week, they can only emerge stronger.

In the long run, Gutting is perhaps not a martyr to free speech, and Daughtry is not the representative of all the stiflers of dissent. In fact, this may actually have been the best career move Gutting could have made. Not too many people make The New York Times by the time they're 23. What we have here, at bottom, is a cautionary tale. We all need to learn from these events, but not the lesson that Daughtry wants us to learn. Not that debate is dangerous and inappropriate, but rather that it is the single most important component of our democracy. The preservation of our country has taken on paramount important, but we must always remember why we are preserving it.