Hey! If you and **Contrapuntal ** wanna talk jazz, just get a room already! 
If you’re talking to me, I’m saying there’s no proof Sharpton is to blame.
If this issue really involved attempts to remove certain instances of protected speech from civil society—i.e., attempts to infringe the constitutional protection of certain instances of unpopular speech—then I’d be totally on board with you on this one.
But this isn’t about trying to interfere with Imus’s or anybody else’s constitutional rights to free speech, which is what “removing speech from civil society” would entail. It’s simply about trying to remove the offensive speech from a particular commercial market using legal free-market activities.
This is not a bad impulse, and it’s perfectly consistent with a healthy liberal commitment to the constitutional right to free speech.
You obviously don’t agree with this perspective, because you think markets as well as civil society have a moral obligation to provide forums for free speech of all kinds irrespective of individual preference. I think you’re wrong.
I really don’t see anywhere this discussion can go from here except into an endless reiteration of statements from you along the lines of “you people are nanny-pussies who are betraying the right of free speech in the name of morality”, and from your opponents along the lines of “you people are delusional fanatics who are unrealistically demanding to co-opt markets in the name of morality”. Nothing’s going to give here, on either side. There simply is not enough agreement about the premises to reach any kind of consensus opinion.
I have to wonder, though, if your ire on the subject of using commercial pressure to remove commercial outlets for controversial speech is equally hot towards producers as it is towards boycott-launching consumers. Where are the calls for companies to start sponsoring, or continue sponsoring, commercial outlets for speech that they don’t like?
Well YWTF in one of these threads I tried to pursue that. Censorship indeed is the subject of this conversation. Some censorship is good. Your resturaunt example was a case of reasonable censorship. We censor these boards. Hate speech is prohibited on our airwaves. I self-censor all the time. I censor what can be said in my house. And the calls to fire someone who says objectionable things on the radio is also an attempt at censorship, a desire to keep this objectionable speech off of the airwaves. The means of this censorship was by a form of mob action by way of media circus pressuring advertisers who then pressured the media outlet who then exercised their right to remove his soapbox.
Is that the kind of censorship we should celebrate or is the sort that we shold bemoan? We seem to disagree on that.
To illustrate my concern let me give a few scenerios:
Murphy Brown portrayed a single Mom as a good thing. Forces objected to that. Would a concerted effort to punish the network and show advertisers for “endorsing” a lack of "family values be commendable?
Disney pulled out of distributing Farenheit 911. If pro war forces had succeeded in keeping it out of any distribution would that be a cause for celebrating the power of the threatened boycott?
A media outlet in the 50’s hires a writer who may have Communist sympathies. Under McCarthy’s leadership pressure is brought to bear to fire her or else the company would face the consequences of endorsing Communism. A good thing?
Muslims are ridiculed on a conservative talk show. They do not have the numbers or purchasing power that Blacks have. They boycott and no one cares. Too bad for them. Democracy and freedom of speech in action. Only a purchasing powerful group can influence what gets said. More cause to celebrate this particular method of censorship?
If I do not believe in protecting the rights of others to say what I disagree with then I have no right to object when others try to limit those with POVs that I like.
You haven’t addressed the specific questions I asked. Until you do that, we will never figure out where the main point of our contention lies. Talking about censorship, as I already mentioned, muddies the issue. Not only is it a loaded term, but it has nothing to do with why Imus was fired.
And why is this any different from a “mob” of customers in a restaurant complaining about my hypothetical waiter. Care to address my questions? They weren’t rhetorical.
By the way, the media circus was actually actively perpetuated by Imus’ employer. Chris Matthews, Olberman, Abrams, etc., all of them beseiged us with Imus-gate. MSNBC was not a victim; they were more of an agent in all of this than Sharpton and the rest of the rabble-rousers combined. Not only did they give nonstop coverage to this while they tried to make up their minds about appropriate disciplinary action, but they were the ones who decided to fire Imus. All everyone else did was exercise their 1st amendment rights by complaining.
I’ll do my best to answer your questions. Then you can do mine! But part of our not understanding each other is our different belief about whether this is about censorship or not. That discussion cannot be squelched: it is the critical dividing issue. Understanding our difference here does not muddy the water, it shows where the rocks are that we getting hung up on.
Why is speech different than other behavior? Because speech is ideas and the free exchange of ideas is the strength of our pluralistic society. Even ugly ideas.
What is different about the restaurant situation? Several things, including that restaurants do not sell ideas like media outlets do, but most of all the fact that people expressing their disappointment in your example are the potential consumers of the restaurants products. They are saying that they do not enjoy the product with a rude/offensive waiter so they will not patronize the establishment. The parallel with Imus is not listening to his show. But the people complaining about Imus were not voting by turning off. They were insisting that others not have an option to turn it on even if they wanted to. They were not customers and they wanted to prevent others from being able to be customers. He was not fired because his behavior drove listeners away but because he offended non-listeners. The desire was to use media mob action to influence advertisers and thereby to limit others’ choice in what they could hear. Legal yes. But in my mind wrong.
And the illustration of why I think it is wrong is in my list of situations and matching questions to you. This sort of tactic is a set-up for tyranny of the majority, or at least tyranny by those with large enough coordinated purchasing power. If the Religious Right is organized enough to use this tactic well then portrayals of gays, of single mothers, of unmarrieds living together, of all sorts of historic “devil music”, can be ethically squelched because enough consumers who do not watch those shows or buy that music anyway feel offended enought that others can that they will boycott any company that sponsors that show or plays that music. It was very much a tactic used during the Communist witch hunts: hire a suspected Communist sympathizer and forget about getting any right thinking American to patronize your products. In fact the blacklisting of alleged Communists in Hollywood is defended by the same logic that you are using here:
I do not accept this argument that blacklisting was not coercion. But to accept your POV is to accept the Communist blacklisting as an approriate act of “cultural self-defense.” Do you? How is what happened to Imus anything other than a call to blacklist him for speech that offends your ear? And a message to others that they could be blacklisted as well.
Please go through my examples and tell me how they are different other than by which side of the fence you are on.
and I was agreeing with you!
CMC fnord!
I’ll give this a shot. I don’t think I’ll say anything I haven’t said, but I’ll try to put in succinctly and in one post.
First off, everything I say applies only to speech. I’m not going to talk products at all.
Second, everything I say applies to what I consider the “right thing to do”. I have no contention that Sharpton or any organizers were not within their first amendment rights to do everything that they did.
So, Imus has X number of listeners every day. Let’s say 1 million (from thin air. Have no idea.) The radio station, knowing that they can tell advertisers that they will reach 1 million people every day, decide to give him a platform every day. I fully recognize that this is a privilege and not a right.
Those one million are happily listening, and the ratings stay up. Advertisers are happy.
One day, Imus puts his foot in his mouth. (aside: I would like to apologize for one thing. I originally put up a post because everyone seemed to think that his show was a news show, and weren’t aware that it was primarilly a comedy show. I ended up defending a position that maybe it was satire too strongly considering I hadn’t heard the comments.) Leaving aside the issue of whether the comments are the most offensive things ever said, he pisses off a number of people.
The station looks at the situation. Imus has one million listeners. Sharpton is calling for him to be removed from the air. Now, I don’t know what Imus’ demographic is, but I’m guessing that most of them don’t take their cue from Sharpton. The likelihood of more than a handful of those one million turning off the show is low. Let’s say, now he only reaches 950,000 people. The listeners are voting with their wallets; they think Imus’ show is still worth listening to.
In other words, I’m not sure I have such a problem with organizing boycotts against the show. I still think it’s silly to try to suppress speech, and I’d prefer everyone can say what they want nomatter how controversial. But here’s where I have the problem.
The decision to remove speech from the airwaves shouldn’t be taken lightly. The bar should be set high. However, since 950,000 people are still listening to the show, it seems that the public would still prefer to have the show on the air. Advertisers are willing to lose the 5% of their ad audience. The show continues on because the public voted with their wallets to allow it to. Had he said something worse, perhaps 500,000 would have stopped listening. Then, the radio station would look at the economics and realize that the public doesn’t want Imus’ speech on the air. But, that’s not what was happening.
Boycotters know this will get them nowhere. So, they threaten to boycott the advertisers.
The advertisers look at the situation and realize that the pros of staying on the air are reaching that 950,000 people. The cons are that a lot of people who used to shop at Staples, will now look elsewhere. Staples spooks, realizing that those 950,000 listeners who might possibly buy something are not as important as the people who will now look elsewhere, even if they are much fewer in number. Staples decision had nothing directly to do with what was actually said, merely the threat of a boycott of their product, which was come to by threats by a relatively small number of radio listeners, but a large number of Staples customers. The station could probably weather losing Staples, but add GM, and other companies, and obviously nomatter that the ratings say that people want to listen to the show, the show becomes unprofitable. The radio station pulls the show because it became unprofitable.
The important part is that the show didn’t become unprofitable because people were going to stop watching it; then, by all means yank him. The show became unprofitable because people were going to stop buying paper clips. They were voting with their wallets, but the price was much lower than it would have been because the bar was lowered. No longer do the boycotters have to convince people that the show is offensive, now all they have to do is convince a third party company that they will lose sales. The exact same 950,000 people are still willing to listen to the show.
When the bar is lowered, it allows a relatively small number of people, who weren’t listening to a certain speech anyway, to stop others who did want to listen from listening. Focus on the Family wants to stop gay groups from existing and speaking. They know that boycotting the gay groups speeches would be ineffective; they weren’t going anyway. So, they’ve called for boycotts of Wells Fargo Bank, which apparently has donated money to gay groups, which has a much higher chance of silencing gay groups. It should be hard for a group to censor another group’s speech. It certainly shouldn’t be that easy.
I don’t want what I’m able to easily listen to to be dictated by special interest groups’ influence over corporate sponsors. Nomatter how noble that interest group.
I have no illusion that this makes sense.
In other words, your definition of “setting the bar high” for “removing speech from the airwaves” (i.e., firing a particular speaker from a radio gig) is merely the profitability of the show as measured by number of listeners?
That doesn’t seem to me like a particularly lofty standard for protecting free speech in commercial venues. So, the free exchange of unpopular or controversial views is valuable in a democratic society if it attracts 950,000 listeners, but not if it only attracts 450,000 listeners? :dubious:
Absolutely not! This gets to the heart of it! Everyone should have a venue.
You have to start small probably. Start a blog with your ideas or something. If your ideas are good, people will listen to them. You may screw up along the way, and lose some of your listeners. As your ideas get more relevant to a larger audience, your venue will grow. You’ll get a radio station.
As your ideas get worse and worse, your audience will leave you and your venue will shrink back to a blog.
Profitability, which would ideally be determined by ratings, merely indicates how large your audience, and therefore how large your venue. When profitability is divorced from ratings is where I have a problem
My mistake. I apologize for eviscerating you like that.
I guess I was quite bothered at the time that there are people in this thread who still have not attempted to answer my direct questions to them, questions related to the person one of them actually included in their thread title and excoriated in their OP and throughout this thread.
Now, I’ve realized they’re conceding that they’re wrong (one has posted saying so) and moved on to other straw men and off-the-mark analogies.
So what? This line that you draw in the sand is completely arbitrary, IMO. MSNBC sells information. A restaurant sells food. Neither commodity is inherently more sacred than another in a free market economy.
They also don’t want to give their money to an establishment that hires folks who call patrons “jigaboo” and “chinky” when the walk in the door.
No, but they let MSNBC know that they were dissatisfied, with the implication that they would vote by turning off. Not just Imus, but the entire network. The complaints only served as forewarning. “FYI, I don’t watch networks that support this type of programming”. Which ethically is no different than a restaurant patron telling a manager “FYI, I don’t go to restaurants that allow customers to be treated like shit if they are the wrong race.”
As I pointed in the GD thread, you’re assuming facts that are not in evidence when you say that the people complaining are not viewers/listeners of Imus. In theory, anyone flipping through channels could become a part of Imus’ audience. That includes any unsuspecting person who clicks onto MSNBC when Imus is airing.
And I could make the same complaint about customers who “coerce” a restaurant to fire an offensive waiter. “No fair, they deprived the handful of others who like to see slurs thrown around! Those customers are tryng to censor free speech by using mob action.”
So what are people supposed to do if they object to a business’s practices? Should they not complain at all, lest there are other people out there complaining and thus a “mob action” occurs? The only alternative is simply not patronize that business anymore. In other words, boycott it. But oh noes! Boycotts are bad, too! Boycotts might actually have an economic impact! That’s not fair either!
You know what? I actually agree that this is a possible consequence of boycotts and the like. But just because that’s a possibility, doesn’t mean the whole concept is unethical. There are no holy grails in a free market economy. Just because Imus got paid to talk doesn’t mean the world is a better place with him doing so. Unless you’re saying it was ethically wrong for someone to complain to MSNBC about Imus’ behavior, you can’t blame what happened to Imus on anyone except two entities: Imus and his employer.
I don’t need to. Sometimes there will be boycotts that I disagree with. And then sometimes there will be boycotts that I support. Declaring that they’re all wrong is not only hypocritical (if you believe in freedom of speech), but it’s also foolish. Because the alternative is to take away people’s freedom to choose what they buy and why they buy it. That’s antithetical to just about everything this country is supposed to be about.
But obviously, everyone can’t have a for-profit commercial venue, because there’s simply not enough market for everyone’s ideas. So if profitability isn’t the determining factor for the value of free speech, why should we worry about protecting the profitability of commercial venues rather than the actual right to speech itself?
In other words, you’re not trying to protect free speech; you’re trying to protect profitability. It’s not Imus’s right to free speech that’s being threatened in any way here: it’s the value of his product.
What you think is unfair is that a commodity with a substantial market share should lose its marketability just because lots of other consumers stop supporting the product’s sponsors.
Have you ever considered that maybe you should be directing your ire instead at the structure of the media-advertising complex that makes boycotts possible? After all, if media consumers paid for all their entertainment directly instead of free-riding on the sponsorship of advertisers, it would be impossible for a show like Imus’s to lose support except by turning off its listeners.
With direct-to-consumer financing, consumers would directly control the profitability of whatever they listened to, and it would be impossible to divorce profitability from ratings. And that’s what you want, right?
But instead of stepping up to the plate and demanding direct media financing by media consumers in order to keep the market power in media consumers’ own hands, you just bitch about how mean it is for other consumers to use their economic power to stop supporting advertisers who sponsor shows they don’t like. You want to have your cake and eat it too: you want free or cheap media products whose cost is mostly borne by indirect support from advertisers, but you don’t want other consumers to legally use market activity to undermine that indirect support.
It’s not the right to free speech that you anti-boycott folks are concerned about here: it’s the “right” to freeload off of advertisers in order to consume media products you didn’t pay for in the first place. Well gee, cry me a river, you poor oppressed victims you. :dubious:
Don’t tell me what I have and have not done because you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ve been an XM subscriber for almost four years. The listener demands determines 100% what is on the stations. I did demand exactly what you’re talking about. I haven’t looked back on regular radio in all that time.
I’m also an XM stockholder, though that I’m less proud of.
Since, demand on satellite is determined by listeners. Which is Imus will be on satellite pretty soon. There’s, apparently still a demand there. I mean, his annual charity telethon for children with cancer apparently took in record amounts of money despite being pulled from the air a day early due to how dangerous it would be to leave him on the air for one more day.
Sharpton in addition to NOW in addition to plenty of other people. The more you limit this to Sharpton, the more you reveal a fixation that hurts your credibility.
You don’t know how Imus’ comments affected his ratings. They could have gone up (I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t happen) or they could have gone down. You’re also assuming that his comments didn’t offend any of them. I’m not sure if you can say one way or the other.
It only makes sense if you value some free speech over others. In practice, your philosophy means that its ethically wrong for people to do something as simple as complain to a network about programming that they find offensive, because “undue” pressure may be put on them to cancel that show. It also means that its wrong for people to ask advertisers to rethink how they spend their dollars, because again its unfairly “coercive”. So the only ethical option would be for people to shut up and change the channel. But that’s not right. If Imus can get on national radio and call people “hos”, then people should be able to speak out in response. His speech is no more sacrosanct than anyone elses.
Would you support a boycott of NBC by right-wing Christian evangelists because they might air, say, a documentary sympathetic to abortion clinics? Would that change your view?
Boycotts are a blunt force tool, a bullying tactic, nothing more. They say nothing about the moral legitimacy of whatever position they’re espousing.
Lost in all this is that Imus was a supremely silly target for this kind of nonsense. I used to listen to him about fifteen years ago, when I had to drive to work because there was no mass transit to the place I was working for at that time, and I used to enjoy him immensely. One of his standard lines was about Rush: that he was on some amazing number of stations, after which he would say “Name one.” Meaning that he was on all these obscure channels, but none with any real clout.
A lot of his stuff was bad, but a lot of it was very good, and he was merciless with everyone. Should rednecks have done to him what is being done to him now because of this exchange, about Clinton’s having named Bobby Ray Inman to be his Defense Secretary:
Mary Matalin: Good teeth. *
Bill Bradley: It’s not so much that as can you see this scene in the White House? (said with a distinct Southern drawl, imitating Clinton’s voice): Hey Bobby Ray? You know where those Eye-Cee-Bee-Eyms are?
Either you have a sense of humor or you don’t. There’s no cure for those who don’t. This unbelievably stupid incident proves that in spades. No pun intended, for the humor-impaired. I can’t believe I even have to write that. What a stupid world. What a bunch of hypocritical swine inhabit it.
BTW, for the truly ignorant above, some of whom have cited his supposed anti-Semitic comments: he’s a Jew. And a highly unapolegetic one at that. Which y’all would know if you ever bothered to actually listen to him. Not that any of you will ever get the opportunity anymore.
Asses.
*Reference to a bit by her future hubby, James Carville, who while appearing on Imus earlier, had given a few ways to recognize if you’re a hillbilly:
1 - If, when your front porch collapses, more than three dogs die.
2 - If, when your mother-in-law gets stopped by a state trooper for speeding, she doesn’t bother to take the lit Marlboro out of her mouth when she tells him to “kiss her ass”.
3 - If when you go to the local bar to see your girlfriend and she smiles, you compliment her by saying “Nice tooth”.
When I get to heaven, I’ll be sure to tell Rosa Parks and MLK this.
You’re equating that with a campaign to shield a bunch of athletes from locker-room talk? Unbelievable.
Hey, you’re the one making blanket statements, chum. You left the door open on that one.