Commercial Speech Is Free Speech, Now?

FCC Wins Lifetime Award for “Muzzle-ing” Free Speech

For decades, the defense of obscenity, profanity, and pornography has been a favorite liberal cause rather more central to the liberal cultural revolution of the mid-20th Century than many Democrats would care to publicly recall in an election year.

The major liberal court decisions of that period that pertained to free speech were split between decisions affecting state secrets and decisions affecting the moral censorship of the arts and the mass media that was a side-effect of the cultural and political power of the churches – a side-effect of the then prevailing “lite” version of establishment of religion, in fact.

Needless to say, the decisions that had the most visible impact on everyday life were those affecting moral censorship rather than government secrecy.

In the nature of the case, a result of the permissive liberal revolution in the law that, as part of the general sexual revolution at work in society at that time, was on the whole and in many ways a good thing, was the increasing debasement of popular culture. Perhaps to the surprise of few, the “lowest common denominator” so relentlessly sought by commercial culture turned out to involve large doses of sex, violence, obscenity, and profanity.

So much is this the case that the even more competitively and relentlessly commercial cable television has brought us, with very few exceptions, not much by way of higher quality, niche-market material exempt from these effects of the commercial pressures on mass media, but hundreds of channels of more and worse as the cable marketers have sought to justify the extra cost of their product to their customers by offering programming even more marked by sex, violence, obscenity, and profanity.

A result has been that, just as it was before the rise of cable, the least dreadful television available is provided by public broadcasting, itself increasingly under pressure owing to the need to seek corporate sponsors after years of Republican attacks excused by libertarian ideology but motivated by taxpayer resistance to its costs and the resistance to competition of the commercial industry.

This is the context within which the regulatory efforts of the FCC have taken on the role of defense of broadcast TV, the cheap TV readily available to the masses who are less able to afford cable, as a non-toxic preserve of popular culture less urgently requiring parental control and supervision than the commercial sludge, some of it explicitly aimed at children, all over the cable.

From being agents of Mrs. Grundy, enforcers of the most blue-nosed repression at the behest of Bishops and other churchmen around the country some half a century ago, the FCC has become an agent of un-wealthy and un-influential and generally powerless parents seeking to preserve a safe haven for children and family programming.

Mrs. Grundy is dead and Larry Flint has built his throne as a liberal hero on her grave. And now, metaphorically if not literally, he is attempting to beat back government regulators who stand between him and his desire to deny the people their right to insist on a small corner of the entertainment world free of his control.

Just as freedom of expression as a positive, democratic right of the people is not about empowering the oligarchs to monopolize the media with their propaganda, neither is it about empowering the prole-feed industry to reach, debase, and dominate every form of mass entertainment and every popular art.

It is sad that liberals have not, with the changing role of the FCC and the changing nature of mass culture, changed their tune. It is true that in the past the censorial efforts of that agency were part of the domination of culture by churches and the blue-noses. But today its efforts are best understood alongside the role of public broadcasting and, for that matter, public libraries, which is certainly not to provide more of the same commercial sludge, but free of charge.