Free speech threats in the US and UK

Its time to make a stand for freedom of expression and the freedom of the press with no ifs or buts

Everybody in public life in the US and UK claims to believe in freedom of expression and a free press. Strange, then, that a growing number of people should now choose to exercise that freedom in order to declare that it should be limitedat least for others.

The mantra of the moment is, Of course I believe in free speechBUT And the buts are getting bigger. It is high time to make a stand for freedom of expression and the freedom of the press with no ifs or buts, as liberties that we must defend for all or none at all.

On both sides of the Atlantic, attention focuses on the overt threats to freedom of expression posed by state interference, as illustrated by the scandals over the NSA spying revelations and the Justice Department secretly seizing AP journalists phone records. In Britain, where I work as a journalist, we still labor under the worst defamation laws in the civilized world. These laws, under which truth is no defense and the defendant is assumed guilty until proven otherwise, attract powerful libel tourists from around the world, seeking to use the London courts to silence their critics; US courts have rightly refused to enforce judgements imposed by UK libel courts.

There are also, however, even more insidious challenges to freedom of expression today that attract less oppositionand can even be supported by the same supposedly liberal voices that will speak out against state censorship.

The problem is clearest in the UK, where the free speech, BUT lobby dominates public debate. Over there, folks like me are labeled First Amendment fundamentalistsand that is meant as a damning criticismfor daring to suggest that British culture might have something to learn from the US safeguards on freedom of expression.

Where the US has the historic 45 words of the First Amendment, we got the one million words of Lord Justice Levesons report earlier this year proposing statutory regulation of the press. This has been the cutting edge of a crusade to purge the UK press of things that are not to the taste of those who deem popular a dirty word. In my book I describe it as ethical cleansing. But because the authorities used the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdochs now-shuttered News of the World as the pretext for the purge, Leveson was supported by many liberal politicians, lobbyists, journalists, and journalism academics who fear and loath the tabloids and their readers. Of course nobody in the UK press will defend the illegal hacking of the voicemail messages of innocent victims of crime, especially those of abducted and murdered teenager Milly Dowler. But individual crimes that should have been a narrow matter for the police have been turned into the excuse for an official assault on, in the words of Leveson, the entire culture, practice and ethics of the British press.

Even in the Land of the Free and the First Amendment, the Free Speech, BUT group has been gaining ground. One big battleground is the college campus, where controversial speech codes and restrictive free speech zones have been backed in the name of countering hate speech and promoting tolerance. A joint letter from the US Education Department and Justice Department, sent to the University of Montana in May in response to the colleges mishandling of serious sexual assault cases, announced that speech could now be considered sexual harassment, and that this would be a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country. This is a striking example of a dangerous modern phenomenon: We might call it intolerant tolerance, or illiberal liberalism.

And in the US, too, despite the constitutional protection of the free press, many would like to exclude unethical tabloid journalism from that hard-won freedom. Hence the new California law against paparazzi photographing celebrities with their children has provoked relatively little controversy, since it should only affect gossip sheets and scandalmongers. Those wishing to limit press freedom on both sides of the Atlantic have had considerable success in using high-profile victims of media intrusion and children as effective human shields for their campaign.

The creeping culture of You-Cant-Say-That needs to be challenged on every front. The biggest danger facing freedom of expression in our societies will not be sweeping state censorship, but the creation of a stultifying atmosphere of conformism and the sanitization of the press and public debate.

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Free speech threats in the US and UK