Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Americans have the right to be audible. This is an implied right under the freedom of speech because what is speech, really, if one is forbidden from having an audience? Free speech was designed originally to allow those with political views to argue for those views in the earshot of those who might not already agree about those views. The freedoms of the press and of assembly let us preach to the choir, but only the freedom of speech allows me to try to convert people. Yet this right has been dramatically curtailed in the last several decades:

“Free speech” areas, currently legal under the doctrine of time, place, and manner restrictions.

Ostensibly, these are designed to prevent people from disrupting other people’s speeches and activities. Yet even standing next to the primary focus of an event, I never had the right to disrupt that event (directly at least: the ideas in my speech may be arbitrarily disrupting) with my right to speak. There was no need to ban all speech in certain places in order to prevent that. In practice, these separate-but-equal “speech quarantine” areas are used to shove officially unpopular speech into the background, while discriminating in favor of speech endorsed by those in power. Those whose speech is favored by the state get to use its resources to project their message, while those whose speech is disfavored aren’t even allowed to be seen.

Speech in “private” places.

Malls have significantly replaced the public square as the centers of American community life. Yet they currently may forbid any political speech within their property. This, of course, leaves political speech with no effective place to live. The malls argue that since they own the property, they have the right to determine what goes on within it, and this would be a perfectly reasonable argument, were they just a private area. Yet the civil rights movement set the precedent that a business open to the public must obey a higher standard than, say, a private office. This should extend not just to the people but also to the activities allowed inside. Of course, the diners favored for the civil rights movement’s sit-ins are too small to allow public speech without disrupting the primary business of the place. But any place, like a mall, or some bookstores and coffee shops, which is intended as a public forum, must allow all speech in that area, not just that speech deemed acceptable to the management.

Finally, advertisements.

Commercials are a more subtle issue because they’re never exactly open to the public; they’re merely a way to pay for the ability to speak to large numbers of people at once. But, once the basic exchange of money for speech has been established, it must be executed without any more discrimination about the content of the ads than is allowed in government-owned places. If a car company can pay $100,000 to tell me to buy a car, Adbusters must be able to pay $100,000 to tell me not to buy a car. Station owners argue that allowing certain content in their commercials will drive off other advertisers. This argument should be disregarded for two reasons: First, the government created these profits in the first place by establishing the monopolies over broadcasting. Second, the right of a human being to speak, and thereby effect change, trumps any claim of a corporation to make money.

The freedom of speech has been slowly taken away in recent history by both the gradual reduction in public space and apparently minor procedural restrictions like speech quarantine areas. It’s time to reverse that decline and take back our right to be audible.