Media Musings: Tennessee given two Muzzles
It often seems like the First Amendment is so far from the everyday lives of so many people because the United States Supreme Court is constantly shaping it. But, when it’s tested at the local level, the old First is often trotted out to defend speech time and again.
The reason for such awards as the annual Jefferson Muzzles is to publicly focus attention on outrageous excess by boards and individuals when it comes to controversial – or potentially controversial – speech.
Tennessee “won” two Muzzles this year, which are awarded by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded.
One went to McMinnville City Administrator Herb Llewellyn for barring city employees from writing letters to the editor or calling radio stations without his approval. What prompted the gag order was a sports opinion column in the Southern Standard criticizing food quality at ballparks. Two city employees wrote to defend concessions at the local Civic Center, even though the columnist never mentioned local venues.
An effort was made to say the memo was prompted by a city policy where the only person allowed to speak for the city is the mayor, in this case Royce Davenport. It would appear both the mayor and city manager were correct in arguing the only spokesman on policy matters would be the mayor, but a total gag on city employees in an opinion area wouldn’t have stood court review.
This is a small tempest, granted, but what the Muzzle is trying to showcase is free speech is a local matter, not just debated by lawyers before the nine members of the nation’s highest court. Said again, free speech gets battered at the local level every day and it must be defended and underscored at all levels.
The second Muzzle is much more troubling. The Tennessee Arts Commission placed a blanket ban on art depicting nude figures in a Nashville gallery. I am confident the members of that body knew full well that nude figures are as old as the ancient Greeks. I think it probably was afraid of public reaction, like calling for a boycott of the gallery or wondering aloud why public money was being used to corrupt the young.
After all, it was the brilliant, but controversial, art of Robert Mapplethorpe that almost cost the nation’s arts commission its Federal funding when Robert Dole and Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond shouted from the floor of Congress that the agency was mis-managed by funding a small portion of the Mapplethorpe show. Never mind those arguments about the importance of art, they roared – use private money.
It’s no surprise the center hammered Attorney General John Ashcroft and the 107th Congress for passage of the USA Patriot Act.
Using the winds of fear, they forced into law the most repressive measures in history regarding freedom of speech. Part of the law gives federal investigators power to secretly examine book or use records in libraries and bookstores. There’s a way around some of this madness. Don’t buy books from Internet sites (sorry Amazon, my old pal). Pay for your purchases in cash at all bookstores. Then there’s no record. That’s what I will do. Also, ask your library about its data base, if the new policy troubles you.
And, if you think this is the end of the passion to control expression, the proposed additions to the existing Patriot Act – which Ashcroft said was just in the talking stage – has been leaked and it’s 80 pages long.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)