Topics Freedom

Question It seems to me that the power of the first amendment to protect freedom of speech is vastly overstated. If a wealthy corporation doesn't like a magazine which is agitating against them they can just buy the magazine. Wouldn't freedom of the press be better served by some degree of government involvement?

Accepted:
January 10, 2013

Comments

Very interesting observation and question!

The first amendment is (I believe) customarily treated as what some philosophers call a "negative right." That is, the amendment refers to the duty of government and private citizens to REFRAIN from outlawing or unjustly silencing "voices" that are licit (that is, the people speaking / publishing are not breaking some other precept of justice, e.g. a newspaper uses its prestige to make baseless claims about the outbreak of an epidemic that does not exist causing a mass population to a panic that leads to many preventable deaths). So, initially, it seems the first amendment does not involve a positive right, a right that would entail duties on behalf of people to insure that all voices be heard/ made public.

So, in the case you bring up: if a wealthy corporation has broken no laws and (let us imagine) has acquired its wealth justly (from a moral point of view), it seems that the second amendment would not be a sound basis for objecting to their acquisition of a magazine critical of the corporation. But your question and observation brings up a vital point: in a democracy, the citizens need to have access to fair and balanced information about their nation and the world. Other things being equal, it seems that a publicly funded source of information / news would be better than a news organization funded by private financing with a specific ideological agenda or, putting things differently, did not have a vested interest in the result. So, I believe that many of us would be more likely to trust a claim by a study that was funded by the public on the safety of Tobacco products than a study funded by Philip Morris.

While I suggest that there MIGHT be nothing unethical or illegal about a corporation buying a magazine critical of the company, democratic societies have a real and significant interest in insuring that their citizens have a fair and balanced understanding of what occurs locally and internationally. So, if the free market economy is unable to sustain a public investigation into whether a company is implicated in dangerous practices, there is a collective interest in supporting news sources that are not vulnerable to manipulation due to market pressures, especially those advanced by the company itself.