A Stitch In Millertime

We at PE will be the first to admit that media is an industry ever fascinated with itself. For a host of different reasons that many a pundit has deconstructed, the Judy Miller story has been of particular interest to the journalistic navel-gazers everywhere. Tina Brown got it half right when she weighed in on the matter herself yesterday by saying the Judy Miller story has been to Arianna Huffington's blog "what O.J. Simpson was to cable news." She's only half right because that analogy applies not just to the Huffington Post, but every media critic from Chicago to Oregon and every media-attentive blog in between.

Amid all that, it is a rare case when one encounters an interpretation of the situation that actually unearths a rather unique angle. Michael Kinsley has done just that in today's Washington Post by examining The New York Times' strange appropriation of its views on First Amendment rights. While the paper says a journalist's right not to cooperate with law enforcement in order to protect the identity of an anonymous source is upheld by the First Amendment, the contention seems to sit oddly with another of the Times' views on the clause.

Kinsley explains by outlining the Times' recent editorial that disagreed with the Supreme Court's ruling that says campaign spending is an exercise of free speech protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was being challenged by a Vermont law that limits how much a candidate can spend on a gubernatorial race.

Says Kinsley:

The court's equation of money with speech is the despair of biens-pensants everywhere, but especially at the New York Times. A Times editorial called the state of Vermont "laudable" (an adjective that exists only in newspaper editorials) and declared that "the absence of [spending] limits gives an unfair advantage to wealthy candidates, who can spend vast amounts of their own money."

That last point is obviously true. Unfortunately, it should be equally obvious that limits on spending for speech are limits on speech, both in intent and in effect. You can't use money to buy votes directly in this country, for the most part. Having more money is an unfair advantage only to the extent that it is spent on sending a louder or more persuasive message. The government can and should do many things to make the softer voices louder. But when it tries to make the louder voices softer, it is reducing speech, which is unconstitutional.

… the Times believes that its First Amendment right to speak includes a right (for journalists only) not to speak when subpoenaed in a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, it cannot see how a right to speak includes the right to spend money on speech.

As many have pointed out over the years, the Times might feel differently about a law that limited how much any one person or organization could spend putting out a newspaper, although that, too, would reduce the "unfair advantage" of some players over others.