The Interview and free speech: let’s not get too smug

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2014/dec/26/the-interview-free-speech-smug

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Censorship battles are usually a good thing, especially when powerful voices and interests are ranged on opposing sides. They illuminate the social and political landscape in a country – our own, as well as those we routinely regard as less enlightened. But the triangular controversy over Sony Pictures’ low-budget comedy The Interview, North Korea and the White House has not made my Christmas.

Americans were busy congratulating themselves for “standing up for free speech” after a string of independent cinemas and chains across the republic started screening the film, and cinemagoers turned out in solid numbers to see it. “We can show Kim Jong-un we’re Americans, we can still screen something,” one US teenager told the Guardian in suburban New Jersey.

Well, good for him. But paying to sit in comfort and watch a movie is not much of a price to fork out in the defence of free speech or liberty – and no one should confuse it with the real thing, as dissidents in dangerous countries and beleaguered opponents of Syria’s Assad regime can readily confirm. It’s like confusing online “clickocracy” with more meaningful forms of public participation.

Sony blamed the major distribution chains for cancelling a wider release of what sounds like a pretty tacky movie – corporations protecting their property (or their customers?) from possible attack by the so-called Guardians (no relation) of Peace. That came after Barack Obama ticked them all off for betraying liberty under assault from a North Korean proxy.

You could see the corporates’ point of view (“Hey, it’s only a comedy”), and for that matter North Korea’s (“capitalist swine openly plot to kill our revered hereditary leader”). But it’s a superior kind of row that gets a weirdo pseudo-Marxist regime protesting about assassination – something the regime does to its own folk as well as others – while liberal Hollywood resists a president defending their right to make and distribute rubbish.

But let’s not get too smug. One does not have to be Noam Chomsky, radical author of Manufacturing Consent and other systemic attacks on US media, to accept that American tolerance of heretical views in mainstream culture has often been quite fragile down the centuries. Libertarian forces on left and right, stronger than in old Europe, have been pitted against authoritarian ones in regular battles: the race-and-slavery question and raging anti-communism are two of the most conspicuous, but it’s worth recalling that the US also tried to ban alcohol from 1919 to 1933 via the ill-fated Volstead Act. Damaging effects of this authoritarian folly linger on in attitudes towards drugs and organised crime.

But it goes further. Good US media can be pretty brilliant, intelligent, tenacious and brave, none better. But there isn’t too much of it, certainly not outside the major cities, by which I mostly mean New York. Even before newspaper groups and TV chains fell into the problems we all share as a result of disruptive new technologies and falling revenues from ads and readers, most US newspapers (there were 1,600 dailies the last time I looked) were pretty timid affairs. When I used to talk regularly on campus at small-but-nice liberal arts colleges you’ve never heard of, I would tell my students that the British press faced legal pressures (contempt of court, tough libel laws, secrecy codes) largely unknown in the land of the First Amendment, the right to free speech, cited last week by Obama.

But the US press, I argued and still would argue, faces far harsher commercial pressures, chiefly because there were/are almost no national newspapers, competing across the country and avowedly partisan in the way, say, the Daily Mail and the Guardian are. Local monopolies depend on local advertisers and need to placate Democrats and Republicans, though probably not Prof Chomsky, who thinks they’re all part of a tightly drawn elite consensus to manufacture support for state policy.

Chomsky is a bit like Ukip with a PhD – they all think they’ve got the answers, that the Great Satan (the US or EU) is to blame for all our woes and that everyone else has false consciousness. But just as such people are not all right, they’re not all wrong either. About the time I stopped being invited to chatter on liberal arts campuses, the 9/11 attacks of 2001 imposed a stifling degree of patriotic conformity on US media, far more pernicious than during the Vietnam war, which had been widely resisted. A few publications stood up to this quasi-state of emergency during the Bush administration; others have since been blindsided by the awkward fact that Obama is black, a liberal and something of an intellectual, as well as being a drone bomber. Life can be complicated.

Can we be smugger than the other bugger? Not really. We did much better than the US media in questioning both the ethics and practical consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq – before, during and after the event, though the Yanks have lately been catching up. They did better than us in response to Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the alarming and unaccountable reach of GCHQ and its US patrons at the NSA. That was a row with powerful voices on both sides – in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s case, one voice on both sides, though she gradually came to realised she’d been stiffed by the CIA and NSA.

But closer to home there was a scream of pain from the Tory press when the BBC decided (who says the suits don’t have a sense of humour?) to run Hilary Mantel’s fantasy The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, as a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Kim Jong-un probably read the outraged cuttings with approval. At the time I tweeted that the same newspapers were untroubled by Robert Harris’s enjoyable thriller The Ghost, which told the story of memoirs being crafted on behalf of an exiled British former PM called Adam Lang now living on Martha’s Vinyard, the Hampstead of the north-east Atlantic. Lang bore a striking resemblance to Harris’s estranged pal Tony Blair. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, look away now: it ends badly.

Some fellow tweeters reminded us all that there is a long tradition of such fiction – Freddie Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal, for example. Others said this was different, that Mantel’s perspective was sympathetic to the would-be killer or that Harris had decently changed Blair’s name. I’m not persuaded. I think most of us sometimes adapt our standards according to what we believe about the subject under discussion.

Still not convinced? The other day my old Westminster colleague and co-founder long ago of the Independent, Stephen Glover, protested in his Daily Mail column that some Christmas cards mocked or abused the central Christian message of Christmas, the Nativity. As with The Interview, such tacky cards can be defended on the grounds of free speech and those offended by them told they can just ignore them. Obama, whose religious faith seems to be Churchillian (ie non-existent) would probably echo that sentiment. So may well you: Christmas is the winter solstice festival that those crafty God-botherers have hijacked.

Ah, but would the card manufacturers – do Sony make cards? – dare to mock Islam in this way, Glover asks? Or Judaism? Good question, to which we know the answer: too risky, too much trouble – too dangerous, even. Remember the gently offensive Danish cartoon about Muhammad? Precisely.