• Tag Archives free speech

  • Canada May Ban Fox News from Cable TV for ‘Abusive’ Tucker Carlson Segment

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The regulatory body that oversees broadcasting in Canada has opened a public consultation about potentially banning Fox News from cable TV. Initiated on May 3, the process was prompted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Egale Canada, which asked for the consultation in early April in response to a Tucker Carlson segment that, in their view, “aimed to provoke hatred and violence against 2SLGBTQI communities.”

    “This programming is in clear violation of Canadian broadcasting standards and has no place on Canadian broadcasting networks,” wrote Executive Director Helen Kennedy in an open letter. “Egale has experienced firsthand the hate that is generated from a single segment aired on Fox News in Canada. We cannot begin to imagine the broader impacts and potential rise in hate that might result from allowing more content like this to air in Canada.”

    The body conducting the public consultation is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), essentially Canada’s version of the Federal Communications Commision (FCC). Among other things, the CRTC is responsible for enforcing the Broadcasting Act, which governs broadcasting in Canada.

    “The CRTC maintains a list of international channels cable, satellite and IPTV providers can include in their packages,” the National Post explains. And the list does change every now and then. “In March 2022,” the Post writes, “the CRTC removed Russia Today and RT France from the list, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    Fox News was originally approved for Canadian viewers in 2004 and has been available in Canada ever since.

    The specific regulation Egale Canada is accusing Fox News of breaking is section 5(b) of the Television Broadcasting Regulations which prohibits broadcasts of “any abusive comment or abusive pictorial representation that, when taken in context, tends to or is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.”

    Prohibiting what amounts to hate speech on public television may sound somewhat reasonable, but it opens the door for considerable censorship, as this story illustrates. After all, who gets to define hate speech?

    Now, we could quibble about this specific regulation and how it should be interpreted or whether it should even exist, but there’s a much bigger issue to highlight, namely, the issue of broadcasting regulations as such.

    For context, radio and television broadcasters in Canada are heavily regulated, much more than most people realize.

    For one, foreign ownership of broadcasters is significantly restricted. As University of Ottawa law professor Dr. Michael Geist notes, “The foreign ownership rules generally limit [broadcast] licensees to 20 percent foreign ownership (up to 33 percent for a holding company). This covers all types of broadcasters including television, radio, and broadcast distributors.”

    There are also strict rules about the amount of Canadian content—often called CanCon—that broadcasters must feature. The Canadian YouTuber J.J. McCullough draws attention to these requirements in an article for the Washington Post. “It is thanks to the CRTC, for instance, that Canadian radio stations ‘must ensure that at least 35% of the Popular Music they broadcast each week is Canadian content,’” he writes, “and that Canadian television stations must ‘devote not less than 50 per cent of the evening broadcast period to the broadcasting of Canadian programs.’”

    As you can imagine, there is a complex list of rules that specify exactly what is required for media to be considered “Canadian Content.” Many of the personnel involved must be Canadians, for instance, and at least 75% of program and post-production expenses must pay for services from Canadians or Canadian companies.

    Notably, it was these CanCon requirements that prompted much of the backlash against the recently passed Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, which essentially aims at expanding these kinds of requirements to online platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. The legislation, originally called Bill C-10, has become quite contentious in Canada over the past few years because of the new powers it gives the government to regulate online content platforms.

    Now, some proponents of Bill C-11 point out that the current system is rigged against legacy media and in favor of online content creators, and that Bill C-11 will level the playing field. I agree the current system is unfair in this regard. But the way to fix that is to deregulate legacy media, not to impose the same restrictions they face on new media.

    Deregulating the broadcasting industry may sound radical, but it’s actually the status quo that should be cause for concern. Though they are rarely labeled as such, the current broadcasting regulations in Canada essentially amount to a form of protectionism. Steven Globerman comments on these regulations in a refreshingly candid 2014 study published by the Fraser Institute.

    “One of the longest standing shibboleths of Canadian public policy is that popular culture industries in Canada must be financially supported and protected by government if those industries are to survive,” he writes. “While it is certainly incorrect to characterize all culture policy as protectionist, Canadian content regulations and foreign ownership limitations can be fairly characterized as such.”

    The truth that is rarely spoken is that there’s a whole “Canadian Content” industry being propped up by these regulations, and it stands to lose a lot if the quotas and other protections were to disappear.

    A group called SOCAN, which lobbies on behalf of Canadian musicians, eagerly boasts about the success of these regulations.

    “In 1971, the Government of Canada recognized a problem: Canadian music wasn’t being played on Canadian radio, but foreign artists (mostly American) were. This meant that non-Canadian artists received the vast majority of radio airtime. Money flowed from Canada to support foreign talent rather than our Canadian talent.

    As a result, Canadian Content (‘CanCon’) rules were implemented for radio stations. The CanCon rules require that at least 35 percent of music broadcast by radio stations during peak hours must meet a defined minimum level of ‘Canadian.’ In Québec, the level increases to up to 65 percent for French-language radio stations. The rest of the ‘traditional’ sector (television and cable) also has its own CanCon rules.

    Those rules have been enormously successful in ensuring that Canada has its own cultural industry and Canadian voices, creating, sustaining, and building a significant source of monetary, emotional and cultural value. There are few, if any, aspects of Canadian culture that foster as much national pride and value as the success of music made in Canada.

    Today, we’re facing a similar but new challenge: Canadian music isn’t sufficiently prominent on internet-based services.”

    They go on to advocate for Bill C-10 (the precursor of Bill C-11) to “bring the Broadcasting Act into the digital era” because “it’s imperative to continue to sustain and build Canadian-made music.”

    If this reminds you at all of the whole “Made in America” rhetoric, then you understand this issue perfectly. And if the emphasis on “preserving Canadian cultural identity” strikes you as a Baptist cover for a Bootlegger motive, then you’re really paying attention.

    Why does this group favor the existing regulations and their expansion with Bill C-11? Because they represent the beneficiaries, the creators of “Canadian Content” who are given a competitive edge against their foreign counterparts with these quotas. An industry that owes much of its existence to a certain set of regulations tends to push pretty hard to keep those regulations. And if they can gain even more quotas in the increasingly dominant new media, all the better.

    Should broadcasting regulations be scrapped then? Absolutely. Not only is broadcaster licensing protectionist, it’s also censorious, because it gives the government the power to control who is allowed to broadcast. The economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard discusses this in his book For a New Liberty.

    “Because every station and every broadcaster must always look over its shoulder at the FCC, free expression in broadcasting is a sham. Is it any wonder that television opinion, when it is expressed at all on controversial issues, tends to be blandly in favor of the ‘Establishment’?”

    Just imagine if the government tried to create licensing for books or newspapers, Rothbard says. “What we would all consider intolerable and totalitarian for the press and the book publishers is taken for granted in a medium which is now the most popular vehicle for expression and education: radio and television. Yet the principles in both cases are exactly the same.”

    So what would a free market in broadcasting look like? Fortunately, we don’t have to guess. It would look like the internet, which the CRTC has thus far not been regulating (hence the push for Bill C-11). In other words, it would look like more choice and by-and-large better content.

    Now, some might object to a free market in broadcasting because certain producers of “Canadian Content” would go under as a result. This is probably true, but success in content creation should depend on your ability to win viewers, not on your ability to rig the system in your favor.

    Others may object because they believe patriotism and a national identity is important to foster. But it’s not the government’s place to foster culture. If the Chinese government imposed “Chinese Content” requirements for their broadcasters and had state-approved content creators to fill these quotas, wouldn’t that be considered an unwarranted interference with press freedom? Why should it be considered any less egregious when we do it?

    Still others may object because of concerns about hate speech, such as with the Fox News case. But hate speech laws already exist in the Criminal Code. Now, whether those laws are themselves legitimate is another matter. For the purposes of this discussion the point is that specific hate speech regulations on broadcasters are at best redundant with existing laws and at worst censorious. In either case they shouldn’t exist.

    A final objection that might be raised is that without regulation, Canadians would be allowed to watch foreign propaganda like Russia Today. And it’s true, RT would probably be on cable TV in a free market. But there’s a couple of points to make in response. First, it should be up to consumers to decide what constitutes state propaganda, not bureaucrats. And second, if your concern is genuinely that Canadians might be allowed to watch RT on TV, I would simply point out the irony that you are advocating for government censorship in the name of opposing authoritarianism.

    Speaking of irony, it’s curious that Canadian politicians love to posture on the world stage about their commitment to freedom. If they actually want to practice freedom and not just pay lip service to it, the complete deregulation of broadcasting would be a great place to start.

    This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • A Warning to Americans From Across the Pond: Don’t Take Your Free Speech Rights for Granted

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    For the past decade, freedom of speech has been at the forefront of America’s culture war, and it should not be controversial to say that both sides are at least partly to blame for this.

    Many on the left have exploited their expanding cultural hegemony to suppress dissenting speech in universities, religious institutions, and the creative industries, while some on the right have attempted to suppress “obscenity,” punish the speech of their ideological enemies, and micromanage classroom instruction.

    To those on all sides who think of America’s proud free speech tradition as a political football, I have a simple message: heed Britain’s example.

    Last month, a woman was arrested in the UK for refusing to cooperate with a Police investigation into her activities near an abortion clinic. What stimulated this investigation? Was she blocking access to the clinic? Harassing women seeking an abortion? No, she was silently praying.

    The arrest of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is just the latest in a tapestry of alarming censorship exhibits. Since the passage of the Communications Act in 2003, it has become the norm to see reports of people being jailed for ‘offensive’ private text messages; during the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth, several peaceful anti-monarchy protesters were detained or arrested; and in a recent statement, the Crown Prosecution Service argued sections of The Bible “are simply no longer appropriate in modern society and … would be deemed offensive if stated in public.”

    The reaction of Britain’s governing elite has not been to correct this sorry state of affairs, but to double down on Parliamentary efforts to curb free expression. New legislation called The Public Order Bill, if passed, will have a chilling effect on our right to protest; the government’s proposed Online Safety Bill would fatally undermine encryption, while forcing tech companies to censor speech “on an industrial scale”; and some MPs have recently taken it upon themselves to sign a letter condemning an offensive op-ed about Meghan Markle.

    Thankfully, the American Constitution is clear that decisions about the content of speech are not in the purview of legislators, but individuals. Although post-New Deal Supreme Court jurisprudence leaves much to be desired, it is to the judiciary’s credit that it has generally upheld First Amendment provisions stringently.

    While a strong system of constitutional protections is a vital prerequisite to upholding individual freedom, it is not a silver bullet. The key threat to free speech in the UK comes from voters’ unwillingness to defend the right at the ballot box.

    On free speech, most Brits are split into two groups. The first takes a Helen Lovejoy-esque approach to speech, with “Won’t somebody think of the children?” being an essential rallying cry for their campaign to encourage more online censorship. This group tends to endorse the view that causing offence or panic trumps the right to free expression, which in turn underpins their desire for other restrictions like anti-hate speech and anti-misinformation laws.

    The second group’s approach is akin to appeasement, condemning the latest encroachment on free speech (particularly when it affects them or their in-group) and proclaiming censorship should not go one step further. They rarely, however, make the principled case for free speech or advocate the repeal of all speech-suppressing laws.

    The first group is an active threat to free speech, while the second lacks the ideological commitment to fight back against the tide of censorship engulfing British law.

    The task ahead for those of us trying to restore free speech is titanic: first, we have to engineer a colossal change in the culture around free speech, such that voters will no longer tolerate infringements on their freedom by MPs. If we can accomplish this, we must then repeal a gargantuan body of speech-suppressing legislation. Only then would it be possible to implement institutional protections akin to the First Amendment, which would shield freedom of expression from future Parliamentary interference.

    Those willing to take on this task look to America as the shining city on the hill—a haven of free expression in a world becoming increasingly hostile to it. So much of the work we must do in the UK is already done in the US: you have a proud revolutionary heritage which promotes individual expression, characters who stand proudly as individuals against the mob are core to so much of your history and mythology, and your constitutional guarantee of free speech has largely withstood the challenges thrown its way.

    This has not, however, always been true. During World War I, Americans were whipped into a patriotic fervor which saw dissent as a vice, not a virtue. As expected, Congress was not immune to that fervor, passing the Espionage Act of 1917, which restricted anti-war speech. Tragically, the Supreme Court also refused to stop liberties being undermined, upholding Congressional censorship in cases like Debs v. United States—which approved the imprisonment of socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs for speaking against the war—and Schenck v. United States—which upheld the criminalization of speech urging people to ignore the draft and originated the misguided idea that falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater is not legally protected speech.

    As America’s past and Britain’s present show, you cannot always rely on precedent and institutions to protect free speech. In 1944, Judge Learned Hand delivered a speech titled “The Spirit of Liberty.” While I believe the vision of liberty he articulated in the speech was flawed, he delivered an important insight when he said:

    “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

    The future of free speech lies in the heart of every American, in every university lecture theater, in every protest, in every vote, in every speech, and in every debate. Nurture it and selfishly guard it, because if politicians sense that your willingness to protect it has diminished, everything from your right to speak out against government policy to your right to silently pray outside an abortion clinic may, before you even realize it, be eroded.

    Freedom of speech is functionally extinct in Britain. I urge all Americans to learn the lessons from our experience.


    Harrison Griffiths

    Harrison Griffiths is Communications Officer at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank in London.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Free speech used to be held up as one of the core American institutions. It was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason: while other countries have also adopted free speech, it is a fundamentally American tradition.

    More than that, free speech is essential on its own terms. It is the single best way for humans to make progress. None of us are perfect, and none of us know the full truth. Therefore we all need to engage in the marketplace of ideas in order to find the truth and develop the best path forward.

    But free speech has been under attack for decades.

    One of the earliest—and most influential—critics was Herbert Marcuse, a college professor and the father of the New Left. In an essay called Repressive Tolerance published in 1969, Marcuse recommended removing rights (including the right to free speech) from conservatives. Marcuse didn’t see the world in terms of human beings who all have equal worth; he saw the world in terms of power. Those with power should be forcibly silenced (at least, the ones he disagreed with) so that those at the bottom could have more freedom. For Marcuse, if a majority is being repressed, what is needed is “repression and indoctrination” of the powerful so that the weak get the power they deserve.

    In recent years, Marcuse-style attacks on free speech have filtered down from academic institutions into the mainstream.

    Ilya Shapiro, adjunct law professor at George Washington University and the University of Mississippi, provides a case study on the new rules around who can speak and what they can say. Early in 2022 Georgetown Law School hired him to teach. When President Biden said he would only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro expressed dismay at this form of blatant affirmative action. At the voicing of this heterodox view, the sky fell down on him.

    Georgetown swiftly placed Shapiro on administrative leave, where he languished for months without knowing whether or not he’d be fired. An administrative investigation into the offending Tweets lasted 122 days.

    Georgetown finally reinstated Shapiro, but only on the technicality that he hadn’t officially started at Georgetown at the time he sent his tweets. The Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) said that his comments were “objectively offensive” and that saying something similar in future may be enough to get him fired.

    Even more disturbingly, the IDEAA adopted a blatantly subjective standard for deciding whether or not speech by faculty would be punishable. “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” according to the report. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.”

    As Shapiro puts it: “That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.”

    This punishment of heterodox speech isn’t an isolated incident. A 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that over a third of Democratic responders said that a business executive should be fired if they “believe psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers.” A substantial number of respondents thus advocated stripping someone of their job for the crime of saying what many psychologists know to be true.

    The new cultural norms around free speech aren’t just a problem for right-wingers. In an in-depth explainer on cancel culture, Julian explains the scope of the problem:

    “Heterodox Academy surveyed 445 academics about the state of free inquiry on campus, asking them, ‘Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?’

    One of the hypothetical consequences Heterodox Academy listed was, ‘my career would be hurt.’ How many academics said they would be ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about this consequence? 53.43%.

    To put it another way: over half of academics on campus worried that expressing non-orthodox opinions on controversial topics could be dangerous to their careers.

    We see the same self-censoring phenomenon among college students. In 2021, College Pulse surveyed 37,000 students at 159 colleges. They found that 80% of students self-censor to at least some degree. 48% of undergraduates reported feeling, ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

    In a panel on free speech and cancel culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said, ‘I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship.'”

    It’s not just students and professors. In an article titled “America Has A Free Speech Problem,” the New York Times editorial board noted that 55 percent of Americans have held their tongue in the past year because they were concerned about “retaliation or harsh criticism.”

    Extremists on both sides of the aisle increasingly wield their power to shame or shun Americans who speak their minds or have the temerity to voice their opinions in public. This problem is most prominent on social media, but is spilling into offline conversations as well. Citizens of a free country should not live in fear that a woke or far-right mob will come for them because they express an idea that isn’t sufficiently in vogue.

    The very concept of free speech is increasingly associated with violence. When former vice president Mike Pence planned to speak at the University of Virginia, the student newspaper Cavalier Daily published a furious editorial saying that Pence shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Why not? “Speech that threatens the lives of those on Grounds is unjustifiable.” It takes a lot of mental contusions to conclude that letting Pence give his opinion could threaten anyone’s life.

    It’s not just students. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?”

    According to Barrett, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”

    She continued: “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.”

    The fact that psychologists are lending the veneer of science to the idea that speech is violence should be deeply troubling to every American.

    When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place. Robust norms of free speech helped people build the emotional and mental resilience to cope with ideas they disagreed with. It helped us build bonds with people who believed different things, because we were able to listen to and understand their position.

    Free speech also enabled multiple parties to argue from competing worldviews and find a solution that was better than what any party had formulated going into the discussion.

    The silver lining is this: Americans increasingly recognize that free speech is a value whose preservation is essential. The New York Times editorial board notes that “84 percent of adults said it is a, ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”

    As a strong and integrous person, what can you do to limit the impact of the degradation of free speech on your own life?

    First, speak up about what you know to be true—even if no-one else is speaking up, even if there are risks to you. Develop the courage to call a spade a spade. If you see insanity—in your workplace, in politics, in your home—call it out openly and honestly. You’ll sleep better at night. You’ll also become stronger through the act of speaking out. Speaking takes courage, but it also creates courage.

    Second, seek out people who disagree with you. Listen to them. Go further; try to be persuaded by them. Skewer your sacred cows and let go of your ideology. Neither one is serving you.

    Third, banish forever (if you haven’t yet) the infantile notion that words are violence. This notion is profoundly damaging, because it makes you weak. If mere disagreement can hurt you, after all, then so can everything else in life. So will everything else in your life. Instead, embrace the adage of the Stoics: other people are responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your response. Once you embrace the idea that mere words—whether vicious or merely heterodox—cannot hurt you, you are on the path to emotional strength and groundedness.

    Fourth, don’t let yourself become a “tribe of one.” It’s easy, in this environment of chilled speech, to always feel scared to speak up. Find a group of friends who encourage you to speak your truth, and who speak their truth in return to you. Find people who aren’t afraid to share heterodox ideas and to challenge your sacred cows, nor to have their own challenged in return.

    Find a group you’d trust to have your back in a firefight, and who will love you and expect you to have theirs in turn.

    This article was republished with permission from The Undaunted Man.

    Julian Adorney


    Julian Adorney

    Julian is a former political op-ed writer and current nonprofit marketer. His work has been featured in FEE, National Review, Playboy, and Lawrence Reed’s economics anthology Excuse Me, Professor.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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