April 9, 2004

FREE SPEECH IS A RIGHT TOO:

Justice Scalia, Again (Hartford Courant, April 9 2004)

This week, Justice Scalia addressed high school students in Hattiesburg, Miss., on the importance of protecting constitutional rights. During the event, a federal marshal told two news reporters that they could not record the justice's remarks.

There was no announcement on barring electronic recordings, but the justice simply did not want such coverage. The marshal erased the tape of an Associated Press reporter and directed a local newspaper reporter to delete her tape.

It is appalling that a jurist on the highest court in the land would try to dictate the terms of coverage of any public speech, let alone one in which he extolled the U.S. Constitution as "something extraordinary, something to revere."

Was he suggesting that a free press is fine, just as long as it does not apply to him and his speeches?


It's not a public speech unless he says it is, is it? Or do government officials lose the right to speak freely?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 9, 2004 5:26 PM
Comments

And on the flip side of the coin, "protest zones" around political figures and events are also bad. After all, correlative to my right of free speech is the President's obligation to hear me out when I interrupt him, no matter how asinine my views and no matter how many times he's heard them from other people. Besides, I've got a larger-than-life puppet, a huge banner and a really cool Jacksonian chant, it would be a crime against my narcissism to shunt me off into some holding pen hundreds of yards away and take away my bullhorn so that the bourgeois sheeple can hear what the speaker is saying.

Anybody wanna leaflet?

Posted by: Random Lawyer at April 9, 2004 7:05 PM

Are they free?

Posted by: John Resnick at April 9, 2004 7:49 PM

If this were Ginsberg or Stevens, the press would solemnly report on their honorable (and traditional) intentions as they maintained their status as icons.

Posted by: jim hamlen at April 9, 2004 10:28 PM

Basically, the reporters wimped out. The marshalls had no right to stop them from taping or to erase the tapes, but nothing stops them from asking and if the reporters don't have the nerve to say no, too bad about 'em.

Posted by: David Cohen at April 9, 2004 11:25 PM
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