The Free Speech “Absolutists” Strike Back against NPR.

A few weeks ago, NPR offered a program on "free speech" in which none of the participants took a strong stand in favor of free speech.

In this video, Matt Taibbi (Journalist/Commentator), Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU), Amna Khalid (Carlton College History Professor) and Nico Perrino (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) respond to the lopsided NPR presentation. Each of these participants recoiled at the idea that there is such a thing as a "free speech absolutist," an idea repeatedly promoted by the NPR panel. Matt Taibbi explains:

This idea that we're free speech absolutist is something that's been invented by people who are against the who want to regulate speech in a way that i think is new and very repressive. They're mischaracterizing the positions of people like all of us.

Nadine Strossen further explains:

Government may restrict speech if but only if it can satisfy an appropriately heavy burden of proof if it can show that the particular restriction is necessary and the least speech restrictive alternative in order to promote some countervailing goal of compelling importance whether that goal be public safety for example or individual safety and when you think about it that just makes common sense of course most of us would be willing to trade off free speech for you know public safety or even national security but it's a fool's choice to give up free speech if we're not gaining safety in return or worse yet as is often the case if the censorship no matter how well intended does more harm than good which is typically the case.

Taibbi points out that the NPR panel has no solutions to the "problem" that speech is often unruly and offensive:

It's so important to our conception of what our society is all about this idea of of being able to express ourselves that is preferable to the alternative. The alternative is that somebody would have to regulate the speech and that's the problem is once once we get into who's doing that regulating that that's where we get to the scary part and they don't address any of that. All they want to do is, in a very narrow way, say "Oh this libertarian hands off approach to to speech regulation doesn't work." But it's so much more complicated than that.

Amna Khalid accuses the NPR panelists of being myopic, over-focusing on the relatively functional state of American culture compared to the many vast oppressed populations in other parts of the world, where free speech is desperately needed:

In our current moment if you cast your eyes beyond the pond and look at the rest of the world you will see so many examples of how limitations on free speech are a way of shutting down the rights of minorities.

I've listened to the NPR presentation and repeatedly heard the NPR panel members attack the straw man they labeled "Free Speech Absolutist." It is as if those panel members never heard of widely recognized restrictions on free speech, including libel laws, incitement laws, laws prohibiting speech constituting hostile work environments and laws prohibiting fraud. I highly recommend this discussion:

Continue ReadingThe Free Speech “Absolutists” Strike Back against NPR.

Ira Glass and the taste-ability gap.

Creation is daunting. Partly because the drive to create is always rooted in admiration for others' creations. What writer hasn't struggled against inadvertently ghost-writing their favorite author? What aspiring auteur, poet, or painter doesn't begin with work that is heartrendingly derivative of others' better attempts? Or worse-- what creative person hasn't struggled to make something 'great', something 'great' as the art they adore, only to find they can't quite compete? And who doesn't infer from these failings that maybe they weren't cut out to be a creative type after all? Ira Glass, creator and longtime host of This American Life, says there's a very simple reason for the head-bashing frustrations of early creative production. Simply put: if you are interested in creating something, it's probably because you have immaculate taste. Taste that outpaces your own ability. At least, at first. Glass says:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I found this snippet in a video interview with Glass (below) a year or two ago, and I find it incredibly inspiring. Glass' view of creativity suggests that even if you lack innate, immediate creative ability, you are not a lost cause-- and that, in fact, a little creative self-loathing may be a sign of good aesthetic instincts. It also suggests there is a solution to the problem of making unsatisfying dreck: just keep making more. And more. And more. This wisdom is especially powerful in context. As a radio producer, Glass was a very late bloomer. He worked in public radio for twenty years before conceiving of This American Life; he readily admits (in another portion of his interview, and on his program) that the first seven years of his radio work was deeply underwhelming and often poorly-paced.  He'll readily admit that his early stories were bad, and that even he knew they were bad, and that this tormented him. Only through tireless efforts and the cultivation of exceptional taste was he able to develop and bloom. And he bloomed big:  This American Life is one of the most widely-heard public radio programs ever, with 1.7 million weekly listeners, and has topped the Itunes podcast chart continuously for years. If Ira had given up after a few years of shoddy radio stories, we'd all have missed out on TAL's  hundreds of hours of thoughtful, poignant, high-quality public radio. I found this interview snippet a little over a year ago, and Glass' words of experience have galvanized me ever since. Whenever I write something that strikes me as uninspiring or derivative dreck, I reassure myself it's a matter of taste, and time. And more time.

Continue ReadingIra Glass and the taste-ability gap.

Bravo, NPR, for keeping an eye on the lobbyists

While others were photographing the senators at the front of the room, NPR turned its camera on all of those people sitting in the back of the room, in an attempt to identify all of the health care lobbyists in the room. What ARE the names of all of those people trying to subvert our political process? NPR has invited an interested parties to review their photos and to help them nail these bastards figure things out.

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Suggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.

My family doesn't go to many movies at theaters. In our experience, modern movie theater audiences tend to be far too talkative during the shows and prices are not cheap. Netflix is the default option for my family. I made an exception for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009). On Friday, I had heard an director interviewed on NPR. She indicated that the producers had to work hard to earn the trust of those who run the various Smithsonian Museums, the setting for the movie. Plus the movie featured Robin Williams and other notable actors. Thus, I gathered up my willing daughters (aged 8 and 10) and assumed that even though this was a movie geared for kids, there was a decent chance that it would have some take-home value. I was sorely disappointed. The problem is that this movie, despite the almost-constant high-quality special effects, had no meaningful plot and no meaningful resolution, even for someone willing spend disbelief for the duration. I was already dissatisfied with the movie while the credits ran, but now that I have had further chance to consider the work both as a parent and a member of the audience, I'd have to say that I'm all the more disappointed. Those special effects constituted eye-popping pyrotechnics, but it's an old story for so many American movies: the producers forgot to hire a real script writer. Thus, the movie was merely one damned thing after another, with Ben Stiller and company dashing here and there, in a wacky and barely-connected series of scenes that continually threatening to break out into needless violence. What especially aggravated me is that the attention-deficit afflicted characters made almost no effort to think things through, quite a feat for 105 minutes. There was no sustained effort at problem solving, but only a constant need to drop buckets of wise-cracks and put-downs and to keep on the movie moving--to keep doing something, anything. This movie exemplifies one of the most prominent social illusions: that movement is necessarily progress. Here's my bottom line: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian presents a collection of paper-thin characters running amok, somehow not getting each other killed. Most notable is the prominent appearance of the character of heroic aviator Amelia Earhart (played by the fetching Amy Adams), who was quickly reduced to a woman who became all-too-willing to take orders from a numbskull ("Larry," played by Stiller) while maintaining her schoolgirl crush on him for most of the movie's 105 minutes. This movie must have cost many tens of millions of dollars to produce. Whatever it cost, the producers of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian could have spent a pittance more ($50,000??) to hire a real writer so that all of those special effects could have told some sort of story. Sheesh. [Hint: there are many good writers looking for work.] It was like the producers were concocting the scenes even as they were shooting them, even though this couldn't have been true, since big teams of computer artists had to be finessing in those dozens of special effects. What an embarrassment it must be for them to see their first-rate special effects put to such piss-poor use . . . .

Continue ReadingSuggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.

Don’t let the White House gut the budget of Public Broadcasting

President Bush’s new budget proposal cuts more than $53 million money from the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the agency that allocates federal money for NPR, PBS and other federally funded media.  This is a quarter of the CPB budget.  This same budget will drastically crank up…

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