From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Subject: Re: To boycott is not to censor
Organization: Northeastern Law, Class of '93
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 15:07:32 GMT


In article <1993Jan2.224336.24949@ringer.cs.utsa.edu>, 
dlaro@lonestar.utsa.edu (David O. Laro) said:

> > If it's your newspaper or magazine, your editorial decisions as to
> > what goes into or stays out of it are not censorship because all
> > you're doing is refraining from providing someone else with a
> > soapbox.  You _aren't_ preventing someone else from printing
> > whatever he wants in _his_ newspaper or magazine.  [wdstarr]
>
> What?  Let him print what ever he wants in *his* newspaper or
> magazine?  Hey, if only _you_ have a newspaper or magazine, you have
> denied access.  Sounds a lot like "let them eat cake!" to me.
> Indeed, I guess everybody has a magazine or newspaper at his
> disposal.

And at this point, I think, the discussion effectively moves _far_
beyond the realm of censorship, boycotts and freedom of speech and
into the more fundamental area of the legitimacy of property.  _If_
it's legitimate for some people (or cartels of people) to own more
property than others then the unequal ownership of forums for the
expression and dissemination of ideas and opinions is also legitimate
-- in a system wherein it's legitimate for some people to own cake
while others only have crumbs, "Let them eat cake" _is_ a perfectly
valid doctrine.

(I'm not, right here and now, taking any personal position on the
question of the legitimacy of property.  I'm just trying to point out
some of the implications of this discussion  -- that if you take an
intuitively sound position like "everyone should be given equal access
to the press" and follow it through to its logical conclusion, you
might end up somewhere that you didn't expect to be, such as
advocating the elimination of property and capitalism.)

> And how do you see it when the National Endowment for the Arts (or
> the NEH) refuses to fund those arts which appear pornographic and
> objectionable to most of us taxpayers?  There were so many people
> who called it censorship!
>
> But you didn't, I suppose?  You just said, let them publish their
> "art" in their own magazines/display it in their own
> galleries/support themselves with their own fortunes.  That would be
> consistent with your statement above.

In fact, I _didn't_ call it "censorship," but only because I didn't
think that that particular word was the correct one.  It wasn't
censorship per se so much as it was, to put it generally, a violation
of the spirit of the guarantee of Equal Protection -- regardless of
_whether_ the state should be using public money to fund art, I
believe that once the state does decide to do so, it must do so
equally, without allowing politics to influence its decisions as to
how to distribute the funding.  In other words, I believe that _if_
the government is going to fund _any_ art then it must fund _all_ art
as equally as possible... and that isn't what the NEA was doing.  But
I don't think that "censorship" was, technically, the correct word to
describe the wrong being done.

> Mr Starr, I begin to believe that you have been jaded or spoiled by
> all the freedoms you enjoy in this arena, don't realize what goes on
> elsewhere.  Have you ever been a subscriber to Prodigy?  Now
> *there's* some censorship.  I say that because every opinion is
> screened before making the public board.  Many are denied access..I
> call that censorship.

The relationship between a subscriber and Prodigy is a private matter,
governable mostly by contract law.  If the contract between the user
and Prodigy said that Prodigy would post whatever the user wanted so
long as the user paid his fees, and then Prodigy reneged on the
contract, the user should have recourse in civil court to bring a
breach-of-contract action.  Is a private breach of contract an act of
censorship, though?  I don't think so, though at this point what we
have is more of a debate over semantics than doctrines.

> Libraries, public or private, schools, colleges, whatever, often
> keep certain books off their shelves.  When it is done because they
> don't want that book available (not $$shortage) I call that
> censorship, too.

If the library is publicly funded then the situation is analogous to
that of government funding of the arts.  If it's purely private then
it's analogous to that of newspaper ownership.

-- William December Starr <wdstarr@athena.mit.edu>

Newsgroups: alt.censorship