At the same time, roughly four out of five Americans consciously censored their own speech out of various fears and inhibitions. They were afraid their words would subject them to physical assault, retaliation from employers, social ostracism or actual arrest by the authorities for saying the wrong thing. Those fears are not irrational. Throughout our history, people have paid a price for the exercise of free speech. Religious dissenters, social and artistic mavericks, abolitionists, union organizers, communists, socialists and homosexuals were often beaten and sometimes killed or imprisoned as punishment for the words they spoke and the causes they represented.
Similar prohibitions are in effect in workplaces all over the country.
The FBI in its background checks on potential federal employees now seeks out evidence of deviant speech as a factor in character evaluation. The answer may be that they don t, that we misread the findings and use them to feed our paranoia. There is some evidence to that effect in the recent Harris report. The public, in the main, looks on journalists as people a lot like themselves, not grossly more biased, cynical, dishonest or unethical than the average man or woman in the street. A majority even reject the frequent charge that news people are excessively arrogant.