Related: Does the "news media" or "reporters" have rights the rest of us (or entertainment companies) don't have under 1A?
(How can you possibly draw a distinguishing line from a "reporter/news media" and say a blog named for a paper poker hat - or a truck driver on Facebook?) Do reporters have rights the rest of us don't have to knowingly publicize classified information that falls under the espionage act?
(Contrast that to spousal & confessional privilege.)
Journalists from accredited institutions are also given access that you and I don’t have. We can’t go into the White House Briefing Room for a presser, for example.
That's granting things that aren't directly required by the First Amendment, on a statutory basis or whatever rules govern the WHBR process, etc. For 1A rights, there's been some debate but the general view has been freedom of the press covers a right possessed equally by everybody, not just professional journalists. The random nobody off the street has as much right to publish and distribute his Crank Pamphlet Weekly (or Crank Blog Hourly) as do the publishers of the New York Times.
It’s true, because the reason shield laws exist is because there was a 5-4 Supremes decision against the right. It could be argued that the decision was narrow, prompting the law to clarify that the right does exist.
Media credentialing by government is fig leafed on space limits and security concerns, real or imagined. It also is a relatively recent development. There are many people without any government issued press credentials breaking news. Nakedcapitalism.com has consistently broken public pension corruption news, to give but one example.
I haven’t noticed any Putin cheerleading. I have noticed skepticism and realism, which is sadly lacking from the predominantly moralistic and content free coverage in most American news.
But then I long ago learned that all news organizations lie and so I purposefully read a wide variety of news outlets in order to suss out what is agreed as fact, what is probably true but selectively reported, and what the actual partisan or other interest based controversies and bones of contention are. The latter tend to be the most important and revealing. My synthesis method holds reasonably high predictive value which is useful for a number of purposes. In the context of our conventional to nuclear brinksmanship with Russia, it has led me to send my daughters to their grandparents’ home in the sticks as offen and for as long as possible and also led me to buy potassium iodide pills for my family and friends.
1. "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" (said in the context of government-imposed consequences, not social consequences)
2. FIRE's push to describe disruptive protests as a "heckler's veto" in order to confuse from the legal concept. (I suspect there is some concerted effort to prop this alternative usage up. Of note, the Wikipedia article for Heckler's Veto contains a section on "Outside of Law" which only contains examples from the last 15ish years)
Ken, the linked post does nothing to inform me on the best ways to make people shut up when they are annoying. Where's the loopholes on getting people who say things I don't like to "shut it, buster?"
I’m always irritated by the straw man argument that free speech advocates are supposedly claiming that free speech will cure society of all our bad or malignant ideas. This is related to the Kumbaya Straw Man, the claim that civility advocates are saying that if we just all hold hands with our enemies and sing Kumbaya, it will fix all our problems.
As a librarian going into year three of the actual censorship crisis in schools and libraries, pretty much all of the arguments there make me angry. From a legal commentary perspective, you might cover the misuse of legal terms (directly or by implication) such as "obscene", "obscene as to minors/harmful to minors", "pornography", &. Also the lack of acknowledgement that kids have rights, not just parents. And that "non-sexual nudity", "alternative gender ideologies", "critical race theory", and other such aren't outside the bounds of First Amendment protection but rather admissions of desiring content-based restrictions on protected speech.
I also want to know if, when a federal judge orders you to restore access to certain library materials by putting them back in the catalog so that people can find them and check them out and further ordering you to not take anything out of the library catalog while litigation is ongoing, voting to completely close the library would likely be a breach of that order.
From what I’ve seen, I think propagandists on both sides of this are being dishonest. (quelle surprise!) I’ve checked the online card catalogues of several elementary schools in my very blue state and county. None of them seem to have “Gender Queer” or any of the other three primarily targeted books. There’s no appetite to provide these sexually explicit books to elementary students in this blue state that I’ve found, even in the reactionary high dudgeon against banning these books elsewhere.
None of this affects county public libraries which do carry the books.
I am sure there are books being banned inappropriately. I expect there is even some actual support for that. However, I expect from casual observation that those bans were sold on the idea of these books being provided in elementary school libraries, which even in very blue states like mine is not actually happening.
However, it seems that in service of the culture war facts are no longer welcome as they would show that Americans generally share similar opinions on the appropriate age at which books on sexuality ought to be made available in school libraries.
I suspect that this is being done to distract from potential discussion of political economics and our nuclear brinkmanship.
I haven’t yet found the high school library that has managed to justify the pedagogical value and overcome the probable sanitary issues of providing Hustler in its periodicals section.
Book challenges and bans aren't happening at high schools and public libraries based on something theoretically happening somewhere else. That's not how challenges work, nor is it the common complaint or ask. People are asking for books to be removed entirely from high school collections and public libraries—not just moved to an older collection—because they view the works as "pornographic" or "obscene" and not fit for public access, period. Gender Queer was the most-challenged book of last year at 151 known cases. It is being challenged where it is . . . which, as you yourself note, is not elementary school libraries.
It is true that I am also not aware of any high school library stocking Hustler. However, I am also not aware of any authoritative, professional review source rating it as appropriate for high school students. Gender Queer, on the other hand, was listed as being for grades 9+ by School Library Journal and for grades 9–12 by Booklist. The second-most challenged book last year was All Boys Aren't Blue; the publisher rates it for ages 14–18, School Library Journal for grades 9+, Kirkus for ages 14+, Publishers Weekly for ages 14+, and Booklist for grades 9–12. It would seem that all of the professionals agree that these books are appropriate for high school students and indeed aimed at them. The people requesting that they be removed from high school libraries and from all sections of public libraries, including the adult sections, feel that they are not appropriate for high school students or anyone.
Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, The Bluest Eye, and Out of Darkness were all completely banned at the Ada Public Library. (They're at least temporarily back due to a violation of the Open Meetings Act.)
A challenge at Blount County Public Library requested the complete removal of Gender Queer but was declined . . . but they will be relocating it from the teen section to the adult section.
There's an ongoing attempt to completely remove in Gender Queer from the Deckerville Public Library. The same goes for Let’s Talk About It at the Anchorage Public Library.
And I didn't have to hunt for those; I got that sample from a single week's news roundup for the week ending April 28th. That's just the public libraries; the list of schools in the same roundup would run a lot longer.
But hey, let's talk about schools.
Between 1 July 2021 and 31 March 2022, when the pace of challenges was still ramping up, Gender Queer was at least temporarily removed from the following school districts:
Alaska, Anchorage School District
Florida, Brevard County Public Schools
Florida, Orange County
Florida, Pinellas County Schools
Illinois, Community High School District 117
Illinois, Lake Forest Schools
Iowa, Ankeny Community School District
Iowa, Waukee
Kansas, Goddard Public Schools
New York, Wappingers Central School District
New York, Yorktown Central School District
Ohio, Hudson
Pennsylvania, Downington Area School District
Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg Area School District
Pennsylvania, Kutztown Area School District
Pennsylvania, North Penn School District
Pennsylvania, Wissahickon
South Carolina, Fort Mill
Texas, Birdville
Texas, Canutillo Independent School District
Texas, Keller
Texas, Prosper ISD
Texas, Spring Branch ISD
Utah, Canyons School District
Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools
Virginia, Harrisonburg
Virginia, Loudoun County Public School
Virginia, Virginia Beach
Washington, Central Kitsap
Washington, Walla Walla School District
All Boys Aren't Blue, likewise:
Florida, Clay County Schools
Florida, Flagler School District
Florida, Indian River County School
Georgia, Forsyth County Schools
Iowa, Waukee
Kansas, Goddard Public Schools
Maryland, Wicomico County Schools
Missouri, North Kansas City Schools
Missouri, Wentzville
New York, Yorktown Central School District
Pennsylvania, Central York
Pennsylvania, Downington Area School District
Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg Area School District
Pennsylvania, North Penn School District
Texas Denton
Texas, Katy
Texas, Klein ISD
Texas, Lamar Consolidated ISD
Texas, North East
Texas, Tyler ISD
Washington, Kent School District
Take a guess how many of those were the result of people objecting to a book being in a high school, where the experts all agree they're appropriate.
We're not manufacturing a difference of opinion on who these works are appropriate for. We're not colluding with Moms for Liberty to manufacture thousands of challenges per year. Some challenges—generally those involving someone challenging an entire list simultaneously—are partially aimed at nonexistent holdings, yes, but most of them aren't.
As with foreign policy, where our State Department is more apt to start a war than our Defense Department (formerly Department of War), it seems that trust and expertise is a terrain and is available for sale. In the case of School Library Journal's parent company, Media Source, Inc., this is literally true, as they're owned by a private equity firm and have a solicitation for merger/acquisition on their site. Tell me, if a person or group whose ideology you disagreed with were to buy SLJ's parent and alter the ideology of the expert terrain, would you still cite them as authoritative? Trust and trustworthiness are at the center of our political debates precisely because we are transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society. This is happening due to a mixture of corruption and resource constraints.
Also, we put stuff we don't like on our shelves. It's part of the job. I have to provide for "all people of the community the library serves," not just people like me.
I try to keep to a process that minimizes my own feelings. If a few authoritative sources give a work unambiguously good reviews, it's going in the cart. If a taxpayer actually bothers to put in a purchase request, it's going in the cart. (The exceptions are generally practical considerations, like asking me to buy the middle book in a series or something wildly expensive.) Because I manage a couple of collections that have lots of series in them, I monitor each series' performance and keep buying them as long as enough people keep reading them, and I'll cut low-performing series even if I'm reading it myself. I monitor various sources of what's popular to see if I'm missing anything.
None of that requires that I agree with anybody, just that I trust that my sources are authoritative and accurate with no problematic purpose or objective. And that doesn't require that I agree with them, just that a standard rubric would find them to be so.
You can construct a hypothetical world in which a set of events cause me to stop trusting a particular source. You can construct a lot of hypotheticals. However, the fact that they're possible doesn't make them probable.
Media literacy and source evaluation are things my profession teaches for a living; if we didn't apply them to the publications we were reading, we wouldn't be very good at our jobs. There's a long history of corporate sales and editorial staff changes at most of the major industry-facing review sources, and some research might tell you what changes those resulted in and how they were received. (Elsevier is far more hated as an academic publisher generally than any private equity firm, incidentally.) But if you want to imagine a world in which corporate meddling causes me to stop trusting SLJ, here's how it goes:
(1) The private equity firm replaces the Editor-in-Chief they themselves hired a decade ago, who is a well-respected member of both journalism and library professional organizations, with an MBA yes-man.
(2) The MBA yes-man changes the reviews from signed reviews by an international, freelance pool of librarians and academics to unaccountable / outsider reviews.
(3) Those new reviews stop mostly (but not always) agreeing with the other industry-facing review sources run by their privately-owned competitors, at least one research center at a public university, the ALA, &c.—you know, all the other sources I cited in the comment you're replying to, plus ones like the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books—and instead start pushing positions that accountable, recognized experts generally disagree with.
(4) Having ruined their credibility, everyone stops caring what their opinion is, and their circulation, relevance, profitability, and value tank while failing to achieve their goals.
These aren't public-facing review sources where a puff piece can be pushed on an inexpert and uncritical public, they're industry-facing review sources where the readership is in the same field as the experts and is trained in critically evaluating sources.
These publications share the same "expert terrain" as their competitors because they operate based on submissions from the pool of experts. The only way for them to shift the terrain is to start using shills instead of experts, at which point they're no longer on "expert terrain" and their credibility tanks because the experts are only found in their competitors' publications. And given that nobody's going to read a source that they don't find credible, that would be a terrible idea for any owner who wanted influence, profit, or sales value from the company. So why would they do it?
I'm not even sure what goal they would be attempting by suddenly skewing reviews to . . . what? Say books are best for a different age range? One that is presumably wrong and will result in fewer people picking up and reading the book because it's aimed above/below them? What profit would the owners make?
So I find your hypothetical unlikely. I have a hard time finding a reason why an owner would want to make such a choice; they should know that if they did, it wouldn't be effective; and yes, everyone would stop considering them authoritative if they stopped publishing reviews by authorities.
Nina Totenberg, who should know better, served up both of these today.
"The legal issues in Wednesday's case are bloodless compared to Whalen's story. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but there are exceptions — obscenity, fighting words, falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and what the court has called "true threats." The question in this case is whether the definition of a "true threat" is in the eye of the ordinary, reasonable beholder or in the eye of the writer of the messages."
The case is interesting though and bears the Popehat treatment.
Annoying trope: Social Media is a “town square” where everyone has a chance to voice their opinion and the best ideas will thrive! - says the person with a 500 decible megaphone and legions of followers who amplify their message.
I know you weren't being literal, and I get that hyperbole is an important concept in these discussions, but 500 dB would be the energy of a volcano erupting. It's a logarithmic scale. 125 dB is the sound of a gunshot from 2 feet away.
(That's my own bete noire and me and the doctors are working very hard on coming to terms with people using math wrong. Indeed, we're working on me not getting bent if someone is wrong on the internet. I'm trying new pills.)
While private companies are not obligated to provide a town square, it is easily derived from government’s push to do all or most of its business online that there ought to be online town squares, however provisioned. I put this forward in a similar vein to those who put forward postal banking as a logical extension of existing government services.
I just heard Christopher Hitchens ז״צל [may his memory be a blessing, roughly) point out that the case regarding yelling fire in a theatre was Oliver Wendell Holmes upholding the conviction of Yiddish speaking socialists that were distributing pamphlets written in Yiddish opposing entrance into WWI; that not only was it a language few people spoke, but in fact from the pamphleteer’s viewpoint, WWI was a fire they tried to warn people about. Holmes analogy was more asinine than most people know.
In the mid-90s I ran an ISP. Back then the equivalent of Twitter/Reddit was USEnet, a hierarchical feed service. We carried it by satellite since bandwidth was precious. By far the biggest hog was the alt.* category specifically alt.sex and all the pictures and low quality video shorts. I removed that from my feed and you wouldn’t believe the howls of “censorship” as if Kroger *had* to carry Hustler so otherwise respectable people wouldn’t be seen going into the head shop or adult store to get it. Some of the biggest complaints were folks who shouldn’t be using that and they would try to back door “censorship!” without mentioning the specific thing they weren’t able to see. I always told them to take their money elsewhere if they didn’t feel satisfied, but that was never the “issue” for them.
The trope is censorship when they really mean they’re in some closet or another and want cover for their peccadilloes.
Either on its own or as an expansion of the hate speech entry, perhaps something about people invoking foreign comparisons. Canada or Scotland or whatever other countries ban hate speech and they're still more-or-less liberal democracies. Germany bans Nazis, etc. So why can't we? Both on the law why the First Amendment is different, but also why that's good and importing those kinds of laws wouldn't be. IOW, expounding some on that "In the United States," you start with.
Have someone work your writing on this topic into a poster like they do at https://thethinkingshop.org/ . You need to get into merch, Mr. White! Big sales and get your ideas into the heads of people who read stuff on walls in dorm rooms and offices and not Substack.
This is more of a culture of speech issue, rather than a government censorship issue... but I cannot stand “I am not allowed to say [x,y,z]” when the speaker is absolutely *allowed* to say [x,y,z].
I feel like it confuses non-lawyers into thinking their speech rights are more narrow than reality.
“Moreover, there's very good reason to doubt that the Supreme Court would ever approve a speech restriction that is content-based — that is, premised on dislike of the speech — no matter how strong the government's interest.”
What odds could I get at a bookmaker today, in 2023, that this would be true of SCOTUS scrutiny - by *this* SCOTUS - of state bans on dissemination of true, accurate information about abortion?
Least favorite new trope after yesterday: “[Media outlet] isn’t a news company, it’s an entertainment company.”
Related: Does the "news media" or "reporters" have rights the rest of us (or entertainment companies) don't have under 1A?
(How can you possibly draw a distinguishing line from a "reporter/news media" and say a blog named for a paper poker hat - or a truck driver on Facebook?) Do reporters have rights the rest of us don't have to knowingly publicize classified information that falls under the espionage act?
I’m sure Ken will chime in, but in many states there are shield laws which prevent coercing reporters to name sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_States
(Contrast that to spousal & confessional privilege.)
Journalists from accredited institutions are also given access that you and I don’t have. We can’t go into the White House Briefing Room for a presser, for example.
That's granting things that aren't directly required by the First Amendment, on a statutory basis or whatever rules govern the WHBR process, etc. For 1A rights, there's been some debate but the general view has been freedom of the press covers a right possessed equally by everybody, not just professional journalists. The random nobody off the street has as much right to publish and distribute his Crank Pamphlet Weekly (or Crank Blog Hourly) as do the publishers of the New York Times.
It’s true, because the reason shield laws exist is because there was a 5-4 Supremes decision against the right. It could be argued that the decision was narrow, prompting the law to clarify that the right does exist.
Media credentialing by government is fig leafed on space limits and security concerns, real or imagined. It also is a relatively recent development. There are many people without any government issued press credentials breaking news. Nakedcapitalism.com has consistently broken public pension corruption news, to give but one example.
Good points. This may go back to some kind of “reasonable person” standard, as well as credentialing by journalism associations.
And while I’ve liked nakedcapitalism for that early work, their recent morphing into a Putin cheering squad has had me stop reading them.
I haven’t noticed any Putin cheerleading. I have noticed skepticism and realism, which is sadly lacking from the predominantly moralistic and content free coverage in most American news.
But then I long ago learned that all news organizations lie and so I purposefully read a wide variety of news outlets in order to suss out what is agreed as fact, what is probably true but selectively reported, and what the actual partisan or other interest based controversies and bones of contention are. The latter tend to be the most important and revealing. My synthesis method holds reasonably high predictive value which is useful for a number of purposes. In the context of our conventional to nuclear brinksmanship with Russia, it has led me to send my daughters to their grandparents’ home in the sticks as offen and for as long as possible and also led me to buy potassium iodide pills for my family and friends.
1. "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" (said in the context of government-imposed consequences, not social consequences)
2. FIRE's push to describe disruptive protests as a "heckler's veto" in order to confuse from the legal concept. (I suspect there is some concerted effort to prop this alternative usage up. Of note, the Wikipedia article for Heckler's Veto contains a section on "Outside of Law" which only contains examples from the last 15ish years)
The freedom from consequences one is very important, thanks.
A second to the discussion about "heckler's veto" and the murkiness between free speech culture and free speech law.
Ken, the linked post does nothing to inform me on the best ways to make people shut up when they are annoying. Where's the loopholes on getting people who say things I don't like to "shut it, buster?"
I’m always irritated by the straw man argument that free speech advocates are supposedly claiming that free speech will cure society of all our bad or malignant ideas. This is related to the Kumbaya Straw Man, the claim that civility advocates are saying that if we just all hold hands with our enemies and sing Kumbaya, it will fix all our problems.
As a librarian going into year three of the actual censorship crisis in schools and libraries, pretty much all of the arguments there make me angry. From a legal commentary perspective, you might cover the misuse of legal terms (directly or by implication) such as "obscene", "obscene as to minors/harmful to minors", "pornography", &. Also the lack of acknowledgement that kids have rights, not just parents. And that "non-sexual nudity", "alternative gender ideologies", "critical race theory", and other such aren't outside the bounds of First Amendment protection but rather admissions of desiring content-based restrictions on protected speech.
I also want to know if, when a federal judge orders you to restore access to certain library materials by putting them back in the catalog so that people can find them and check them out and further ordering you to not take anything out of the library catalog while litigation is ongoing, voting to completely close the library would likely be a breach of that order.
From what I’ve seen, I think propagandists on both sides of this are being dishonest. (quelle surprise!) I’ve checked the online card catalogues of several elementary schools in my very blue state and county. None of them seem to have “Gender Queer” or any of the other three primarily targeted books. There’s no appetite to provide these sexually explicit books to elementary students in this blue state that I’ve found, even in the reactionary high dudgeon against banning these books elsewhere.
None of this affects county public libraries which do carry the books.
I am sure there are books being banned inappropriately. I expect there is even some actual support for that. However, I expect from casual observation that those bans were sold on the idea of these books being provided in elementary school libraries, which even in very blue states like mine is not actually happening.
However, it seems that in service of the culture war facts are no longer welcome as they would show that Americans generally share similar opinions on the appropriate age at which books on sexuality ought to be made available in school libraries.
I suspect that this is being done to distract from potential discussion of political economics and our nuclear brinkmanship.
I haven’t yet found the high school library that has managed to justify the pedagogical value and overcome the probable sanitary issues of providing Hustler in its periodicals section.
Book challenges and bans aren't happening at high schools and public libraries based on something theoretically happening somewhere else. That's not how challenges work, nor is it the common complaint or ask. People are asking for books to be removed entirely from high school collections and public libraries—not just moved to an older collection—because they view the works as "pornographic" or "obscene" and not fit for public access, period. Gender Queer was the most-challenged book of last year at 151 known cases. It is being challenged where it is . . . which, as you yourself note, is not elementary school libraries.
It is true that I am also not aware of any high school library stocking Hustler. However, I am also not aware of any authoritative, professional review source rating it as appropriate for high school students. Gender Queer, on the other hand, was listed as being for grades 9+ by School Library Journal and for grades 9–12 by Booklist. The second-most challenged book last year was All Boys Aren't Blue; the publisher rates it for ages 14–18, School Library Journal for grades 9+, Kirkus for ages 14+, Publishers Weekly for ages 14+, and Booklist for grades 9–12. It would seem that all of the professionals agree that these books are appropriate for high school students and indeed aimed at them. The people requesting that they be removed from high school libraries and from all sections of public libraries, including the adult sections, feel that they are not appropriate for high school students or anyone.
Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, The Bluest Eye, and Out of Darkness were all completely banned at the Ada Public Library. (They're at least temporarily back due to a violation of the Open Meetings Act.)
A challenge at Blount County Public Library requested the complete removal of Gender Queer but was declined . . . but they will be relocating it from the teen section to the adult section.
There's an ongoing attempt to completely remove in Gender Queer from the Deckerville Public Library. The same goes for Let’s Talk About It at the Anchorage Public Library.
And I didn't have to hunt for those; I got that sample from a single week's news roundup for the week ending April 28th. That's just the public libraries; the list of schools in the same roundup would run a lot longer.
But hey, let's talk about schools.
Between 1 July 2021 and 31 March 2022, when the pace of challenges was still ramping up, Gender Queer was at least temporarily removed from the following school districts:
Alaska, Anchorage School District
Florida, Brevard County Public Schools
Florida, Orange County
Florida, Pinellas County Schools
Illinois, Community High School District 117
Illinois, Lake Forest Schools
Iowa, Ankeny Community School District
Iowa, Waukee
Kansas, Goddard Public Schools
New York, Wappingers Central School District
New York, Yorktown Central School District
Ohio, Hudson
Pennsylvania, Downington Area School District
Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg Area School District
Pennsylvania, Kutztown Area School District
Pennsylvania, North Penn School District
Pennsylvania, Wissahickon
South Carolina, Fort Mill
Texas, Birdville
Texas, Canutillo Independent School District
Texas, Keller
Texas, Prosper ISD
Texas, Spring Branch ISD
Utah, Canyons School District
Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools
Virginia, Harrisonburg
Virginia, Loudoun County Public School
Virginia, Virginia Beach
Washington, Central Kitsap
Washington, Walla Walla School District
All Boys Aren't Blue, likewise:
Florida, Clay County Schools
Florida, Flagler School District
Florida, Indian River County School
Georgia, Forsyth County Schools
Iowa, Waukee
Kansas, Goddard Public Schools
Maryland, Wicomico County Schools
Missouri, North Kansas City Schools
Missouri, Wentzville
New York, Yorktown Central School District
Pennsylvania, Central York
Pennsylvania, Downington Area School District
Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg Area School District
Pennsylvania, North Penn School District
Texas Denton
Texas, Katy
Texas, Klein ISD
Texas, Lamar Consolidated ISD
Texas, North East
Texas, Tyler ISD
Washington, Kent School District
Take a guess how many of those were the result of people objecting to a book being in a high school, where the experts all agree they're appropriate.
We're not manufacturing a difference of opinion on who these works are appropriate for. We're not colluding with Moms for Liberty to manufacture thousands of challenges per year. Some challenges—generally those involving someone challenging an entire list simultaneously—are partially aimed at nonexistent holdings, yes, but most of them aren't.
As with foreign policy, where our State Department is more apt to start a war than our Defense Department (formerly Department of War), it seems that trust and expertise is a terrain and is available for sale. In the case of School Library Journal's parent company, Media Source, Inc., this is literally true, as they're owned by a private equity firm and have a solicitation for merger/acquisition on their site. Tell me, if a person or group whose ideology you disagreed with were to buy SLJ's parent and alter the ideology of the expert terrain, would you still cite them as authoritative? Trust and trustworthiness are at the center of our political debates precisely because we are transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society. This is happening due to a mixture of corruption and resource constraints.
https://www.mediasourceinc.com/site/
Also, we put stuff we don't like on our shelves. It's part of the job. I have to provide for "all people of the community the library serves," not just people like me.
I try to keep to a process that minimizes my own feelings. If a few authoritative sources give a work unambiguously good reviews, it's going in the cart. If a taxpayer actually bothers to put in a purchase request, it's going in the cart. (The exceptions are generally practical considerations, like asking me to buy the middle book in a series or something wildly expensive.) Because I manage a couple of collections that have lots of series in them, I monitor each series' performance and keep buying them as long as enough people keep reading them, and I'll cut low-performing series even if I'm reading it myself. I monitor various sources of what's popular to see if I'm missing anything.
None of that requires that I agree with anybody, just that I trust that my sources are authoritative and accurate with no problematic purpose or objective. And that doesn't require that I agree with them, just that a standard rubric would find them to be so.
You can construct a hypothetical world in which a set of events cause me to stop trusting a particular source. You can construct a lot of hypotheticals. However, the fact that they're possible doesn't make them probable.
Media literacy and source evaluation are things my profession teaches for a living; if we didn't apply them to the publications we were reading, we wouldn't be very good at our jobs. There's a long history of corporate sales and editorial staff changes at most of the major industry-facing review sources, and some research might tell you what changes those resulted in and how they were received. (Elsevier is far more hated as an academic publisher generally than any private equity firm, incidentally.) But if you want to imagine a world in which corporate meddling causes me to stop trusting SLJ, here's how it goes:
(1) The private equity firm replaces the Editor-in-Chief they themselves hired a decade ago, who is a well-respected member of both journalism and library professional organizations, with an MBA yes-man.
(2) The MBA yes-man changes the reviews from signed reviews by an international, freelance pool of librarians and academics to unaccountable / outsider reviews.
(3) Those new reviews stop mostly (but not always) agreeing with the other industry-facing review sources run by their privately-owned competitors, at least one research center at a public university, the ALA, &c.—you know, all the other sources I cited in the comment you're replying to, plus ones like the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books—and instead start pushing positions that accountable, recognized experts generally disagree with.
(4) Having ruined their credibility, everyone stops caring what their opinion is, and their circulation, relevance, profitability, and value tank while failing to achieve their goals.
These aren't public-facing review sources where a puff piece can be pushed on an inexpert and uncritical public, they're industry-facing review sources where the readership is in the same field as the experts and is trained in critically evaluating sources.
These publications share the same "expert terrain" as their competitors because they operate based on submissions from the pool of experts. The only way for them to shift the terrain is to start using shills instead of experts, at which point they're no longer on "expert terrain" and their credibility tanks because the experts are only found in their competitors' publications. And given that nobody's going to read a source that they don't find credible, that would be a terrible idea for any owner who wanted influence, profit, or sales value from the company. So why would they do it?
I'm not even sure what goal they would be attempting by suddenly skewing reviews to . . . what? Say books are best for a different age range? One that is presumably wrong and will result in fewer people picking up and reading the book because it's aimed above/below them? What profit would the owners make?
So I find your hypothetical unlikely. I have a hard time finding a reason why an owner would want to make such a choice; they should know that if they did, it wouldn't be effective; and yes, everyone would stop considering them authoritative if they stopped publishing reviews by authorities.
The Fighting Words Doctrine, which (IMO) is second only to "fire in a crowded theater" as a "creatively misunderstood" legal doctrine
Nina Totenberg, who should know better, served up both of these today.
"The legal issues in Wednesday's case are bloodless compared to Whalen's story. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but there are exceptions — obscenity, fighting words, falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and what the court has called "true threats." The question in this case is whether the definition of a "true threat" is in the eye of the ordinary, reasonable beholder or in the eye of the writer of the messages."
The case is interesting though and bears the Popehat treatment.
Nina:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/19/1169689996/the-supreme-court-ponders-when-a-threat-is-really-a-true-threat
Scotus Blog
Amy Howe, Colorado man’s First Amendment challenge will test the scope of protection for threatening speech, SCOTUSblog (Apr. 17, 2023, 10:12 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/04/supreme-court-first-amendment-counterman-whalen-colorado
Annoying trope: Social Media is a “town square” where everyone has a chance to voice their opinion and the best ideas will thrive! - says the person with a 500 decible megaphone and legions of followers who amplify their message.
I know you weren't being literal, and I get that hyperbole is an important concept in these discussions, but 500 dB would be the energy of a volcano erupting. It's a logarithmic scale. 125 dB is the sound of a gunshot from 2 feet away.
(That's my own bete noire and me and the doctors are working very hard on coming to terms with people using math wrong. Indeed, we're working on me not getting bent if someone is wrong on the internet. I'm trying new pills.)
xkcd verse 386
Shit, I thought you were going to cite the one where he explains logarithms or the dB scale.
While private companies are not obligated to provide a town square, it is easily derived from government’s push to do all or most of its business online that there ought to be online town squares, however provisioned. I put this forward in a similar vein to those who put forward postal banking as a logical extension of existing government services.
I just heard Christopher Hitchens ז״צל [may his memory be a blessing, roughly) point out that the case regarding yelling fire in a theatre was Oliver Wendell Holmes upholding the conviction of Yiddish speaking socialists that were distributing pamphlets written in Yiddish opposing entrance into WWI; that not only was it a language few people spoke, but in fact from the pamphleteer’s viewpoint, WWI was a fire they tried to warn people about. Holmes analogy was more asinine than most people know.
The version I've seen is in English, and it's worth a read:
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/world-war-i-anti-draft-pamphlet-charles-schenck/dAE1fuuw7-VcEA?hl=en
I need to check my source. This could have been a translation the court used but not the one they were distributing. But I don’t know.
In the mid-90s I ran an ISP. Back then the equivalent of Twitter/Reddit was USEnet, a hierarchical feed service. We carried it by satellite since bandwidth was precious. By far the biggest hog was the alt.* category specifically alt.sex and all the pictures and low quality video shorts. I removed that from my feed and you wouldn’t believe the howls of “censorship” as if Kroger *had* to carry Hustler so otherwise respectable people wouldn’t be seen going into the head shop or adult store to get it. Some of the biggest complaints were folks who shouldn’t be using that and they would try to back door “censorship!” without mentioning the specific thing they weren’t able to see. I always told them to take their money elsewhere if they didn’t feel satisfied, but that was never the “issue” for them.
The trope is censorship when they really mean they’re in some closet or another and want cover for their peccadilloes.
"Country X had no problem banning hate speech so why can't the US do it?"
A close second would be any mention of the Fairness Doctrine.
Either on its own or as an expansion of the hate speech entry, perhaps something about people invoking foreign comparisons. Canada or Scotland or whatever other countries ban hate speech and they're still more-or-less liberal democracies. Germany bans Nazis, etc. So why can't we? Both on the law why the First Amendment is different, but also why that's good and importing those kinds of laws wouldn't be. IOW, expounding some on that "In the United States," you start with.
"Protecting their impressionable little minds." Then they go home and play video games and watch television...
Have someone work your writing on this topic into a poster like they do at https://thethinkingshop.org/ . You need to get into merch, Mr. White! Big sales and get your ideas into the heads of people who read stuff on walls in dorm rooms and offices and not Substack.
Welcome to San Diego! Enjoy the time here. We do have a lot of craft breweries.
This is more of a culture of speech issue, rather than a government censorship issue... but I cannot stand “I am not allowed to say [x,y,z]” when the speaker is absolutely *allowed* to say [x,y,z].
I feel like it confuses non-lawyers into thinking their speech rights are more narrow than reality.
“Moreover, there's very good reason to doubt that the Supreme Court would ever approve a speech restriction that is content-based — that is, premised on dislike of the speech — no matter how strong the government's interest.”
What odds could I get at a bookmaker today, in 2023, that this would be true of SCOTUS scrutiny - by *this* SCOTUS - of state bans on dissemination of true, accurate information about abortion?