The Times and "That" MoveOn Ad

What he said....

September 24, 2007
To: Clark Hoyt, New York Times Public Editor
From: Leonard Witt, Associate Professor of Communication at Kennesaw State University.

On Friday, I began composing an Op-Ed piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, telling the 72 United States Senators they should be ashamed of themselves for voting on the Senate floor to condemn an act of free speech. Horror of horrors, the condemned insulted a general. The piece ran in today’s AJC.

I was equally dismayed when I read your public editor's note in Sunday’s The New York Times. Your major concern was "Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?"

Yes, you gave a tip of the hat to free speech, when you wrote: "For me, two values collided here: the right of free speech -- even if it's abusive speech -- and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues."

Then immediately afterwards you add: "For The Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility. Were I in Jespersen’s shoes, I'd have demanded changes to eliminate 'Betray Us,' a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier."

I would argue having any one person at The New York Times decide how a public body can properly address a United States general is a particularly low blow to free speech.

Indeed, most of your piece was about how Moveon.org's act of free speech did damage to its cause and to The New York Times. Instead of asking, why The New York Times, a long time bastion of free speech, prohibits the exercise of free speech in its advertising pages, you tried to find out which ad sales person actually allowed that act of free speech to take place at a reduced price. Want to kill free speech? Then expose and punish the people at the lowest levels of a bureaucracy.

The person with real guts in the organization was the man at the top, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, who told you, "If we're going to err, it's better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people."

I truly believed you personally erred in ensuring that the trend to mute the public's voice will continue and for that I think you along with the Senators should feel ashamed.

Leonard Witt
Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication
Department of Communication
Kennesaw State University

Link.