Journalism School Dean: Free Speech has Limits, Like Criticizing Mohammed

Journalism School Dean: Free Speech has Limits, Like Criticizing Mohammed















A little reminder from DeWayne Wickham, the dead of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication. There is no such thing as a free press under the left.

Totalitarians don’t do freedom. Either of the red or green flavors. There’s no room for freedom in Das Koran or Das Kapital.http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/21/journalism-school-dean-the-first-amendment-ends-at-insulting-mohammed/

While free speech is one of democracy’s most important pillars, it has its limits. H.L. Mencken, the fabled columnist who described himself as “an extreme libertarian,” said that he believed in free speech”up to the last limits of the endurable.”

As one might expect, from the sort of repulsive creature like DeWayne Wickham who would put forward such an argument, he misrepresents Mencken and carefully leaves out the full quote.

“…every kind of freedom up to the last limits of the endurable, including free speech. The limit to the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy.”

Mencken’s limit here was privacy, not Islam.

“French President Francois Hollande, apparently, disagrees. He defends Charlie Hebdo’s latest depiction of Mohammed by saying that protesters in other countries don’t understand France’s embrace of free speech.”

Neither does Wickham since cartooning Mohammed is more legal in the US than in France. Or was before Obama and Hillary started sending people to jail for it.

“But even as Hollande defends Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish images of Mohammed that many Muslims consider sacrilegious and hateful, his government has imprisoned dozens of people who have condemned the magazine with talk the French won’t tolerate. Those arrested are accused of speaking in support of the attack on the magazine, and a separate assault on a kosher store in Paris by a lone Muslim gunman with links to the men who attacked Charlie Hebdo.”

Is Wickham really too stupid to understand the difference between a cartoon and inciting murder? Or just too dishonest?

But given the possible ripple effects of Charlie Hebdo’s mistreatment of Islam’s most sacred religious figure, at least people in this country should understand the limits America’s highest court has placed on free speech.

In 1919, the Supreme Court ruled speech that presents a “clear and present danger” is not protected by the First Amendment. Crying “fire” in a quiet, uninhabited place is one thing, the court said. But “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

Twenty-two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that forms of expression that “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are fighting words that are not protected by the First Amendment.

That’s wrong and it’s so wrong that it’s hardly worth addressing. Wickham is quoting a 100-year-ruling that is not remotely current law and whose context involved dodging the draft.

And oh yes, around that time a Democratic president sent a man to jail for making a movie that was thought to undermine the war effort. If Wickham really wants to bring back that legal system, Michael Moore will be the first one behind bars.

by Daniel Greenfield