MEDIA'S SELF-RIGHTEOUS CENSORSHIP IS UNFAIR TO READERS

An article in your Nov. 26 paper was entitled "Ad links callers to supremacist group." The article caught my eye. Sunday before last there was a paid-for commercial advertisement in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which allegedly read: "Mossberg 590 12 gauge, $100.00." In the story, an unidentified St. Louis telephone number was listed to call for more information.

The Associated Press article published in your paper went on to say that, upon dialing the telephone number listed in the original commercial advertisement, callers allegedly heard a recorded message from the National Alliance, a violent white supremacist group. The article then went on to summarize for readers, second-hand, what the telephone message allegedly said from this hate group instead of allowing each of us to determine for ourselves what was said, how it was said and what was meant.

Number omitted

The St. Louis telephone number was conspicuously absent from the article, although it was the essence of the article itself. Personally, I believe that any hate group of this type does not deserve any serious consideration by any one of us in our democratic society, but I cannot and do not feel the need to fix the problem by unilaterally imposed censorship either by a news organization or otherwise. There is no harm in the publication of this information and data so we might discern, determine and analyze for ourselves the meaning and significance of this twisted message. At least the publication of all known facts allows each of us the opportunity to recognize the nature and extent of this unacceptable racism. This self-action on the media's part, however, although perhaps well-intentioned, was and is censorship.

Those of us who have come to know the Constitution and its amendments as one of the finest documents ever agreed upon by man abhor most of all censorship of the kind illustrated by the type of omission of information in this article. Our Founding Fathers wholeheartedly believed in absolute free speech and the unfettered consideration and discussion of all sides of a political, economic or other theme, albeit disgusting or revolting to some or all of us. They heartily believed that these kinds of matters needed to be fully debated in open forums without any restriction or limitation so that the general public could come to its own conclusions as to whether or not these issues were valid and legitimate. Except for your censorship, a citizen could have called this number and listened to the inane message out of curiosity, for educational reasons, in order for citizens to appreciate this underground threat to our freedom and, if for no other reason, because citizens have a certain right to know unclassified information. Undoubtedly, if someone in the media thinks long and hard enough, it will likely come up with a seemingly plausible reason for censoring this information and put a spin on it that sounds good, but from my perspective no rationalization is sufficient.

Regrettably, something has slowly happened in our country in the last 200 years in terms of restriction of free speech. Our speech is far less free than it was at the time of our founding.

Dangerous approach

Today, it is the far safer and more acceptable approach to sweep these sorts of issues under the carpet, to omit the reporting of all facts in order to save others who might be offended or who might complain, to censor in order to keep our respective heads in the sand notwithstanding the need to know and appreciate the significant, substantial and clear threat of these hate groups and, in any event, as to matters and issues which might be considered of a sensitive nature or deemed a political hot potato, to underplay their significance or ignore their very existence. This approach is extremely dangerous to a free society and undermines our very existence.

The media, specifically the press, is supposed to be first and foremost the bastions and protectors of the First Amendment of the Constitution, the most significant of all civil liberties. The press has a duty to all of society to assure that censorship does not occur, now or in the future.

Although it may have been the politically correct thing to eliminate the telephone number from the article for whatever lame excuse one wishes to use, it was neither the appropriate nor the courageous thing to do under the circumstances. The decision to omit this information from the article intimated that your readers are uneducated and not sophisticated enough to call the telephone number in question and to discern for themselves the insanity of the recorded racist message. Your decision to omit information assumes we cannot or do not think for ourselves.

Your readers should have been able to check for themselves what the hate message actually was, what it truly meant and the perversion it projected. We as citizens should not have been required to rely upon someone else's subjective interpretation about what the telephone message said and what it supposedly meant to be able to come to our own conclusions. We are increasingly being spoon-fed this kind of information secondhand from the media and other sources without being able to verify the information firsthand. Something is very wrong with this scenario. Who made the media the arbiter to censor this information? Where does it begin, and where does it end? What rationalization is used? Is it the same kind of rationalization uttered in Nazi Germany in the 1930s?

Frankly, I am one who is tired of being protected from myself by the government and the media, and I am especially chagrined at being told by those who are the self-righteous just what exactly was said, what was meant, what to think and so on. It looks to me, unfortunately, that we are a lot closer to the reality of George Orwell's "1984" than we would like to believe.

Ken McManaman is a lawyer who resides in Jackson, Mo.