Why I comment
Michael Silicz, Staff
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” — Thomas Jefferson
As a writer, I am lucky. I have a diverse, intelligent and active readership that I try to inform on a weekly basis. There will never be a more ample and opportune time for me to make my opinions heard.
The same goes for anybody else who has the chance to influence people through any medium, whether it’s a blog, radio show, Youtube.com video or even a campus newspaper like the Manitoban. People with access to an audience — be they atop a soapbox on the street corner or an election candidate before the masses — can consider themselves fortunate to influence public discourse. The bottom-line is simple: we in the media have the power to influence people. But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.
Critically, those of us privileged enough with the power to reach a wide audience have exactly that to uphold — a responsibility. We owe a duty to our readers, no matter what the circumstance. We, as opinion makers with power, have the responsibility to never cower in fear when it comes to letting people express their opinions. Even the most controversial views are not exempt from this obligation. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms reminds us that almost any opinion can be expressed in our country, subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society as decided by the courts. As journalists, writers and editors, we have a responsibility to uphold and defend the right to the freedom of expression, whatever the cost may be. For if we as the sentries of expression don’t do it, who will?
As the gatekeepers of opinion, we must not strive to stand up for one side of an issue or the other. No. Rather, it is our job to stand up for the mechanism underlying both sides of any discussion — the marketplace of ideas — the very rules that allow the debate to occur in the first place. It is thus our duty as editors to defend the intrinsic value underlying the freedom of expression itself; and not the specific opinions, theories, views and conclusions of the writers themselves. That means that we should not be wary of upsetting or offending an audience, just as we should not be elated for satisfying and pleasing an audience. Instead, it means we must strive to preserve, uphold and even expand the rules underlying the basis of how and why we debate. As Thomas Jefferson said long ago: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” We would do wise to heed these late-18th-century words in our brave new millennium.
Sadly, it is exactly this issue — the freedom of expression — that alarms me today. It frightens me that this issue has come under attack from abroad. But worse, it scares me that this issue has come under attack much closer to home.
On March 28, 2008, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) died a quiet death. On this day, and unbeknownst to most of the world, the principle behind the freedom of expression was turned upside down with little to no backlash in the mainstream media. As advocated tenaciously by Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethics Organization, the opponents of free speech have won a major victory that sets back international law and mocks the very foundations of the nearly 60-year-old UDHR.
The United Nations Human Rights Council (the two-year-old successor to the Commission of Human Rights) is designed to address human right violations, but more importantly, to prevent certain countries with well-documented human right abuses from dictating actual policy. The council gives mandates to “special rapporteurs” to monitor human right violations across the globe. At issue is the mandate of the “special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” whose job it is to monitor press freedoms under articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which with another convention and the UDHR form the legally binding International Bill of Rights). Their job, in a nutshell, is to monitor the abusive limits on expression, not the abusive expression itself. Or at least that used to be the special rapporteur’s job.
Through the lobbying power of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the special rapporteur’s job has now drastically changed to fit an agenda that goes against the spirit of the freedom of expression. The 57 member OIC’s fundamental purpose is to strengthen the solidarity and cooperation among the member states. With the support of human rights violators like China, Russia and Cuba, the OIC has managed to amend the special rapporteur’s mandate, which has now become to “report on instances where the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination.” While the wording sounds positive, its implications are foreboding.
It was the mandate of the special rapporteur to consider and monitor “abusive limits” on expression, but now it has become their job to look at abusive expression itself. There already exist other UN bodies and special rapporteurs that do exactly that. Through the amendment, the special rapporteur “will now be required to report on the ‘abuse’ of this most cherished freedom [of expression] by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws . . .” Despite the vigilant effort of 17 countries (including Canada), 27 other countries (almost all members of the OIC) managed to pass the amendment. Thankfully, 40 civil society organizations (many of which were from the OIC too) advocated vigorously to stop this from happening but were ultimately unsuccessful. In a complete reversal of the purpose of free speech, this amendment has transformed freedom of expression from a negative right to an abhorrent and illogical positive right. The quintessence of democracy — free speech — has now been usurped by those who wish to see democracy stopped.
As tragic as this is, there is an issue like it that hits far closer to home, to the very pages of this newspaper. Over the past year, we as editors have routinely made changes to articles for a variety of valid reasons. This is a normal process, as we often edit out words that may be deemed offensive or change phrases to be less exploitive, so long as the change does not alter the general thesis of the article. However, in the most recent issue of the Manitoban, we as editors censored a volunteer staff member’s article about Islam (So Jesus and Muhammad Walk into a Bar . . .). It was deemed by a majority of the editorial board as being too offensive. Created for the context of our annual joke issue, written in an outlandish and over-the-top manner and, most important of all, delivered in a satirical tone that mocks outlandish and bigoted right-wing pundits’ views, we as a majority of editors altered an article that was never intended to be censored by its author. As such we erred on the side of caution and “blacked out” the entire article, justifying the move as a joke that fit the context of our paper, all the while failing to uphold our duty to the freedom of expression out of a fear that our author’s joke might be taken as offensive.
Thus, we have irony at its finest — while non-democratic countries abroad work hard to curb the international freedom of expression through legal means, we at home are censoring ourselves by ignoring our own constitutionally entrenched right to expression out of the misguided fear of offending people. Yet what can be described as irony here may also be called cultural relativism — the greatest danger to our Western way of life is not upholding it as we have for the past century. The 20th century saw liberal, capitalist democracies triumph over nationalism, fascism, and communism. It is dishonourable that after these intellectual victories we in the press now wallow in political correctness, fearing a posssible repeat of the chaos that followed the publication of Danish editorial cartoons.
There are few times that I agree with Noam Chomsky, but when it comes to the freedom of expression, there is no greater champion alive: “the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended.”
Freedom of expression is the quintessence of democracy: it is the aether that pervades the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, as well as the fourth estate. In the proper context, freedom of the expression through the press allows us to criticize ourselves to change for the better; but in the wrong context, it allows our opponents to silence debate by turning our own rules against us. It is for that reason that we as journalists, writers and opinion-makers must stand up and fight for the freedom of expression. It is exactly that — the defence of ideas, the defence of knowledge and, most of all, the defence of democracy — for which we should stand. That is why we write. And that is why I comment.
Michael Silicz is the comment editor of the Manitoban and dedicates this article to writers everywhere who have been censored.
