Imus, Porn, and the Beeb: Journalists and Lawyers Debate Free Speech

To celebrate it’s 75th Anniversary, the BBC is hosting a series of free speech debates. Previously, they visited Delhi and Cairo, and last night they came to Columbia University. There, the panel of experts — free speech attorney Floyd Abrams (a last-minute replacement for Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who was apparently stuck behind a snow bank in Vermont), media rights attorney John Walsh, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller (when asked how she found jail, she said, “Jail is not as bad as Iraq”), and law professor/activist Catherine MacKinnon — tried to answer when, if ever, limits should be placed on free speech.

Hosted by BBC World Tonight‘s Claire Bolderson, the event covered net neutrality, pornography, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s visit to Columbia, government surveillance, pornography, Don Imus and pornography (that coming mostly from Professor MacKinnon). Miller contended that free speech needs to have limits — that there’s “no right to incite violence against others … There are ethics to what we can and cannot say.” She said journalists should “do no harm, then anything else goes.”

Say what you will about MacKinnon — the woman has an agenda, and was excellent and steering the conversation back towards what she sees as the biggest problems with free speech: pornography. The inability to litigate against it, the damages it causes and the blasé attitude towards it. She didn’t flinch when WNYC’s Brian Lehrer asked her if feminist speech was male hate speech, and thus should be banned from the airwaves. While she “would not defend hate speech against men,” she said women “first have to have speech for the media to shut them down.”

Walsh and Abrams provided solid legal opinions from both side of the courtroom: Walsh as a prosecutor of libel and slander, Abrams as a strident defender of the first-amendment.

The panel, which was recorded for broadcast and will be aired on BBC Radio on December 11 at 6pm and 11 pm GMT.

—Kate Dailey

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