Richard Martin Blog: What You Can't Say Online

Dave Wiegel, the political blogger who was forced to resign from his gig at The Washington Post after some private messages he posted to a listserv were made public by conservative outlets, has reportedly signed a deal to cover politics for Slate … which is owned by The Washington Post Co. How’s that for the circularity of Big Media?

Wiegel posted messages on the now-defect JournoList listserv that disparaged luminaries of the right like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, and accused the GOP of trying to "violently, angrily divide America." Never mind that, not only were those posts intended for a private, consensual audience of mostly liberal journalists (although there must have been at least one mole – how else did Tucker Carlson get ahold of them?); and never mind that Wiegel was explicitly hired as a blogger (i.e., an opinionated writer of analysis and commentary), not an objective reporter. He became expendable because some of those right-wing luminaries expressed outrage that the Post would hire and retain such a left-wing mouthpiece.

For a once-great newspaper that is now fighting for its life, this is a dismal example of its inability to face up and successfully adapt to the new realities of online media. It raises deeper questions, though, about what speech is free online, and who gets to control it?

Free Press and StopBigMedia.com, of course, argue that free speech is increasingly endangered because of increasing media consolidation. Sen. Al Franken – one of the few remaining congressional representatives of the nearly extinct liberal-and-proud-of-it politician – gave a fiery speech last week at Netroots Nation in which he vehemently opposed the pending merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, and claimed that “corporations with government permission pose the greatest threat to your First Amendment rights."

Those rights will soon be defunct, if the federal government continues to bless media mega-mergers, Franken cried: “If no one stops them how long to do you think it would take before four or five corporations effectively control the flow of information in America not only on television, but online?"

While I am no fan of media-ownership concentration, I have to say I am less worried about the death of free speech online. After all, the media have been consolidating for a long time, and it’s safe to say the blogosphere has never been more open or more free, or louder, than it is now. Even the biggest of Big Media companies have a business interest in continuing to allow users to say and to download whatever they want. Whether it’ll be easier to download reruns of Seinfeld (an NBC show) over a Comcast connection than, say, old episodes of ABC’s Lost, is another question.

That’s not to say that companies big and small are not devising ever-more-ingenious ways to quash speech they don’t appreciate or agree with. Earlier this month, a Georgia-based computer security firm called LIGATT Security filed suit in state court to suppress two dozen or so anonymous commenters on Yahoo’s message boards, who had been questioning the company’s claims to legitimacy. Run by self-proclaimed “World’s No. 1 Hacker" Gregory Evans, LIGATT is a public company traded over-the-counter and it claims the anonymous message-posterrs have defamed it and damaged its business prospects. The suit is unlikely to succeed.

“The world does not need more facially deficient lawsuits targeting online critics," commented the Electronic Frontier Foundation drily.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of the largest divulgement of classified Dept. of Defense documents since the Pentagon Papers: the Wikileaks posting of the “Afghan War Diary." Reactions to the release of the classified documents have been varied; President Obama has wisely pivoted from criticizing those who released the diaries to attempting to use them as evidence to shore up support for his policy in Afghanistan.

Outside of a few right-wing politicians though, few have suggested that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be charged with multiple felonies. That in itself indicates something about the health of free speech online.