The Quality Control Function of a Free Press

Historically, Marxists have considered “free speech” and a “free press” to be bourgeois values, mere “property rights,” especially a free press. This was always used as justification for state-owned media in the old Soviet Union, because the state, being the dictatorship of the proletariat, was more democratic than any capitalist-owned media ever could be. This also is the real world, hard-core meaning behind A.J. Liebling’s statement to the effect that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one, though I don’t know that Liebling was a Marxist. To this day, some academics in America continue to dismiss “freedom of the press” as a mere “property right” and are angry that the press does not work to support leading ideology, which would include ending oppression, redistributing wealth and power, supporting internationalism and so on.

Freedom of speech, when it first tentatively emerged in the old Soviet Union, simply was a means of encouraging people to reveal their concerns and true beliefs about socialism, internationalism and the state, so that pockets of resistance to leading ideology could be identified. The Soviets would try to re-educate individuals, and would reform educational and political structures that were doing a poor job of inculcating citizens with proper beliefs.

Intriguingly, the old Soviet Union was at least going in the right direction, in terms of the expansion of free speech, while America has been going in the wrong direction. There has certainly been media concentration in recent years (the property rights issue). The criticism of media concentration, whether by Marxists, Social Democrats or American Progressive, nevertheless more closely mimics historic criticism of “Jewish-controlled media.”

I’m concerned with the suppression of free speech by Leftists and Progressives on campus. This can be seen in basic writing classes controlled by Modern Language Association professors, instructors and graduate students, which is to say virtually all basic writing classes in America because the MLA simply dominates curriculum, textbooks and hiring in the classroom in English departments.

Part of the tendentious curriculum installed by the MLA is reflected in the code words “critical thinking.” Rhetoric and basic writing classes now teach “critical thinking,” and the professors seek to deflect criticism by insisting that “critical thinking” is a legitimate part of the curriculum.

It's related to critical theory, of course, in which you talk about the oppressed peoples of the world, identify the oppressors and at least think about overthrowing the oppressors. It's prosecutorial, it's a call to arms. That's the innocent construction. More dangerously, it is the old Soviet model the MLA may be following. You encourage limited free speech so as to identify pockets of resistance to leading ideology, then you correct those errors in thinking. ICritical thinking classes also are a great recruiting tool for graduate school admission and future teaching positions - most undergraduates will just go through the motions, but true believers will easily be identified and encouraged to continue a political career on campus. This is the pattern of the Modern Language Association in America, today, more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is worth emphasizing - students may not be ordered to think in a certain way, but this is agenda setting theory and the agenda is tendentious.

The suppression of free speech on campus also is evident in the small but growing trend to require de facto loyalty oaths to progressive causes, such as during the hiring process. This is a form of enforcing party discipline; it’s a suppression of free speech (because people have to say what they’re expected to say or they risk not being hired) and it’s a betrayal of the marketplace of ideas ideal. A personal example illustrates this trend, though I try to avoid personal examples in this series of essays. I was twice challenged by a union leader at a major Midwestern university to which I had applied for a teaching job to declare whether I would sign the department’s diversity and social justice statement. I am a union executive at my newspaper, but I would not agree to sign such a statement. The professor who had challenged me on this turned in her seat and faced away from me during the rest of the interview process; there was an embarrassed silence while several other professors in the seminar room at the time said and did nothing. If you’re familiar with the interview process at colleges, there often is a final chance for faculty to meet the potential new hire, at the end of the day. No faculty member came to greet me at the final scheduled meeting of the day, however. I was a non-person by then, and only the department chair and a friend from the philosophy department showed up.

I had not been asked if I believed in diversity or social justice; I had been asked if I would sign a document.

The Soviet evolution of the concept of free speech is worth exploring. In the early days with Lenin, and especially during Stalin’s reign, there was no free speech. But starting at least with Nikita Khrushchev (whose greatest contribution to free speech may be his “secret speech” against Stalin in 1956) the Soviet Union began expanding free speech rights in a legitimate way.

This was the “quality control function” of free speech and freedom of the press. Corrupt officials, inefficient state enterprises, faulty record keeping and data collection, and other real ills that the Soviet leadership needed to know about had to be brought to their attention somehow, and free speech and a little freedom of the press were good, pragmatic means to achieve this. Every journalist will recognize this as the searchlight function of the free press, as embraced by the old Scripps-Howard lighthouse logo for their newspaper chain.

The first person to tell me about the quality control function of a free press was my thesis adviser in graduate school in 1982. He also taught me that freedom of the press already was being dismissed in America as a mere property right.

In the late 1990s I wanted to write a book about these free speech and freedom of the press issues, and I tracked him down. He was by then the head of the journalism department at a major American university. But he completely disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of these topics. He didn’t know what the quality control function of free speech was, he said.

He had to be careful. While the old Soviet system was going in the right direction, albeit in fits and starts, we were going in the wrong direction in this country. Clearly, people on campus would see through any plot of ours to embrace a valid notion of a free press, one associated with liberalization in the old Soviet Union. Free speech would be a heresy, a threat to leading ideology in which everthing that needs to be known about society already is known (compare to any revealed religion), a racket to protect someone else's property rights, and an insult to all the oppressed people's of the world who don't need to hear the other side of the story, but only need to have their oppression stopped.

The Left often talks about free speech and invokes it to protect this or that controversial writer or thinker. But it's tactical, not strategic. The Left invokes free speech when it's useful either to protect its own or advance its own. Compare this to authoritarian religion - the truth is known, so why would you allow anyone to challenge the truth? But your truths of course can be allowed to challenge someone else's lies.

Liberalism is a competing universalism; Marxism (and the authoritarian Left) is a competing universalism. Liberalism can tolerate Marxism, but the latter cannot long tolerate the former. Coalitions between Liberals and Marxists (or simply the authoritarian Left) will fail if the Marxists gain the upper hand; they will “consolidate” power, as they always do when they take over countries.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.



.