1. Let's consider the merits of the claim that secondary boycotts designed to silence press outlets are - not as a matter of what the law allows, but as a matter of why we value free speech in the first place - as much a social good as the press itself.https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1118702541942996992 …
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2. This is equivalent to the view that burning a book is as valuable to the free exchange of ideas as writing a book. Under the law, both are protected as expressive activity. But that doesn't make both equal in how they advance free speech!
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3. Let's consider a hypothetical society equally divided among 3 or 4 groups, all of which are equally vigilant to boycott advertisers of press outlets they don't want to hear from. Eventually, because nobody wants to alienate that many customers, no press outlet can run ads.
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4. As an economic matter, this could end with no press outlets at all; it likely would end with far fewer, all of which deliver only news to paid subscribers who are told what they want to hear. Is this progress? The boycotters had their say. Are they as valuable as the press?
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5. Given that the *expressed intent* of such boycotts is to end the expressive activity of the target, either by shuttering their business or changing their speech, defenders of the value of boycott as equal to the value of a free press should be willing to endorse that outcome.
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6. Nobody should be immune from criticism (including boycotters!). If an outlet peddles such garbage that nobody watches or reads them anymore, they die. That's fine! Marketplace of ideas at work.
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7. But that's not what's at issue here: it's the effort to find a chokepoint that causes some speech, based on its viewpoint, to have more difficulty being published than speech that otherwise reaches a comparable audience.
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8. The First Amendment protects both the media & the critics of the media. That means both must be held accountable by social norms - of a responsible press, and of responsible media criticism - where the law may not go.
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9. My point is simply that media critics should not use the tools of speech to try to put media out of business & silence voices it disagrees with, as opposed to exposing it to the harsh glare of truth.
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