Tuesday, January 14, 2014
New lies about anonymous speech from Campaign Legal Center.
Here is an editorial from CLC that was published at Huffington Post.
http://www.clcblog.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=544:listeners-are-entitled-to-know-by-whom-they-are-being-persuaded
Here is an editorial from CLC that was published at Huffington Post.
http://www.clcblog.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=544:listeners-are-entitled-to-know-by-whom-they-are-being-persuaded
LISTENERS ARE ENTITLED TO KNOW BY WHOM THEY ARE BEING PERSUADED
L1: I'm a little surprised they chose the term "entitled"; it has some negative baggage. Anyway, the claim is wrong. There is no general legal or moral right to not hear speech that you don't know the authorship of.
The article goes on to call for new forms of censorship of political speech in America, to make the world safe from democracy. Ah, now I have learned that the title comes from an FCC publication.
I disagree with the general message, but nobody cares what I think. My focus here will be to point out factual errors in the piece.
I'm going to highlight a few sentences that I think are just out and out wrong.
L2:
The Supreme Court has consistently found that voters deserve to know who is funding political communications in order to evaluate the full context of the message.
That's not true, and they know it. NAACP v Alabama, Bates v Little Rock, Talley v California, created a right to privacy. This right to privacy underlies later cases such as Griswold,and Roe v Wade. Talley held that disclaimer rules of the sort the CLC is pushing are unconstitutional. Later, McIntyre repeated this ruling, finding that an Ohio statute require disclaimers on candidate literature was unconstitutional. These cases are part of a larger pateern of cases holding that th government may not dictate the content of speech. Federation of the Blind, Tornillo v Miami Herald, Wooley v Maynard, are examples. The Court's rulings in this area have not been consistent.The claim is false.
L3.
The Court has also held that there is no right to anonymous speech when an organization is trying to influence the outcome of a candidate's election. The Supreme Court has explicitly rejected "the existence of a generalized right of anonymity in speech "
This claim seems fishy, since it lacks a citation to know what case they are referring to. Again, in McIntyre the court found Ohio's statute unconstitutional, and cited with approval state cases such as People v White and New York v Duryea which had held there is a right to anonymous speech about candidates. McIntyre technically was an as-applied case, and the facts of the case concerned a referendum, but the court's finding that the statute is unconstitutional is relevant. McIntyre did not act alone; she was part of an anti-tax organization of about 60 people.
The article puts quotes around the phrase "the existence of a generalized right of anonymity in speech" but did not tell us what it was quoting. The full quote in content tells a different story.
"The existence of a generalized right of anonymity in speech was rejected by this Court in Lewis Publishing Co. v. Morgan, 229 U.S. 288, 33 S.Ct. 867, 57 L.Ed. 1190 (1913)"
It is true that 101 years ago, the court had not yet recognized a generalized right to anonymity; that didn't come until 1960. This quote actually comes from J. Scalia's dissent in McIntyre. McIntyre, like Talley is a case that does recognize a generalized right of anonymity in speech. CLC is wrong, and probably knows it is wrong, because their quote is from the dissent of the case that says they are wrong, but they carefully left off the citation so we wouldn't know that.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive. I mostly wanted to point out that it irked me when I found out they had hidden the fact that their quote came from the dissent in the very case that proves them wrong. -30-.
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