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Key lawmaker calls for criminalizing TV indecency:
SAN FRANCISCO (Hollywood Reporter) – The chairman of one of the entertainment industry’s most important congressional committees says he wants to take the enforcement of broadcast decency standards into the realm of criminal prosecution.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner III, R-Wis., told cable industry executives attending the National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. conference here on Monday that criminal prosecution would be a more efficient way to enforce the indecency regulations.
“I’d prefer using the criminal process rather than the regulatory process,” Sensenbrenner told the executives.
This would be an error. One thing we need in this country is a lot more appreciation for the power of public opinion, and the times when it is appropriate to use that power rather than the force of law.
Anyone who’s ever been to high school knows how powerful public opinion can be. We really care, and rightly so, about what those around us think, and consider to be good behavior. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a genetic part of the human race; but it might just as well be a result of being smart and wanting to be good, productive members of our community, who are appreciated by our fellow countrymen.
Public opinion is able to make far more subtle distinctions than can be made in laws meant to apply to all people in all circumstances. Public opinion can take into account all the details of the people and circumstances involved.
The law is a blunt instrument of relatively brute force. It cannot make subtle distinctions about what speech is acceptable or not to society as a whole. Legal restrictions of free speech in this country cannot be permitted.
Public opinion—which in and of itself is an exercise of free speech—is the most appropriate and effective way of addressing matters of public speech. If the public doesn’t want to see naked women on TV on a SuperBowl broadcast, we have the opportunity to say so loud and clear, with the result that the networks don’t show it.
A recent book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki, documents that public opinion is surprisingly effective at coming up with good judgments. Here’s an excerpt from an article on this subject by Surowiecki:
...Under the right circumstances, groups (like the motley collection of bettors at a racetrack) are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than even the smartest people in them. ...a diverse group of people, even if many of them are not especially well informed, will consistently offer better solutions than even the smartest expert.
The simplest demonstration of this is the jellybean experiment. Ask a group of 50 people how many jellybeans are in a jar, and the group’s average answer will be uncannily accurate — within 2% of the right number — and it will be better than the answers of nearly everyone in the group.
...At the racetrack, for instance, the crowd of bettors routinely offers accurate forecasts: The odds on a horse reflect, almost perfectly, its chances of winning. (Horses that go off at 3-1 odds, for instance, win just about a quarter of the time.) The Internet search engine Google relies on collective wisdom to rank the pages that have the information you’re looking for. It treats a link from one Web page to another as a vote on the worth of that page, effectively getting the Web to decide collectively which pages are most valuable. Google’s popularity is based on the routine excellence of those decisions. And the return on the stock market, even with investors’ irrationality and occasional bouts of hysteria and panic, is next to impossible for mutual-fund managers to beat.
...Our sense of caution about groups is justified — there are myriad examples of collective craziness, ranging from lynch mobs to the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s. But in our haste to recognize that groups sometimes go wrong, it’s easy to overlook how often, and how powerfully, they go right.
It’s very important not to confuse the power of public opinion with the force of law. People saying that their free speech is being violated by those who are telling them to pipe down, are confusing the two. Freedom of speech means freedom from the force of law used to tell us what we can and cannot say. It does not mean freedom from the use of free speech by others who are telling us that they disagree with us and that we should cool it. That’s not a violation of free speech. It’s democracy in action. And it’s very effective.
