Tweeting As Protected Speech for 45? How About That for Class Discussion?

I have a master's degree in Journalism from Marquette University. First Amendment issues are a deep interest of mine. Along with an examination of where we are as a country and how we got there must also accompany the reporting of information and how it's done. It establishes our impressions of reality--reality that is taught in our schools.

My conclusion, among many others, about this is simple: We need schools to create courses on interpreting media.

It's a radical, even dangerous notion. To do that would be to allow all kinds of media to be examined, including non-mainstream publications and blogposts and internet missives that would by nature be provocative.

It would open up school boards to be hyper-political--or not, depending upon their particular derivations. But it would bring nationwide, worldwide issues right to everyone's front door, very currently, very hot and percolating. Parents don't like that. 

Communities don't like that, either, and the smaller the community the more it doesn't like it. It shatters the protective bubble around which their comfortable notion of reality revolves. It makes people uncomfortable because it makes them think too much. 

And the very media that would be discussed would descend upon the communities in which such studies would cause the greatest controversy--thus proving what some consider the largest problem with media, namely that only the strangest and non-mainstream issues ever see light. Small towns are boring, and the adults want it to remain that way.

People love the First Amendment, but only from a distance, like most of the rest of the Bill of Rights. Confronted with its immediacy, they often reject and try to ignore it. They do their best to insulate themselves from it.

Thus (and to no one's surprise) is the position of 45, who is being sued by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. 45 is fond of tweeting those itches that he wishes to scratch. People have responded to his address with, well, protestations that are probably as insulting as those he has put out there. As others do with those they do not care for (and I have done with a few people on Facebook), he has blocked them simply because he doesn't like what they have to say.

Is that fair? Is it fair that the one person who should face whatever commentary he has, engendered very publicly, and willingly provided that same commentary, the one person who has been willingly subjected to as much public commentary in response to whatever he has said and done--in the ultimate elected position--should be allowed to shut off that which he doesn't like?

First Amendment protections are not only those which protect expression, but those which protect the exchanges of expression--which, on its face, is what the protection is about. After all, if I can't get into a conversation with someone about things we do not agree with, what is the point of protecting what anyone says? We will just turn to what's comfortable amongst each other, get nowhere, continue to build resentment and misunderstandings, and engender lashings-out that have extended, now, to the White House and the Senate floor.

The president has every right to say what he wants, publicly or otherwise. But does he have the right, as the ultimate public figure, to shut down exchanges, since they exist to potentially change his mind about things (good luck with that)?

His lawyers say yes. They say that his Twitter account pre-existed his presidency; and that, as a private account, he has the same rights as others who exercise acceptance and non-acceptance of exchanges. He gets to have his cake of insults on social media and eat it, too. 

If President Kennedy, for instance, made a controversial speech and then retired to his getaway in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, wouldn't he have had the perfect right to ward off protesters and maintain some semblance of privacy, if for no other reason than to rest a little, because, you know, that's a tough job?

The Knight Institute's lawyers say: Hey, wait a minute. 45's Twitter feed is direct communication with the public, willingly entered into. And on another matter, a federal court has already ruled that the feed is official White House communications--like a press conference, like any other comment on paper with The White House logo at the top of the page. If he dishes it out, he has to be able to take it.

Should 45 have a modicum of privacy? Sure he should. He has Mar-A-Lago for that purpose. But to keep tweeting from there and demand that some people shouldn't be able to respond seems to me like the person who opens her front door, shouts insults at passers-by, and then sues to prevent people from gathering outside to shout back from the sidewalk because she wants her "privacy." Seems to me she gave that up by willingly engaging in something of a conversation that she wants to be one-way only. I refer to the last sentence in the previous paragraph.

Right now, the White House is on the losing side of this, pending appeal. Out of 48 names, they allowed seven to resume the Twitter connection. That leaves 41. The Knight Institute provided those names online. I didn't recognize any of them, save one: David Hogg, the student activist and survivor of the attack on Parkview High School in Florida, who has been eloquently outspoken in the ongoing conversation on gun violence, particularly in schools. He hasn't been able to tweet with the president since June 11, 2017.

I'll be surprised if this issue doesn't make it to the Supreme Court. Seated there will, in all likelihood, be Brett Kavanaugh--who has already commented that the president should be protected against subpoenas while in office. Would it be a stretch to suppose that he would say that 45 should be shielded from other kinds of unpleasantries as well? 

Wouldn't this be a great discussion topic in schools, if people are allowed to actually have it?

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark