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Before he became the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr often talked about the importance of freedom of speech. “Free speech is the counterweight—it is the check on government control,” he wrote on X in 2023. Or, in 2024: “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” Since taking up his post in January, however, he has found a value in regulating how certain people express themselves. His FCC has launched investigations into 60 Minutes, Saturday Night Live, PBS, and NPR—all before last week, when ABC temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly talk show, in the wake of vague threats from Carr. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast.)
To Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton and the author of a timely new book, What Is Free Speech? A History of a Dangerous Idea, all of this is standard practice for a concept that has always been used to advance particular agendas. Speech, he writes, is always abused and always subject to regulation: “Formal and informal rules about expression are ubiquitous. We label such restraints ‘censorship’ when we disapprove of them, but in truth they are inescapable.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
CAG: You trace the history of the modern concept of free speech to two “little-known journalists” from London, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, who wrote a series of columns in the 1720s called “Cato’s Letters.” What did you discover about them?
FD: Gordon and Trenchard were the first people to put forward an absolute idea of freedom of speech that posits that it should never be limited because it’s the foundation of all liberty. This has long been known as the origin of the First Amendment, and it became the most popular and influential political text in North America in the eighteenth century.
In my research, I discovered two very important things, the first of which is that this theory is full of holes. It’s a self-interested justification of their work as muckraking journalists. They ignore that, in the public sphere, people are writing for money and changing sides all the time according to who’s paying them. They ignore that newspapers are out to make money and profit. And they ignore the problem of libel. Instead, they claimed that the truth will always come out and you can never be harmed by someone attacking you because either it’s true, in which case it’s justified, or it’s not true, and other people will see that and it will just glide off you anyway.
The second thing, even more interestingly, is that these guys themselves were hugely corrupt. They were writing for money. They were writing to be noticed. They were attacking the government so that the government would pay them off. And then they switched sides. Gordon, the main author of these texts, became the chief propagandist of the prime minister of the day. So they epitomized the corruption of the public sphere at that time, and all the problems that everyone else was talking about.
This all sounds vaguely familiar.
It’s very analogous to our modern world.
The first kind of modern attempts to think about free speech arose in the early eighteenth century, and they arose then because it was a moment when a huge communications revolution took place. People started being able to publish in England without submitting anything controversial to censor beforehand. At the same time, this was also the age of the first political parties, so you had this hyperpartisan atmosphere. They’re using these newspapers, and they are shouting back and forth that the other side is lying to the public, but they will tell them the truth.
In this world, people get addicted to fast-paced news. They love the idea of liberty of the press being a thing that English-speaking people are in the vanguard of, but they can also see that it makes the inherent problems of public communication that everyone has always known about worse: they knew that lies are easy to spread and they spread faster than the truth, and that the defamation of individuals becomes easier, rather than harder, when you have faster and freer communication. They knew that the public can be misinformed and misled. For that reason, they didn’t manage to theorize this in anything other than a very loose way, which is that while liberty of the press is good, the abuse of this freedom is a bad thing. So they had this kind of balancing model, and everyone could see that this was an essentially subjective thing, a line between liberty and license. It depended on the point of view of the beholder, and that’s a perennial problem we’re still grappling with. Everyone wants the rules to be simpler and more straightforward.
You write that there has always been a lot of angst about whether what people called the “free press” only applied to a select few. How do power dynamics factor into all of this?
You can’t think about freedom of speech without thinking about power, really. The first thing is that within any society, certain people have greater power. Their voices carry greater authority. In deeply hierarchical premodern societies, people at the top were more important to people at the bottom, so the speech of rulers was more important than the speech of servants, and this was heavily gendered as well. The same is true of our own society in various ways. The voices of the less powerful are harder to hear.
The second issue is the power of amplification—and these issues are related, but not the same. So who owns the newspapers, and whose voices do they amplify and whose do they silence? The earliest attempts to grapple with this are made by the early socialists and then the Marxists and then communists. But even before Marx, the English Chartists were developing a very full-throated critique of the way in which the mass media of the early nineteenth century was made up of basically capitalists trying to suppress the voices of the poor and the working class. In that day, newspapers were heavily taxed in the sense that they were purposefully kept expensive so poor people couldn’t have access to them. So this was, from the outset, a very live issue and a debate.
So what’s the best outcome here? Is it possible to have such a thing as true free speech?
The difficulty is that there are basically only two models of free speech, and they both lead to serious problems of different kinds. If you take the absolutist model seriously, you have to deny that speech causes real harm in the world. As people have known throughout history, speech is trivial, fleeting, and harmless most of the time. But it can also cause serious damage to the public good. Lies, truth, and defamation are real things.
The other model is a balanced approach. But the problem with the balanced approach—one that proceeds from the realization that some forms of speech, especially by people with power, can be harmful to the reputations of individuals or the public good—is that, ultimately, these judgments are subjective. Making laws creates mechanisms that can later be weaponized and abused. And the ultimate difficulty, really, is that free speech is essentially an artificial ideal. You can’t theorize it in black-and-white.
Laws are based on the idea that everyone should be treated the same. And unfortunately, by that logic, people should be allowed to say the same thing. But then that means you’re missing out on all the complexity of communication. You know, my saying something in a drunken outburst, in a café, is different from the president of the United States saying it out loud in public repeatedly. One kind of untruth is not the same as the other. So the context of speech always matters, and it’s always about who is speaking, or the audience.
It often feels in today’s discourse like free speech is viewed as an all-or-nothing proposition. But it sounds like you’re saying we need to have a much more nuanced understanding of what the concept means, and has meant historically.
One of the themes of my book is that “free speech” has always been a weaponized slogan. And so the conundrum that you put forward is based on the idea that free speech is a simple thing to define, and censorship is a simple thing to define, and we need to always be for freedom and against censorship. That, I’m afraid, is too simplistic. “Censorship” is a way of describing forms of regulation that we don’t agree with, that we think are unjustified or immoral or in some other way wrong. But all communication, to be successful, requires some kind of norms and regulation. I mean, you and I understand each other, because we’re both speaking in English. If I suddenly started speaking in Dutch, it wouldn’t work. And that’s just a really simple, basic kind of thing. We also need to understand that we’re talking seriously, that I’m not joking. I’m not trying to mislead you. So in all these ways, communication depends on shared norms and shared rules, and it only works if both parties understand those norms and rules in the same way.
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