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http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2007/09/27/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis56.txtFreedom of speech sometimes asterisky
By Rich Lewis, September 27, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007 3:11 PM EDT
During the years I worked at The Sentinel, I wrote a lot of editorials. Some were long, some short -- but none was as short as the editorial written by David McSwane, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at Colorado State University.
Nor did any of mine create the national uproar his has sparked, even though it was only four words long.
A little background: On Sept. 21, McSwane published an editorial in the Rocky Mountain Collegian that said: “Taser This...F*** Bush.”
Except he didn’t use three little stars after the F.
Within hours, the student paper lost $30,000 in advertising revenue and had to cut staff pay by 10 percent to compensate for the loss. The campus is hot with debate, with thousands of students either defending McSwane or calling for his head. The national media pounced on the story and is similarly abuzz with opinion. McSwane refuses to resign, but the school’s Board of Student Communications could force him out. And that’s where things stood Wednesday morning.
Quite the stir -- a little drama, a little comedy, a heap of passion, a dash of hype.
But is the story worthy of our attention, or just another political sideshow? And should McSwane be fired?
Everyone has a gut reaction, but take a closer look at the details before deciding.
The meaning of the editorial itself may not be entirely clear at first glance.
The first part, “Taser This,” is a reference to a Sept. 17 incident at the University of Florida in which a student was tasered by campus police for disrupting a speech by U.S. Sen. John Kerry. That widely reported incident raised questions about the appropriate use of tasers and whether the police infringed on the student’s right to free speech.
Apparently, McSwane felt very strongly that the Florida incident was just one more example of a broader assault on free speech, and he wanted to make a statement. So, as a defiant verbal gesture to “authorities” in general, he challenged them to “taser this.”
Of course, McSwane then had to connect the “this” to a “speech” that he felt was sufficiently outrageous to make his point.
That would be the last two, inflammatory words.
It’s worth noting that the Florida incident had nothing to do with Bush, and, in fact, involved a prominent Democrat. And the last two words of McSwane’s editorial only incidentally involved Bush personally -- the real intent was to criticize the “president” in crude language as a demonstration that our free-speech rights go that far.
As McSwane explained to CNN: “We wanted people to understand that free speech is something we should talk about. We felt that this campus, for one reason or another, has been really apathetic. Too quiet. We felt that the best way to spark that dialogue was to exercise it ourselves.”
A lot of people condemn McSwane for the way he made his point, not the point itself. For example, as a Collegian blogger put it: “That they have to resort to bumper-sticker trash for an editorial piece is really disgusting.”
But student Kristopher Hite offered another perspective. He first reminded CNN that in 2004 Vice President Dick Cheney aimed the F-word at U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, right on the Senate floor, and then said: “This has promoted more discussion than any other editorial. If they had used an F and some asterisks, it wouldn’t have promoted the same kind of discussion. You can’t always use kid gloves.”
The Collegian followed up with an editorial in which it conceded that McSwane’s tactic was “immature, unnecessary and offensive.”
But it also noted that no one seemed to pay any attention to the paper’s political editorials until the shocking headline appeared.
“It’s interesting and scary that the use of the F-word garners more attention than an intelligent, well-researched editorial,” the paper said.
All I can say is that I discussed this incident in my journalism class on Tuesday, and the students seemed very interested in it. One even e-mailed me his thoughts after class, which is somewhat unusual. He concluded McSwane should be fired for printing “essentially the equivalent of randomly flipping people off without rhyme or reason.”
That’s a valid opinion -- but you have to acknowledge that McSwane’s four words got a student halfway across the country to think about an issue of importance to all of us. That counts for something.
And when Columbia University braved harsh criticism and allowed Iran’s president to speak there this week, the result was positive: The audience laughed at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s absurd claims. If Ahmadinejad’s speech had been suppressed, he would have been the winner. By permitting him to speak freely, we allowed him to prove that he is a loser.
In last week’s column, I wrote about the recent anti-war march in Washington, D.C., and included a picture of demonstrators streaming past the huge, marble panel inscribed with the First Amendment attached to the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue.
McSwane was testing the limits of the amendment’s protections. He didn’t go too far because, with certain rare exceptions, you can’t go too far.
Fire him? ****, no.
Rich Lewis’ e-mail address is rlcolumn@comcast.net
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