(first draft - May 17, 2006)
The author of our next book, Glen Yeadon, had his website excluded from Google's search results for over a month; he thinks it's because his content is "offensive" to the Bush regime. What if Yeadon didn't have a day job, and depended on sales from the Internet for a living? Wouldn't he suffer as much from prejudice as someone who is denied a job because of their race?
As more of us become economically dependent on web traffic, it becomes clear that we need a Bill of Rights for freedom of access to the Web. Corporations can't create monopolies and then say, we are private persons and we have the right to deny service to whom we like, with the party politics we like.
The same applies to monopolistic book chains. The 14th amendment needs to be extended. It prohibits discrimination on racial or religious grounds, but doesn't protect political dissent. There is a body of law prohibiting discrimination in employment, but no protection for self-employed people like authors and entrepreneurs. I tried searching for such 'fair-chance' laws on the web. All I found was that the constitutions of African nations often prohibit discrimination on grounds of political beliefs. It's time for us to try and catch up with Africa.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to use the commons. It is more than mere muttering under one's breath, it is the chance to be heard in the public marketplace. The commons is no longer a green in the middle of the village, it's a corporatized space across malls and screens. So this is a first amendment issue, too. Denying freedom of speech or the press is not an exercise of freedom. Ownership rights to the precincts of the commons is an entitlement to usufruct, not to restrict freedom of speech, of the press, of choice by citizens there. When corporations acquire dominant ownership of information channels - a bad idea in itself - they then have a fiduciary responsibility to keep the commons open and untrammeled.
News media and sites like wikipedia should set aside space for alternative viewpoints on current topics, and those should be edited by their own faithful, not mainstream critics.
When selecting books, libraries should also look at popularity of books online and at an encyclopedic diversity of political viewpoints, not at prevalence of mainstream print reviews
Currently, the book trade takes pride in being a bastion of First Amendment rights. While that seems to be true relative to the miasma of TV and newsprint, I have already found the first signs of statistical evidence of political bias in corporate book purchasing.
Finally, as a fictitious person, a corporation which can not vote also can have no right to a political bias. This is particularly true where channels are involved rather than original expression. As originators, the artist or publisher require the right of free choice; but corporate distributors, printers, or sellers collectively holding a significant market share have no natural right to block commercially viable media of a political nature. Moreover, to ensure that these constitutional freedoms do not become a travesty, there should be legal means of redress such as exist for other forms of economic discrimination.
- John Leonard
See also: Google blocks Nazi Hydra on this site, or on PRWEB