Nine Inch Nails dropped out of the MTV Movie Awards after clashing with the network over an image of President Bush the band planned as a performance backdrop.
The Bush image was to accompany the song “The Hand That Feeds,” which obliquely criticizes the
Iraq war. It includes the lyrics: “What if this whole crusade’s a charade / And behind it all there’s a price to be paid / For the blood on which we dine / Justified in the name of the holy and the divine.”Commentor The Indigent Blogger: However, they are a corporation and will make business decisions that they feel are appropriate. Nothing is stopping NIN from arranging their own venue where they can hang their little picture.
Thoughts like this one are very common from those who defend artistic censorship. They’ll say “censorship is when government restricts the freedom of speech; corporations are under no such restraint.”
In the days when the beloved First Amendment was written, government was the only behemoth powerful enough to quash unpopular speech and pamphleteering was the only way to reach a mass audience. Thus, freedom of speech and of the press go hand-in-hand in the amendment.
Today the only ways to reach a mass audience are television, radio, newspapers, and to a much lesser extent, the internet. Huge corporate behemoths control the big three and are slowly metastasizing into the fourth. If these corporations don’t like your unpopular speech, your ability to reach a large audience is quickly silenced.
So yes, NIN can set up their gear and play a concert hall with their Bush picture, if they like. And Thomas Paine could have delivered “Common Sense” as a speech to private audiences rather than a widely-distributed pamphlet.
How come when it comes to curse words and stray Jackson boobies, the airwaves are a public trust and the government has the constitutional power to control them, but when it comes to unpopular speech, the airwaves are a corporate commodity and the corporations aren’t held to constitutional protections of freedom of speech?
The Clash were right: You have the right to free speech… so long as you’re not so stupid as to actually try to use it! Today, we all have free speech, but only a few media conglomerates are loud enough to be heard. Welcome to government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
