“The press should have no rights that the average citizen does not have.”

On Wednesday, November 5,
I’ll be speaking at Washington, D.C.’s Newseum as part of Spiked
Online’s Free Speech Now! conference.
Go here for details.

Spiked‘s Tim Black interviewed me last week and the
Q&A just went up, under the title
“The Best Answer to Bad Speech? More Speech.” Here are
some snippets that help explain why I’m “nearly utopian” about free
expression:

“People have a right to free expression, and they have a right
to free speech and free assembly. And that is what undergirds our
press freedom. The press should have no rights that the average
citizen does not have….

 I think what unites the right and the left in stupidity
and error when it comes to this broad-based understanding of the
media, which is really the sum of the press as well as the
entertainment industries, is that they’re wedded to an old model,
which grew out of the Frankfurt school, whereby the audience is
assumed not really to have a mind of its own. It just kind of gets
pushed along by whatever it reads and sees. And this argument is
wrong, because everyone who watches a TV programme, or goes to a
play, is an active participant, a person who processes information,
who makes decisions every second about what things mean….

Look at Reason Foundation, which is the non-profit which
publishes Reason. You take a non-profit that doesn’t
have a lot of money, that doesn’t have a lot of power or insider
connection. And we have come from publishing a monthly magazine and
occasionally writing op-eds in newspapers to now, 20 years later,
when we have a complete media operation, where we’re online
everyday and we reach over four million people every month. We have
the ability to reach out and engage an audience as well as the
people we disagree with that was virtually unthinkable when I
joined the staff in 1993. And that’s why I’m nearly utopian. And
every day, there are new sites of information and expression that
were simply not able to exist in any meaningful way a quarter of a
century ago.”

Read the whole thing here.