IN A LETTER on this page today, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of
the company that owns WJLA-TV,
protests that the station was not engaged in censorship when it decided
to "suspend" airing of Bill Maher's show,
"Politically Incorrect." Legally speaking, he is correct. The station
acted in response to comments Maher made
about the Sept. 11 attacks; he questioned whether flying a plane into
a building is really cowardly compared
with firing a cruise missile from thousands of miles away. WJLA is
certainly entitled to decide that its viewers
should be insulated from such talk. But this isn't a question of law.
The station had long carried the program,
whose very purpose is to be, as its name suggests, brash and confrontational.
The station's decision to keep
the show off the air was a capitulation to pressure to toe a certain
line.
That pressure is none too subtle and flows not merely from an outraged
public. The station had actually begun
airing the program again, until White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
denounced Mr. Maher, saying that
Americans "need to watch what they say." This remark was left out of
the White House's official account
of the news conference, the result of what the White House termed "a
transcription error." But its message
has apparently been heard loud and clear. The White House has admirably
embraced its role of speaking
out for religious or ethnic minorities who find themselves embattled
in the current climate. It's too bad that
some officials there don't seem to understand that free political expression
is an equally vital American value.
Mr. Maher's remark is far from the only case in which institutions have
failed to protect dissenters from retribution.
The president of the University of New Mexico, amid pressure from state
legislators, announced that he would
"vigorously pursue" disciplinary action against a longtime professor
who told students that "anyone who can
blow up the Pentagon gets my vote" -- a remark the professor called,
by way of apology, "the worst attempt
at an incredibly stupid joke." The New York Times reports that a columnist
for the Texas City Sun was fired
after writing that Mr. Bush, instead of returning to Washington on
the day of attacks, was "flying around the
country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after
having a nightmare." The same happened
to a columnist in Oregon, who accused Mr. Bush of having "skedaddled"
in the wake of the attacks.
Yes, newspapers and universities and television stations have a right
to be spineless. But they will be judged
in time by how robustly they resist a climate of intolerance. It is
not a show of strength to come down hard
on dissent, even in times of war. It is, rather, America's strength
to encourage contrarian viewpoints and
tolerate distasteful remarks, especially when political discourse matters.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company