You and I, Gentle Reader, are aware of the limitations that come with employment… at least, I am, and I hope you are. What the boss tells you to do, you do; what he tells you not to do, you don’t. Roger-wilco acceptance of one’s supervisor’s decrees is the price of one’s paycheck. Neither of us would expect to claim a “freedom” to defy supervisory authority and have that claim respected.
Apparently, it’s not the same in the media. Quite recently, Bill Owens, the head-honcho producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, resigned his position. The reason he gave was that management above his head was unacceptably limiting his journalistic “freedom.” No, he didn’t claim that he should continue to receive a paycheck, but it was hard to escape the feeling that he believed his prerogatives had been violated.
A little while before that, Jeff Bezos, the moderately well-known retailer who owns the Washington Post, told its editors to revise their editorial stance: i.e., to move toward advocacy of free speech and free markets in their editorial output. That caused an uproar in the Post’s offices. There were some resignations over it, though I don’t know how many. The editors and reporters of that organ seem to have felt much as Bill Owens did.
It puzzles me. In no other occupation does an employee’s claim that he ought to be able to do as he likes, irrespective of his supervisors’ dictates, taken seriously. In media, it seems the attitudes, if not the black-letter rules, are different.
Wait! I’ve just thought of another “industry” in which the claim is both made and defended: education. Employees there trumpet their “academic freedom” to say and do as they please everywhere and everywhen, without penalty. There’s a narrow, shaky precedent for the claim, inasmuch as professors of an earlier day survived “purge” attempts founded on their emissions outside the classroom. But these days, primary-school sex-ed instructors – yes, you read that right – make the same claim, seriously asserting that they have a God-given right to teach toddlers about the joys of anal sex.
This sort of thing gets my head whirling. I can’t imagine any such claim being taken seriously. Yet they happen frequently – usually in cases of egregious misbehavior.
Developments such as these are part and parcel of the devolution of actual freedom. Once again, the Grand Master has a few words on the subject:
“That will do, Sambo. Please refrain from expressing opinion uninvited.”
“I thought you were the great champion of free speech?”
“I am. But there is no free lunch. If you want to make a speech, you can hire your own hall; this one is paid for by the Circle.”
I know that there are any number of other things to obsess about today. But what on Earth will we do if they who hire, pay, and fire are allowed to tell their employees “No, you can’t do exactly and only as you please” — ? And what if the right of “sexual education” instructors to demonstrate vibrators and dildos to schoolchildren should be summarily dismissed? Could the Republic survive?
Just an early-morning thought.
