Tuesday, May 27, 2003 | 8:52 a.m.
I HOPE YOU had a safe and peaceful Memorial Day.
Had it not been for the recent conflict in Iraq, I suspect that this year's Memorial Day holiday would have been just that. Just another holiday for most American families. But not the kind contemplated by the day itself, a day in which the people of this country should reflect on the great sacrifices made by men and women of current and past generations to keep our country safe and our democracy intact.
The tragedy of Sept. 11 and the ensuing reaction by the United States in Afghanistan, and now Iraq, have refocused our attention on the need for an ever-ready Armed Forces that can attack when needed and defend when necessary. We have witnessed both recently, and that has made us keenly aware of the debt we owe to those who serve our country.
Fortunately, my generation and those since have not known the great wars -- the conflicts that pitted the clearly right against the clearly wrong, the very good against the very evil -- in seemingly fight to the death or total capitulation scenarios. Those were the First and Second World Wars, when democracy itself and our way of life hung in the balance. The veterans of those wars, especially the first, are almost gone, and those who gave so much of themselves to defeat Nazi Germany over 60 years ago are also fading away as new generations and new conflicts take their place.
If we could, I am sure we would all wish that wars would be only distant memories and Memorial Day holidays would be times for celebrations of historic events, not of recent conflicts and sacrifice. But, so far, that doesn't seem to be the reality of living on this planet. So wars will come, just like the most recent one, and bodies of fallen Americans will return home for burial and remembrance. And each year it will be our responsibility as Americans to teach our children about the sacrifices made to keep us free.
There are other lessons, though, that could be taught in the context of wars and sacrifice. We fight for many reasons. Iraq was over a dictator who we believed threatened us and others with weapons of mass destruction coupled with a will to use them. Hopefully time will prove that we were right.
The Vietnam War was fought for a theory that pitted communism against capitalism and our way of life against theirs, a theory that didn't hold in the end, but it was a conflict that divided this great country for at least a generation. It produced a death toll that was real and a sacrifice that was palpable and it heaped upon us a hurt so deep that it tempered our thoughts of war and our commitment to it for decades.
I believe one of the great reasons for sacrifice for our way of life is the preservation of our Constitution and the democracy it has fostered. The most significant part of that great document, of course, is the Bill of Rights. And chief among them is the First Amendment. That's the one that guarantees us the right to worship as we please, without government interference, and which prohibits the government from interfering with our right to free speech and press. That one, in particular, always has my attention.
So when I think, as I did this past weekend, of the hundreds of thousands of American men and women who have died during our short history to preserve the greatest democracy on Earth, I cannot separate their reasons. I cannot escape the fact that democracy, their reason for dying, is rooted in the freedom of speech and press that we enjoy here to such a great extent and practically nowhere else on the planet.
And that brings me to the point of today's column. I am concerned about our First Amendment. There are probably a hundred other reasons to see red flags waving about the landscape of individual rights to expression, but the one I am concerned about is an expected ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that will allow a handful of media companies to further their control of what we hear, see and think. Couple that concern with the plan for Rupert Murdoch to own the satellites above us, and from which so much of America gets the message, and the reason for my anxiety should be self-evident.
Soon the FCC will relax the cross-ownership rules that have tried to prohibit television stations and newspapers in the same cities from being owned by the same people. I say tried because, even with an outright prohibition, those with the money and the savvy have managed to bend the rules to their advantage. There was a time when media owners could have it all. But the people soon realized that it probably wasn't a good idea to allow one or two or, maybe, three people to own or control all of what communities could see and hear. Diversity of thought and multiple methods of getting information has always been a hallmark of our democracy, so anything that threatened that concept was not in the best interest of the people. Hence, the cross-ownership rules against owning it all.
We justified those rules for the same reason we justified the prohibition of a person yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater. Neither violated the spirit of the First Amendment and both fostered a more perfect union. Neither inhibited free speech. Both promoted it.
It didn't take all that long, four decades, for the argument to bubble up that economics would be better served by allowing the very few large media companies left in the media world to take advantage of the economies of scale and buy up whatever media outlets they chose to, especially in communities in which they already had an interest. That's always the problem with interpretive lawmaking, it can be interpreted to fit almost any cause, especially one rooted in the root of all evil -- money. And that's why the cross-ownership rules had to go and that, frankly, is why the FCC will cause them to virtually go away next month.
That same argument -- economics -- is driving the planned approval of Murdoch's acquisition of the last remaining competitive satellite dish network so that he will own it all above us and, therefore, control all that is beamed down below. A far cry, I might add, from the Founding Fathers' idea of thought and information diversity.
The disconnect -- between people fighting and dying for the concept of democracy and the reality that it may all have been done in search of another dollar -- is what disturbs me and what should disturb most people, if only we could take the time to consider the consequences. But, alas, that is also a great failing of our country -- we have the attention span of a gnat!
I am usually in favor of anyone with a better idea to make a dollar. I am not, however, in favor of this old idea of concentrating the media in the hands of a very few in order for them to make another buck. It is not "them" who we should be thinking about. It is "we the people" who will get the short end of that stick.
We must always remember those Americans who fought and died to preserve our freedom. The First Amendment is one of those freedoms. And it doesn't make any sense that we should give it away so willingly. Does it?
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