Well this was provocative, I honestly am not sure what I think. But I think there is a point here about how restrictions on expression chance the balance of power in society.

BEST OF THE WEB TODAY | JULY 19, 2011

Power and the Press
The phone-hacking scandal and the dangers of "campaign finance reform."

By JAMES TARANTO

On this side of the Atlantic, most of the commentary about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has consisted in an outpouring of left-wing ressentiment against News Corp.'s American properties, which have nothing to do with the scandal, for not hewing to the liberal-left pieties of the so-called mainstream media.

The best distillation of this attitude came from The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg last week: "In terms of its net impact on human welfare, News of the World has been the least evil of Rupert Murdoch's three-cornered Axis of Evil, the other two being the Fox News Network and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal."

This sort of demonization of dissent is common enough to be tiresome and is of a piece with the deplorable and unsuccessful effort (in which Hertzberg participated) to scapegoat conservative media figures for the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

In England, however, the complaint about Murdoch is not merely that he supports "evil" points of view but that he exercises actual power, because the press plays a larger and more direct role in politics there than in the U.S. In all this there is a warning to Americans, to which the Financial Times's Clive Crook perhaps unwittingly alluded in an interview with NPR's Scott Simon the other day (hat tip: Newsbusters.org):

Crook: An important aspect of this story in Britain is the close relationship between the newspaper business, Rupert Murdoch's business, and leading politicians--not just the Tories, though the current prime minister is very embarrassed by this.

Simon: Yeah.

Crook: But Labour is just the same, all the parties are just the same. They have to get on with the newspapers. And why is that? I think it's interesting that they have to because Britain has largely succeeded in getting money out of politics, something many Americans would like to do here. The consequence of doing that is that the newspapers become incredibly important and you have to have them in your pocket if you're going to do well.
"Getting money out of politics"--that is, imposing governmental restrictions on political speech--is a cause that many American newspapers have championed. (The Journal is a notable exception.) The McCain-Feingold law's unconstitutional ban on corporate political speech included an exemption for "media corporations," so that while it was in effect, those corporations had an effective monopoly, as in Britain.

The complaint in Britain now is that the press has too much power, and it turns out that media organizations--being composed, like other organizations, of human beings--are susceptible to corruption. In response have come calls, including from Prime Minister David Cameron, for more government regulation of the press.

In England we are seeing the Kagan Principle play itself out. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld some restrictions on political speech in the name of preventing corruption. In a dissenting opinion last month in Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom PAC v. Bennett, Justice Elena Kagan implied that those measures have proved insufficient, and argued that the court therefore should uphold more-restrictive measures.

Kagan was not yet on the court last year when the justices held, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that nonmedia corporations do have freedom of speech, but one may safely assume she would have voted with the dissenters. Both that case and last month's were 5-4 rulings. A switch of a single justice could open the door to a vast increase in government power over speech.

Would a Kagan-led majority stop short of approving restrictions on the press such as those Britain is now contemplating? One would hope America's strong First Amendment tradition would stand in the way. But that didn't stop four justices in Citizens United and Arizona Free Enterprise Club, and majorities in earlier cases, from upholding government censorship of political speech.

In dissenting from one of those earlier cases, McConnell v. FEC (2003), Justice Clarence Thomas warned that "the chilling endpoint of the Court's reasoning is not difficult to foresee: outright regulation of the press." It's hard to see how he was wrong, and it's not hard to imagine journalists--who, after all, are only human--joining in calls to regulate competitors they imagine to be "evil."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...297702652.html
Brittons: is your press "too large" a part of your civil society?