100 Years. 5,892 Voices.

When I first moved back home to Cleveland, I attended a City Club luncheon featuring a panel discussion about the development of downtown Cleveland. I was hooked. I had just moved from DC and was worried that I had left behind the luxury of exposure to big ideas that I had encountered in other cities. I learned that day that Cleveland is a place thriving with ideas and vision, and people hungry for creative expression, dialogue, and impact. The City Club plays a significant role in fostering that energy.

Over the summer, I was working on a project related to Open Government and Transparency, the Transparency Action Plan (TAP) Summit. At the heart of the TAP project was our group’s belief that citizens are a vital organ in the body of our American democracy: only a public that is informed can be in a position to provide the helpful critique, feedback, and collaboration that is necessary for a well-functioning democracy. Freedom of speech is an intimate partner to open information; information must be available, analyzed and communicated in order for citizens to have the tools to fulfill their responsibilities to maintain democratic integrity. 

My experiences at City Club have provided unwavering affirmation of my role as a citizen to seek information, to speak out, and to do my part. I look forward to seeing what the next hundred years have in store for the City Club, as we all work to put the new communication tools and tricks of our time to good use.

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Beth Sebian, Visit Author’s Website

Posted: October 9

As a (belated) prophylactic measure, the Obama administration has promulgated new computer security policies intended to forestall future leaks of classified information.  

In light of the new policies and Espionage Act prosecutions of alleged leakers, we might well ask if the unauthorized disclosure window is that opened so swiftly is now beginning to close.  Seems unlikely, by the admission of senior government officials, but what will be the effect on our news?  The United States has strong protections in place for the confidentiality of reporters’ sources, but how do these wither internationally? 

If any of this stuff catches your interest, tune in to our conference, streaming live on Monday.  We’ve got the right people coming to Cleveland to talk about it.  Stop in at the Allen Theater — there is a limited amount of overflow seating available for impulse visitors.  Or swing by the Loop coffee house in Tremont if you want to run into other folks interested in these things–they’ll be projecting the conference on a big screen. 

And if you’re downtown on Monday evening, stop in at Michael Symon’s Lola, Jonathon Sawyer’s Greenhouse Tavern, or the inimitable Velvet Tango Room to continue the conversation with our audience and panelists.  VTR will be doing a special Free Speech cocktail; Lola will do the First Amendment, and Greenhouse will mix up the City Club — shaken, not stirred.

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David Agnew
Commentator, City Club

Posted: October 8

I posted last week about the idea of the signal-to-noise ratio in social media. What interests me about social media (which is a phrase I’m suspicious of, if only because Facebook is more a megaphone than a medium) is that it’s the test kitchen for free speech in the age of information overload. Those of my generation, to maintain our sanities, must tune out more information than our parents ever had access to. It’s one thing to tune out targeted advertising, or Taco Bell customer surveys, or the Drudge Report. But we are now in a position to “unsubscribe” from friends online in the same way we “opt out” from telemarketers or, for those of us in the city, outright ignore those on the corner with beards and sandwich boards, shouting “the end is nigh.”

Obviously having friends with ignorable opinions, and ignoring those opinions, is nothing new. David Brooks talks about “the empathy gap,” saying that on some level we’re simply less interested in each other than we used to be, and I think he’d associate “unsubscription” with that gap. But I’m not sure that the interesting story is how our culture affects the way we treat each other online. Rather, it might be how the way we treat each other online is affecting our culture, the way we talk to each other and therefore the way we understand each other.

I’ve unsubscribed from one of my aunts, whose Facebook posts combine the infuriatingly trite with the compulsively outspoken. Before Facebook, she was an out-of-state aunt and little more. Facebook has brought her much closer to my life. It has brought her opinions into my home, and I don’t want them there. It’s not that I disagree with her, really–I think we probably vote the same way. My unsubscription aligns more with an aesthetic displeasure than a philosophical one. She’s still my aunt, obviously, which is why she’s been unsubscribed instead of “defriended,” and I thank Facebook for the technological platform that makes such nuance possible.

Facebook has made my aunt an immediate vector for information, and I’ve chosen to tune out that information, like an obnoxiously flashing banner ad. I can’t help but feel that my abhorrence at her online expression has caused me to think of her less as a person and more as a radio station I don’t like. I just think of her as static in my Facebook, and I’ve adjusted the rabbit-ears to minimize her influence.

Perhaps that’s the distinction I’ve been struggling to draw about Facebook: it’s not “social media,” it’s a “social platform.” Speech itself is the medium. Speech is a medium for information, the information is broadcast via Facebook, and it’s through the Facebook platform that I can tune out the information, denying the speech yet maintaining the access. Facebook allows us to set parental controls on ourselves, but instead of defying pornography, we’re defying people–people, we still maintain, who are “friends.”

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Will Hollingsworth

Posted: October 4

Jameel Jaffer, a leading crusader against state secrecy, will join our two-part panel in here Cleveland next Monday.  He’ll chat first with our panel on BBC’s World Have Your Say, which will live-broadcast from our stage at the Allen Theater, and then with our Cleveland audience about Free Speech and the War on Terror.    We’re very excited to have him. 

Mr. Jaffer had a significant victory last month, when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ACLU’s challenge to a warrantless wiretapping statute can go forward.

As with many of our panelists (e.g. Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C., who represents Julian Assange in the U.K. extradition controversy) Mr. Jaffer is always in the thick of major world events.  Last year, he represented  Anwar Al-Awlaki’s father in a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to  carry out “targeted killings” of U.S.  citizens located far from any armed conflict zone.  The U.S. recently killed Al-Awlaki with a targeted drone strike.  Some of Mr. Jaffer’s comments are available at this release from the ACLU. 

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David Agnew
Commentator, City Club

Posted: October 3

We’re particularly excited to have Scott Horton join us next Monday at the Conference on Free Speech.   He recently delivered an address entitled Wikileaks: The Public’s Right to Know and the Government’s War on Whistleblowers  at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he reflected on what he considers a disturbing trend: the DOJ’s increasingly active use of the 1917 Espionage Act against government whistleblowers.

Take a look at the address-it’s quite engaging and tees up a number of issues we’ll be addressing at the Conference.  He’s concerned about how Espionage Act charges not only affect whisteblowers, but threaten the press.  As Horton puts it:

The Espionage Act charges are a back-door effort to import the British notion of an Official Secrets Act–a legal regime perfectly suited to a monarchy, but out of place in a democracy which prides itself on free speech and a free press…

The use of the Espionage Act has a dramatic side affect: it puts the government in the position to compel journalists to disclose who leaked information to them. Prosecutors will tell the journalists who published the leak–you did no wrong, you acted within your rights, but you must tell us who gave you this information. And if you claim confidentiality of your source, we’ll put you in prison.

So we see in prospect now a leap from persecution of whistleblowers to persecution and repression of the press–a frontal assault on the First Amendment.

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David Agnew
Commentator, City Club

Posted: October 3

There is a bit of a buzz in the legal world (as there is every first Monday in October) with the Supreme Court beginning its October 2011 term today. Baseball fans have opening day, theater fans have opening night, and those with an interest in the law have the first day of a new Court term.

The last term brought with it a couple of free speech cases, Snyder v. Phelps and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (formerly Schwarzenegger v. EMA), still on the lips of many. The decisions in each case, though controversial, were met by free speech advocates with a form of gratitude and relief more often reserved for sports stadiums than courtrooms. With each case the Supreme Court not only advanced our collective understanding of First Amendment jurisprudence, but also further defined the speech protected by the First Amendment.

Looking forward, the Court will tackle at least a couple of First Amendment issues in this coming term. Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court correspondent, identified these cases to be of “sweep and consequence,” contrasted with “quirky” First Amendment cases from previous years. Though the docket hasn’t been finalized, this should be an interesting and, as always, exciting term at the Court.

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Liz Woolery
Roy H. Park Doctoral Fellow, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Visit Author’s Website

Posted: October 3

October 1 marks the end of Banned Books Week, sponsored annually by a host of national pro-book, pro-free-speech organizations and now in its 29th year. The event, which is held the last full week of September, coincides conveniently with the start of the academic year for students of all ages. The result is a nationwide celebration of the freedom to read challenged books on university, high school and primary school campuses. For those outside of a traditional academic setting, though, there has been much to celebrate as well. Of particular note this year are the American Library Association’s statistics on books that have been challenged over the past 20 years. Though the number of challenges rises and falls from year to year, 2010 marked the second lowest number of challenges by year, with 348  (it was beat out by 1990 – the first year for which the ALA shows data – which recorded 157 challenges). In the virtual world, organizers offered a YouTube channel featuring a “read-out” of banned books. Celebrities and non-celebrities alike were invited to read from their favorite challenged or banned books, with hundreds of videos posted before the week ended.

Though changes in new media have greatly impacted print journalism, the impact of those same technological advances doesn’t extend into the banned book realm. Neither print nor digital books are immune from challenges brought by school administrators, teachers, parents, government officials, clergy and others. While scholars struggle to make sense of new legal and regulatory issues presented by these changes in technology and media, old-fashioned-hard-copy-printed books continue to face some of the same hurdles they have faced for years. And now e-books face these same hurdles. As the City Club of Cleveland gears up for its Conference on Free Speech (a central theme of which is the future of free speech), it’s apparent that books — whether digital or printed — will continue to face challenges long into the future.

Anyone with an interest in censorship and freedom to read should check out the ALA’s Banned Books website. There’s sure to be at least one book on the list to surprise everyone. For me, there were three books: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and Where’s Waldo. What books on the list surprised you?

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Liz Woolery
Roy H. Park Doctoral Fellow, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Visit Author’s Website

Posted: October 1

There are two Facebooks. One is the Facebook we all deride; it’s filled with pictures of meals eaten and of cute pets, chain-statuses (“If you think mothers are good, make this your status and we’ll donate one cancer treatment to Support Our Troops!”) and trite observations (“OMG I hate work sooooooooo much!!!!♥!!♥!”). Now, this Facebook is made up of real people using Facebook the way it was intended–not as “social media,” as it’s often called, but as a realtime digital reflection of their lives. When they eat, it’s on Facebook. When they opine, it’s on Facebook. When they coo over a lover or a labrador, it’s before your eyes instantly, available across the network and (as Facebook has recently insisted on reminding us) archived for posterity. This is what we all hate about Facebook, it’s what makes us pare down our friend list and lash out at our internet acquaintances and, sometimes, but never for long, it’s what makes us delete our accounts. It’s vacuous and boring and obnoxious, and it’s a massive waste of time, but it’s the freest speech there is, because it’s an enormous platform where more often than not there are no consequences for being wrong or misguided.

Facebook is only social “media” when the accounts, which have names (your name) because they’re supposed to represent people, are cultivated and manicured and curated–when they’re less about what you do and what you think, however trite or absurd, and more about your hand-built gallery of ideas and images. When you become the curator of your own Facebook, when it ceases to represent your life and starts to represent your aesthetic, you take up a medium and, in its highest form, your curation can become art in and of itself. But curation, as media, is not free like that other Facebook is free–curation is dictated by market forces (what you think your friends will understand, or enjoy, or find interesting), and those forces necessarily limit free expression. The trite on Facebook, and even the ignorant on Facebook, is not edifying, but it’s pure. And the purity of expression has value in and of itself.

When you get that Google+ invite (a service which reflects the duality of Facebook–it was designed to more efficiently dial in the signal/noise ratio of your newsfeed, where meals and cuteness and nonsense is noise, and the curated streams of aggregated art and information are the signal), or the next time Facebook encourages you to segregate your “subscribed” (read: interesting) and “unsubscribed” (uninteresting) friends into groups, remember: that which is the most interesting is not always the most free.

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Will Hollingsworth

Posted: September 28

I have been a member and an admirer of the City Club for a long time and appreciate that we are so very fortunate in Cleveland to have a place where we know that if there is an important topic to be discussed there is a public forum for it; a place where speakers come, say their piece and then must take questions to support their position or just to futher elucidate their thoughts. The City Club has been host to Rosa Parks, Bobby Kennedy, Wayne LaPierre, Chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen , FDR, TR, both Bush Presidents, President Clinton, ambassadors, authors, environmentalists, scientists and many, many more. This institution needs to be preserved and supported and it is terrific that Cleveland can boast that it has been around for 100 years..

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Jan Roller, Visit Author’s Website

Posted: September 27

What a great time to have a conference on free speech.   We’re thrilled that Google is able to participate (Alan Davidson, the search giant’s U.S. policy chief, will be on the Internet panel), because they’re at the center of another emerging storm.

The Senate has been riled up for a little while now, suspicious of Google’s market power and role as an arbiter of all things Internet.  So our dear old elected representatives held the obligatory angry hearing, asking, as The New York Times accurately summarized, “good Google or bad Google?”

Come to the conference.  Or watch it online–we’ll stream it on this site.  Or watch part of it with friends at one of Cleveland’s great coffee shops–more on this to come, but it looks like Loop (in Tremont) and Phoenix Coffee (Coventry or Lee Road) will be holding a live screening of the day’s events.

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David Agnew
Commentator, City Club

Posted: September 22