Legal Commentary

So, after all that, Terry Jones now swears he and his followers will not burn the Koran, today or ever. Of course, he came to that conclusion after being promised a meeting with the people behind the new Muslim cultural center--meaning he has been elevated as an important voice in this (silly) public debate, as I had feared. One could call this a victory for the American vision of free speech and counter-speech, as Jack Balkin does.

Or one could say this whole story shows the dark side of the First Amendment, something Brooke Gladstone of NPR captures (no audio until after the weekend, it appears). There are a couple elements to this notion.

First is the fact that this was, in many ways, a made-by-the-media controversy. It became a national/international story only when the media started covering it. The media could not resist, Gladstone argues, because we "love crazies." One commenter on my earlier post posed that "[i]f a crazy pastor in Florida with a congregation of less than 50 can cause masses of people to hit the streets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries, perhaps the problem lies more in those Muslim countries than in Florida." The response is that the media coverage made Jones much more than a crazy pastor with a congregation of less than 50. He was given the same microphone as any major social, religious, or political leader and this rally might have reached a massive audience because of it. And it earned him a seat at the table of national/international public discussion. Now, I question the Administration's fear that this rally would unleash a torrent of anti-American violence and protest in the Muslim world. But not because this was still a tiny rally by a no-name fringe crazy in a small southern town.

The second element was the media's subsequent hand-wringing and public declarations of professional self-righteousness over whether to cover the rally. Fox news announced it would not cover the rally; the AP said it does not cover events that are "'gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend.'" Other outlets planned to use a minimum of visuals and emphasize context (whatever that means). Of course, there only was a rally for the media to cover (or publicly and obtrusively decline to cover) because the media has been talking incessantly about the planned rally for weeks--and the plan to burn the Koran was just as "gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend."

The idea of the media "creating" stories is a common refrain, although not one to which I typically subscribe. But in this case, there is something to the accusation. The best we can say for Rev. Jones (as Gladstone says) is that he worked the system, particularly the media, masterfully. And it has paid-off royally for him and his political goals--whatever those are.