Your First Amendment (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

(A correction has been made to this article. See end for details.)

News is my life, so even on vacation I can’t completely unplug. I don’t even want to. But I didn’t spend much time delving into the arrest of Tommy Robinson after I determined that was the pseudonym for a right-wing British activist and not Arkansas’ colorful former congressman.

His case is pretty simple. Robinson — real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — was sentenced to 13 months in jail for using Facebook to live-broadcast people coming and going from a court proceeding that is the subject of a reporting gag. Because Britain does not have the near-absolute freedom of the press that we are guaranteed in our country, a defendant’s presumption of innocence can be protected there by limiting what can be reported. (Judges here are limited to gagging the parties.)

Robinson — just the latest of this fellow’s fake names — instantly became a cause célèbre on the political right in the U.S. for reasons I can’t quite understand. I prefer our system, naturally, but I can’t deny the tension between the right to a free press and the right to a fair trial. I could name some politically conservative Arkansas defendants who would certainly have preferred not to have “perp walk” photos in print and online as a jury heard the evidence of their corruption.

So an agitator — not, as the British judge pointed out, a “legitimate journalist” — who knowingly violated the law in order to broadcast activity outside a courthouse is hardly a martyr. (Neither was Arkady Babchenko, the dissident Russian journalist whose death was staged last week by Ukrainian police in an effort to thwart a real murder plot. Surely there could have been a better strategy than real fake news.)

“Robinson” pleaded guilty to contempt of court, and his sentence was made harsher by the fact that he had already been convicted and given a suspended sentence for a similar stunt last year. There was no part of “illegal” that he didn’t understand, even if he — and we — disagree with the British law.

Just as the misplaced outrage over the British case was roiling social media, yet another misplaced debate was starting here at home. Roseanne Barr, a groundbreaking comedian and provocateur, went on a racist rant on Twitter and her resurrected sitcom was promptly canceled by ABC. As usual, people who don’t care about the First Amendment enough to actually understand it started squawking about Barr’s loss of First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment only protects us from government action, not from personal consequences. Like Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player who protested by kneeling during the national anthem, Barr had the perfect right to express her opinion without government interference. And like Kaepernick, she ran the risk of being out of work if no one wants to employ her.

For Kaepernick, drawing attention to his concern over police brutality and racial injustice was apparently worth the risk — one that other players could choose to join or not. And for Barr, comparing an African-American woman who served in the Obama administration to an ape was apparently worth the risk of unemployment for herself and all of her co-workers. (She did apologize. And blamed a prescription medication.)

What’s more, the rest of us still have the perfect right to express our opinion of the response by the NFL and ABC by patronizing or boycotting their products and by urging others to join us. Corporate citizens face the consequences of their controversial actions as well.

Meanwhile, conservatives, how about a little more concern over freedom of the press here at home? A prominent American politician who swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States keeps declaring even the most rigorous reporting to be “fake news” and advocating stricter libel laws to discourage reporting that he considers unflattering.

He’s even trying to use the U.S. Postal Service to punish investors in one corporation, Amazon, because its CEO happens to own a newspaper that has been exercising a little too much freedom of the press. And as far as I can tell, this is completely acceptable to the same conservatives who are outraged by the treatment of Tommy Robinson and Roseanne Barr.

(Correction, June 4, 2018: In the U.S., judges can gag parties to lawsuits, including court staff. This article orginally said that they could only gag lawyers, which was incorrect.)

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.