Was it not private property? Yes or No?

Yesterday, Matt Drudge reported the following.

A CNN switchboard operator was fired over the holiday -- after the operator claimed the 'X' placed over Vice President's Dick Cheney's face was "free speech!"

"We did it just to make a point. Tell them to stop lying, Bush and Cheney," the CNN operator said to a caller. "Bring our soldiers home."

The caller initially phoned the network to complain about the all-news channel flashing an "X' over Cheney as he gave an address live from Washington.

"Was it not freedom of speech? Yes or No?" the CNN operator explained [sic].

"If you don't like it, don't watch."

Laurie Goldberg, Senior Vice President for Public Relations with CNN, said in a release:

"A Turner switchboard operator was fired today after we were alerted to a conversation the operator had with a caller in which the operator lost his temper and expressed his personal views -- behavior that was totally inappropriate. His comments did not reflect the views of CNN. We are reaching out to the caller and expressing our deep regret to her and apologizing that she did not get the courtesy entitled to her. "

Developing...

Um. Yes. I haven't been paying much attention to this story. The last I heard, the X was quite possibly a computer glitch. Whatever.

This may seem like a relatively minor incident, but this operator's actions exemplify a very common -- especially among leftists -- misconception that freedom of speech represents some kind of entitlement to say whatever one wants at the expense of whomever one pleases. So it's worth doing a quick post-mortem for that reason.

The important point, probably lost to the former boiler room employee, is that freedom of speech does not come with the freedom to commandeer the resources of others to broadcast that speech.

Let's assume for the moment that someone deliberately placed the X over Cheney in order to send some negative, subliminal message about him. (And why didn't the operator even consider the obvious: That this was some diabolical ruse cooked up by Karl Rove, puppetmaster of the airwaves, to gain more support for the Bush administration from that pivotal constituency, the Nation of Islam?) First, CNN does not owe it to anyone to cross out Cheney simply because that person can conceive of placing an X over his face during a newscast. Its air time is its property. Second, a news organization commands the respect of its audience and thus the advertising dollars of its sponsors based on its credibility, a valuable asset which would be damaged by such an outrageously partisan stunt. So our operator's hypothetical hero has the right to display such an image, but not to employ the resources of CNN to propagate it, unless, perhaps, this was an idea from Ted Turner himself.

But that's just the beginning of what this operator got wrong. Since CNN expressed disagreement with the operator (and there is no evidence that CNN is lying), it is clear that the operator violated CNN's property rights in the exercise of his freedom of speech. Or was it freedom of speech? Assuming that CNN's X really was a glitch, the operator was not only violating his company's property rights, he was slandering it! Slander is not protected by the First Amendment any more than murder is protected by the Second! (I am not going over the top here by calling this slander, even if it was, as is almost certain to me, sarcasm. Within the context of so much leftist "reporting" today, the idea of a network doing such a thing -- and for the reasons given by the operator -- is hardly far-fetched. )

So the operator was half-right, but only about the X, if we spot him the assumption that someone purposely superimposed an X over an image of Cheney. He altogether ignores the issue of his employer's property rights with respect to the X-incident, as he does implicitly later with regards to his choice to promulgate his own pet theory on company time. And he demonstrates a failure to understand freedom of speech by lying about what occurred. (And, come to think of it, I've completely skipped over the whole matter of etiquette!)

It's amusing that such a liberal network possesses such a firm implicit grasp of property rights -- and seems to support said rights so unequivocally. But perhaps it needs what is left of its reputation for objectivity to more effectively undermine what is left of the free society that permits it to exist.

-- CAV