Connections: All the President’s Men
Because I am not much of a TV news viewer, my opinion about whether Megyn Kelly should have interviewed Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist, on NBC is neither here nor there. But the nonsense he sprouts is, to me, personally, not only outrageous but also obscene, and how to judge obscenity is something we have confronted from time to time even here on our letters-to-the-editor pages.
Over the years, The Star has occasionally published statements we thought were abhorrent, including those that were anti-Semitic. If they were signed by writers willing to make their identities known, we were satisfied that publishing them helped the community know something that was otherwise hidden, that civil society was better served when base elements within it were made known. The pat explanation is that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech was not intended to protect language everyone likes.
Nevertheless, it seems that somewhere a line should be drawn. The Star has consulted lawyers when something submitted seemed libelous, but the few judgments we have made about whether something was too obscene for publication were subjective.
Which brings me to Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones. NBC and most TV and print commentators appear to have agreed that Ms. Kelly’s interview with Mr. Jones was a public service, the idea being to confront Mr. Jones and to make his outrageousnesses known. Did you know, for example, that he has said Barack Obama was the global leader of Al Qaeda, that Hillary Clinton was involved in the imprisonment of children as sex slaves in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, that the Sept. 11, 2001, attack was backed by elements within the United States government, and that our government was trying to turn kids into homosexuals by putting chemicals into juice boxes? Laughable to most of us, yes. Mr. Jones even believes that the Apollo II moon landings were faked.
But not everyone recognizes these claims as ridiculous. President Trump, it appears, considers Mr. Jones his kind of guy. According to Media Matters for America, a nonprofit research and information center dedicated to ferreting out disinformation, the president has frequently repeated ideas promoted by Mr. Jones, among them that the 2016 national election “was rigged,” that millions of people voted illegally, and that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton founded ISIS. Media Matters quotes an InfoWars statement explaining that it is “seeking the truth and exposing the scientifically engineered lies of the globalists and their ultimate goal of enslaving humanity.”
(Globalists, huh? I think we’ve heard that one before.)
Mr. Jones’s radio program is a three-hour, Monday-through-Friday talk show that apparently is carried on more than 160 stations, as well as being streamed on the internet; InfoWars, the website, is touted as the “#1 Internet News Show in the World.” It has a huge readership; Mr. Jones claims it is above three million, though I haven’t been able to find a reliable fact-check of that boast.
The most emotionally distressing and offensive InfoWars crusade is Mr. Jones’s charge that the deaths of 20 children and 6 faculty members at Newtown, Conn., did not occur, that the story was fabricated by forces seeking to control guns and destroy the Second Amendment.
Recently, I took a careful look at the 1973 Supreme Court decision on obscenity. It offers three standards for judging obscenity, and Mr. Jones’s foul theory about Newtown doesn’t seem to meet any of them. Which means that if someone were to write a letter to this newspaper espousing this outrage, we would probably print it — and the inevitable rebuttals — following the open-letters policy and in hopes that the light of day is the best remedy for society’s darkest rot. But I am not sure. An internal debate here at the Star would be likely.