Free Speech, Free Audience
By David Yeagley
Discover The Networks – Moonbat Central
August 17, 2005

Cindy Sheehan has the perfect right to free speech. Does she also have the right to be heard? There’s an enormous difference between having the freedom to say what you want to say, and having an international audience to hear it.

Ward Churchill, for instance, has perfect freedom of speech.  He can say what he wants.  The question is, does he have the right to be paid $100K a year to say it, to a guaranteed audience of students? I was fired from university teaching because of what I said. (I was a full-time adjunct, teaching anywhere from three to five courses per semester at OSU-OKC.) Yet, I still have free speech.  Speech is free.  It’s the audience that costs, or, I should say, the audience that pays. I wasn’t taken to jail. My tongue was not cut out.  I simply was no longer paid to say what I said.  I can still say it.

What some people say is highly significant and profitable. But, did they not have audience, were they not published, and not heard, this would not mean their freedom of speech was denied in any way. 

The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, not audience, and certainly not salary. 

The media frenzy over Cindy Sheehan is only because of her "motherhood," not because what she says is new or different. Being mother of a slain warrior son, whom she dishonors, is the only element in her story which the media seems to think validates whatever she says about anything. Were we never to hear of her again, it wouldn’t be because she did not have free speech.  It would only be because the media found her no longer useful to the Leftist cause, no longer outrageous, no longer a profitable story. 

To protest the excessive, imbalanced media coverage of her words is not to protest her free speech.  It is merely to suggest that her shameful, "unmotherly" denigration of her son is unworthy of broadcasting.