The Press v. Citizen's United

There is an article in today's New York Times which describes the conflict allegedly inherent in the liberal opposition to last year's Supreme Court decision in Citizen's United v. Federal Election Commission. Citizen's United, of course, was the decision that extended political rights to corporations and other large organizations where none had previously existed. Liberals and, I expect, Libertarians argued in opposition to this arguing that corporations had no inherent political rights.

I had written about this at some length on another of my myriad blogs and made the argument that since corporations had no right to vote and did not, in fact, have the concomitant responsibilities of voting or serving on a jury, they therefore had no inherent right to make unlimited and secret campaign contributions. And yes, I think this applies equally to unions, charities, and the Italo-American Society of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. All non-human entities, the end.

However, this morning, I find what I consider a rather specious argument presented as something of a thorny legal knot for liberals to untie concerning this. Rather than me diluting it through paraphrase, let me cede the floor to Adam Liptak of The Times:

If corporations have no First Amendment rights, what about newspapers and other news organizations, almost all of which are organized as corporations?

The answer to this is simple. The corporations that own various news outlets have no 1st Amendment rights. The reporters and editors of such enterprises do. After all, when the government doesn't like it that a story quotes unnamed sources, who gets carted off to jail to reconsider this protection? Is it The New York Times Corporation or is it the reporter? It is always the reporter and it is always the reporter for a very simple reason: It is impossible to incarcerate a concept. And that's what corporations are, fundamentally. They are concepts. And concepts have no rights, except as expressed through the collective rights of the people who agree to accept the fiction that the concept does exist in order to make a living from that other marvelous fiction of modern life: money.

Part of why we live entangled in the existential miasma of modern existence is because we rarely take the time to distinguish between convenient fictions and reality. As a result, reality starts to seem fictional and fiction starts to seems real, and corporations have political rights and angels and UFOs exist and Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are brilliant jurists who aren't representing the interests of the people who take them on expensive hunting trips.

Of course, the problem that democracy (another concept) has is that human society tends toward authoritarianism. In some senses, it is easier being the subject of an authoritarian society than it is being the citizen of a democracy. The political and social questions are left to the political class to sort out and more of one's time and attention can be devoted to bread and circuses. To be a citizen is to participate and to act, however marginally, in an effort to improve and enlarge the society to which one is a member. And to be a citizen, one must be a human and not a concept.