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I guess theres a deeper question behind this, and it came up with the example of billboards. Thomas, the doctrinaire libertarian that he is, would hear of no restrictions even there; Occom Bill was more pragmatic and pointed out that, since there is no way for parents to avoid their children from seeing them, it's reasonable to regulate 'em some.
The question behind this, then, is of
public space - and in a way, the airwaves (for terrestrial TV at least) are public space.
Who does the public space belong to? The citizens/residents? The state? The corporations and enterprises? To what extent are numbers 1 and 3 as much one and the same thing as libertarians tend to describe 'em?
Bear with me, for a moment.
The libertarian argument is that any regulation of public space is an encroachment of individual freedom, and therefore should be opposed by principle. But there is a disconnect between the rhetorics, the theoretical principle, and what the practice looks like in reality.
Eg: neither you, nor I, nor Craven and his A2K, have the money to buy huge billboards along the motorways. To plaster downtown building facades full of these messages, appeals, incentives, commercials. We dont have the money.
Corporations do. They have the money to bombard us with messages all along the highway, in the elevator, 20 minutes out of every hour on TV, in the tram and
in the taxi - and to pose them ever more so that it becomes literally impossible for us to shut them out (see the taxi link). It's they who have the power - more so, nowadays, than the state. Yet they represent only a small percentage of the population.
So who does the public space belong to? How much of it are we Ok with being bought up?
When you look at the end result, the contradiction between the rhetorics of libertarian principle and its practical effects is pretty easily visible. The rhetorics is that of "individual freedom", and how citizens should be safeguarded from their lives being interfered with by the government. But in practice, you can spend your day with your kids in the city, or inside in your home, and hardly be confronted with any government message at all. But you will be bombarded non-stop by commercial messages that are designed to maximally influence your thinking and behavior. We've become conditioned to not even notice anymore. But try for a day - hell, even just an hour - that you spend outside, to count how many commercial messages you unwittingly, unwillingly, instinctively read, on the back of the bus, on page 3 of your newspaper, on the side of the phonebooth.
It is the individual freedom of the makers of those commercial messages to make, publish and broadcast them. But by doing so, they impose on all the others the duty to filter those out, to select and avoid, and even, in the end, to arrange their and their childrens' lives - in this case, viewing behaviour -
around them. The individual freedom of the business here leads to extra work and practical complications for the regular citizen. This is unavoidable to some extent of course, but where comes the tipping point? And is it
really that logical that the libertarian notion of "individual freedom" comes to translate, in practice, in a succession of extra
burdens for a regular individual?
Take the classical libertarian advice to parents. You have the responsibility for your own kids. Aint no state or organisation or school or what not to pass it on to, you have to buck up, take up your task to care and protect as you should. In short, if you dont want your kids to see something, its up to you to check he doesnt see it. Which means, to make sure he doesnt watch the wrong TV channels, programs, commercials, doesnt go anywhere where he would be confronted with it, etc.
Right. But in the name of the same freedom, you then have a system in which businesses can flood public space with messages, images and what not that the parent might or might not want their kid to see. Whether we're talking mainstream TV or the street outside with its billboards or whatnot - it is those same parents who, with the ever-increasing commercialisation of space, end up having to positively slalom and obstacle course through it to avoid whatever unwanted images and messages are thrust onto them.
So you have an ideology that places all responsibility firmly and exclusively on the parent's shoulders, while at the same time giving a free hand to businesses to make the parents' task ever harder. For a good example, check out how toy producers go to seminars to learn how best to target their messages directly at children - the New Yorker's recent story about Bratz described how business managers were told that they should deliberately aim to force the parents' hands by encouraging the children to plead and beg them.
There is something wrong with this contradiction; something off in the definition of "individual freedom" here. If it is the
citizen, that same private
individual whom the libertarian notion purports to defend, who is forced to navigate an ever more intrusive commercial onslaught, 'brought to you' by a small segment of the population, throughout publicly accessible spaces and places, what is it with individual freedom then? Is
that individual freedom?
Sounds to me like its not just the state, its the corporations who can interfere with your lives in many unasked-for ways as well, and that that is part of the problem. I mean, practically speaking - short of costly solutions like TiVo or the like (I dont think we even have that here), the barrage of commercial messages thrust on us through the TV commercials are the equivalent of spam. We have to go to great lengths (eg DVR skipping) to avoid these infringements into our consciousness, our time and personal space, that we never asked for in the first place.
Now I'm not suggesting some kind of overall ban on commercials. What I am saying is that it is either simplistic or doctrinaire to put the issue of parents asking for the regulation of some of them as an assault on freedom. In many ways, it is an attempt by citizens to
protect their freedom - their freedom
from commercial intrusions that can only be avoided through more extra practical steps.
Somehow, libertarians never hesitate a second to plead the case of citizens defending themselves against government intrusion, but when it comes to corporate/commercial intrusion, they act like the interests of citizens and corporations are somehow one and the same thing. When at least the government is
elected - the boss of GGW, or McDonalds or Marlboro or whatever can at the very most be elaborately argued to have been'elected' by his consumers.
Honestly I think the most important thing about this issue is the fact that Joe Francis just needs a freakin' huge ass-whipping. Of course, the simulated-sodomy-with-a-dildo that someone forced him to do on tape was kind of a good start...
