by Ann Althouse

Elif Shafak, author of a book called "The Bastard of Istanbul," has just been acquitted of the strange-sounding crime of "insulting Turkishness." The idea of such a crime seems ridiculous or contemptible to most Americans, though some of us might push the problem aside and perhaps even congratulate ourselves for appreciating cultural difference. But the belief that government should not punish free expression is deeply embedded here, and it's easy to conclude that Turkey needs get rid of its law.

The European Union has threatened to exclude Turkey over this issue, and this pressuring might work, but it also stirs up opposition. The nationalist lawyers who brought the charges against Shafak stormed out of the court complaining that the judges were caving to political pressure. The law is an expression of national pride, and changing it because of the demands of outsiders wounds that pride. To be compelled to adopt the outsiders' preference for free expression paradoxically sacrifices the freedom to express that pride. How much better if Turkey could discover its own love for individual free expression and relocate national pride in a willingness to hear debate and criticism, which is, after all, a mark of strength.

The insults to Turkishness at issue in Shafak's case were lines she had her fictional characters say. (One Armenian character speaks of "Turkish butchers" and "genocide.") Shafak offers a narrow defense that ignores the question whether the law should exist at all. If the law applied to her, "nobody can write novels in Turkey anymore." And: "The words of a character could be used as evidence against the author or the film director. I think it is extremely important to defend the autonomy of art, and of literature." That is, novelists stand aloof the fray and deserve special immunity from laws that penalize those who state their opinions without fictional mouthpieces.

This resonates with the controversy over Pope Benedict's recent speech, in which he recited a centuries-old quote calling Islam "evil and inhuman." He's now apologized, saying, "In no way did I wish to make my own, the words of the medieval emperor." But some seemed to think people who got upset were obtusely failing to understand that he was quoting someone else.

Of course, it's true that a novelist is not embracing every line that comes from a character's mouth and the Pope doesn't endorse everything he quotes. But one very significant way of expressing an opinion is by indirection. On my blog, I often cut and paste a quote and tag on an enigmatic statement or a puzzling question. But this certainly doesn't mean I have no opinion. I'm not floating ideas randomly. Maybe I've chosen to proceed by indirection because I enjoy the tease or love the art of writing. Maybe I'm not quite sure what I think, or I want to leave it open-ended and invite you to explore your own thoughts. But maybe I fear the reaction and want to slip my opinion in gently or preserve deniability.

In a repressive and violent world, the tools of indirection are important. But if we care about expression, we care about truth. So let's not pretend that quotes and fictional characters and other literary devices have nothing to do with what you mean to say. It may be somewhat complicated to figure out what is really there that has to do with you, but surely something is.

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She blogs at althouse.blogspot.com.

by Nick Gillespie

With a general election less than two months away, the last thing anybody wants to talk about is politics, right?

Thankfully, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. BCRA, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold, makes it infinitely more difficult for people to do just that.

One key element of the law--which is as beloved by its fans as Baby Suri's blue eyes are by People magazine--is a 60-day blackout period on "electioneering communications" by nonprofit groups if they mention specific candidates for federal offices.

After all, "electioneering communications"--you and I know and hate them as radio and TV commercials--can only get in the way of making an informed vote. Perhaps the only way to prevent them from hindering the election process is to makes sure they don't mention the candidate, right?

The case that most clearly highlights the stupidity of this law features bedfellows every bit as strange and repellant as those you might find at a Michael Jackson slumber party or a Kennedy Compound Easter weekend: a Wisconsin anti-abortion group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wisconsin Right To Life supports passage of The Child Custody Protection Act, which would make it a crime to transport a minor across state lines for abortions to avoid age or parental-consent restrictions in the minor's home state. A WRTL radio ad urging passage of the bill, currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, can't be aired, however, since it mentions both of Wisconsin's senators by name and one of them, Herb Kohl, is up for reelection this year. Here's some irony: Kohl voted for the bill in an earlier iteration, so there's no way the ad can be seen as slagging him. In any case, it has nothing to do with November's election, which Kohl, like virtually every other incumbent senator, will almost certainly win with a margin of victory comparable to Saddam Hussein's in 2002.

Last year, when WRTL first got around to challenging the law in federal court, the ACLU filed an amicus brief, noting that lots of important legislation gets voted on in the weeks leading up to elections and that the blackout would screw the "ACLU's ability to advocate in support of civil liberties during a period of time when many civil liberties issues are being prominently debated."

In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the blackout provision of BCRA, though it did allow groups to petition for exceptions in specific cases, which is what WRTL has done in this case, so far to no avail (the group's lead counsel, James Bopp, Jr., says that the court won't even likely make a ruling until after Congress adjourns in October).

You can argue that being allowed to beg for an exception is better than nothing, but it's certainly a lot less than what seems to be guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution, which goes a little something like this (sing along if you know the words!): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Then again, if the courts could guarantee that all political ads -- even or especially those paid for by candidates themselves and the two major parties, would be banned -- well that's a kind of freedom from speech we could get behind.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason.

Not that long ago, many people thought the Internet would break down partisan boundaries and improve the quality of political debate in this country -- a prediction that sounds as silly today as previous hype about the educational potential of television and radio.

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model -- and the independence -- of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

I learned this lesson the hard way after I signed on as a contributor to The American Prospect's media criticism blog a few weeks ago. It seemed like a bit of an awkward fit -- the Prospect is a liberal magazine, and I had previously co-founded Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of online spin -- but I assumed they knew who they were hiring. I was wrong.

Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee's suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the "wanker of the day" and to call on TAP editors to "rethink things a bit." Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the Prospect's comment boards with vitriol. In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine's online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here ) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line? In an email statement, TAP editor Michael Tomasky said that "[t]he Prospect is hardly averse to criticizing liberal verities" and that the magazine had no problem with my initial posts criticizing liberals, but "there were a few posts in succession that struck us as either inaccurate or an effort to draw equivalencies where none existed. The Prospect has always opposed a 'pox on both houses' posture, and that's what we came to believe you were doing."

However, no editor at the Prospect ever contacted me about the posts, nor did any of its writers attempt to engage me in a public debate. More fundamentally, while TAP can choose to (almost) exclusively criticize conservatives, isn't open and honest debate a value that liberals prize? Is it appropriate to largely ignore one side while jumping on virtually any misstatement from the other?

One important factor shaping TAP's decision may have been the popularity of Democratic bloggers like Atrios, who pump out a stream of pre-filtered news and commentary. Before the rise of online competition, opinion magazines had some freedom to be idiosyncratic and less partisan than their readers. The initial incarnation of the Prospect, for example, had a thoughtful, academic tone. But the availability of more points of view online (while laudable in many ways) has paradoxically increased the pressure on ideological publications to pander to readers, who have the option of seeking out exclusively partisan blogs instead.

In addition, the huge audiences of the partisan bloggers make them a key source of online traffic for opinion magazines if they supply ideologically favorable content. (At Spinsanity, we quickly learned that it was virtually impossible to get links from liberals when we criticized a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.) Similarly, the risk of not getting links means that few commentators are willing to criticize the gatekeepers.

In some cases, the threat may be existential. Opinion magazines lose money -- a lot of money -- and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine's lagging popularity among liberals. If TNR's subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.

Considering these factors, TAP's decision makes perfect sense; they have no incentive to incur the wrath of the liberal heavyweights whom they depend on for traffic. According to Alexa.com, prospect.org is less popular than Atrios and dwarfed by Daily Kos (whose site also includes reader blogs and discussion boards). With Eric Alterman [a former MSNBC.com blogger now on Media Matters] and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Kos joining Atrios' attack on the Prospect Friday afternoon, the risk was real.

At a deeper level, these developments may offer a preview of the future of opinion journalism. Ex-reporters and political insiders currently dominate the nation's op-ed pages, but mainstream news organizations like the Washington Post are hiring a new generation of ideological bloggers who are likely to take their place. And conservative magazines, while less heterodox than their liberal counterparts, also face competition from ultra-partisan blogs like Power Line, Time's 2004 blog of the year (sample quote: "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice.")

Ironically enough, the liberal writers who decry the excesses of capitalism have failed to recognize what it is doing to their business. In a marketplace where publications compete on partisanship and ideological consistency, our democracy loses.

Brendan Nyhan is a graduate student in political science at Duke. He blogs at Brendan-Nyhan.com. Full disclosure: The editor of this column, Ana Marie Cox, was once employed by the American Prospect. Also, Michael Tomasky is a lovely cocktail party guest.

by Greg Beato

No one can electrify a routine backwoods flesh-presser with a jolt of vintage Rickles pizzazz like genial monkey-shiner George Allen. Give Dick Cheney a beer and a fancy Italian shotgun and he makes the Three Stooges look as stiff as John Ashcroft in a coven of naked Druids. Unfortunately, the superb comic chops of the GOP's funniest white collar comedians are nowhere to be seen in "America Weakly", a satirical tabloid newspaper the RNC recently published to show potential voters what life will be like under the dark, checks-and-balances cabal of Nancy Pelosi and friends.

"A Democrat Congress would weaken our economy and weaken our ability fight an aggressive War on Terror," clarified perpetually on-point straight-man Ken Mehlman in a press release announcing the publication's raison d'etre. "America Weakly takes on a very serious subject matter in a lighthearted way."

The Republicans are no strangers to fake news, of course. Remember last year's heavily scripted town-hall sitcom, "Everybody Loves Social Security"? Or the fiscally irresponsible No Pundit Left Behind Act of 2005, which paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout the Bush Administration on his syndicated TV show even though volunteer patriot Jeff Gannon was giving out freebies in Talon News?

This time around, the RNC is practicing transparency, and a la The Onion, leavening their phony journalism with humor. At least theoretically. Alas, while Mehlman and his underlings gamely draft "fictional news stories of a fictitious future," locating jokes in "America Weakly" is like searching for ricin-tinged needles in the Syrian Desert: We're pretty sure you have to be either Rick Santorum or Sean Hannity to actually spot one.

Here, for example, is a typical set-up and punchline:

House leaders have promised hearings on a wide array of issues, including scaling back interrogation techniques used against accused terrorists. "These harsh methods to force them to talk is not what we should be about," one Democrat staff source said. "Whatever happened to good old-fashioned interrogation methods that we've used for years against common criminals, like good cop/bad cop?"

Hey, if someone can translate this stuff into Urdu, maybe Matt Lauer will lay off President Bush for a while. Surely there are no Geneva Convention rules against softly bludgeoning enemy combatants with GOP talking points that have been weaponized in the RNC's secret chem labs with a super-malignant strain of Ken Mehlman's eye-glazing light-heartedness.

In the horoscope section under "Aquarius," the Weakly's ground troops take a potshot at the Democrat dream of universal healthcare and accidentally frag their own commanders. "Feeling ill?" the horoscope inquires. "No worries, the government bureaucrats will make all of your difficult medical decisions for you!" Ah, yes, things are so much more efficient now when only Bill Frist is allowed to make drive-by diagnoses, and all the other members of Congress selflessly shelve their personal beliefs to honor the culture of life-support.

That hipster irony and the RNC go together like Hezbollah and the Israel Border Guard is no great surprise. What is slightly astonishing is that the RNC even bothered to produce the publication in the first place. Unless it's just the latest clandestine kickback program for moonlighting GOP pundits -- "America Weakly" sports no bylines and no masthead -- what's the point? George Kauffman said that satire is what closes on Saturday night and last week's Emmys proved it: even in a race where the electorate was made up of media elitists, Barry Manilow wiped the mats with Stephen Colbert. So how much influence does wink-wink, smarty-pants humor really have on the public at large? History, alas, is written by Geraldo Rivera.

And clearly the GOP should just git 'er done with them what brung 'em -- appealing to the angry enfranchised with attack ads, whisper campaigns, push-polling family-values robots, and special amendments to protect heterosexual Americans from the War on Marital Terror. When the Mighty Wurlitzer is cranking out majestic triple concertos of fear, rancor, and tax relief, there's no need for a laugh track. Archetypal RNC campaign thug Lee Atwater must be spinning in his grave to see Ken Mehlman trying to smirk his way out of a mid-term massacre. Comedy, after all, is the province of losers. If a second issue of America Weakly hits the streets, you can bet plenty of Republican incumbents will be chuckling all the way to the private sector come November.

Greg Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes for Reason, Las Vegas Weekly, and many other publications.