The second apology
David Letterman is apologizing on his show tonight in a more formal fashion to Willow and Bristol Palin and their parents for the jokes he told a week ago that were interpreted to be attack on Willow, the underage daughter of the Alaska governor. (The text of tonight's comments are here.)I'm a Dave fan and I have little doubt that his decision tonight to add further clarification and go further in his apology is his decision alone. To deliver one is his prerogative. Fourteen-year-old Willow is even owed an apology-- by her mother, that is, for being dragged into all of this. But I want to reiterate the fact that I don't think that either Bristol or Sarah Palin is owed an apology by Letterman here, and not just because the governor has implied that he's a pedophile.
Eighteen-year-old Bristol is an adult who chose to enter the public fray-- a teenage mother promoting abstinence-only education after she got knocked up having unprotected sex with her boyfriend under her parents' roof. This makes her a perfectly acceptable target for satire, tasteless or otherwise. I would contend in fact that our social contract with such demagogues actually demands that they be confronted with the challenge of public ridicule. Answers.com describes a demagogue as "a leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace." That description definitely fits the Palin daughter I saw chatting it up on Larry King last month.
I wish that I could be as confident as others to think that our First Amendment right to such expressions of political dissent (yes, that's what it is) are safe in modern America. Lest we forget that little more than 20 years ago, a satirist was still subject by law to civil and financial penalties for presenting this type of satire into the marketplace of ideas. It took a unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of Hustler Magazine v. Jerry Falwell to guarantee that public figures could not be compensated for emotional distress incurred even if it were intentionally inflicted. (Chief Justice Rehnquist, hardly a liberal, wrote the majority opinion of the court.) One of the principals upheld in the verdict was that there needs to be sufficient "breathing space" in the freedom of expression, even to the point of making a false statement (and this was clearly a joke), that a chilling effect not do damage to speech that does have constitutional value.
It's a typically classy move by Letterman to go further than he should have to in issuing now a second apology. It's not a sign of weakness, but the host is going to have serious problems with me and his other viewers if we start to get a whiff of that chilling effect creeping into his comedy.
posted by CM @ 7:05 PM
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