1st Amendment For Me, But Not For Thee?

This is a few weeks old, but it just showed up in a paper I read last week. Evidently John Seigenthaler is pretty peeved over his Wikipedia entry.

For those of you who don't know, John Seigenthaler is a legitimate "big man" in a way that few are any longer. He started as a reporter for The Tennessean in 1949 (according to Wikipedia) and later became the publisher and chairman. He also was a founding editor of USA Today. Along the way he found time to work for Robert Kennedy and get beaten up during an attack on Freedom Riders in 1961. Finally he founded the First Amendment Center at Vandy in 1991. I think y'all kind of know my feelings about the 1st Amendment, hence I've always respected Mr. Seigenthaler even if he and I have disagreed on certain issues.

Now, though, he seems to be taking a stance that strikes me as funny for such a staunch defender of the 1st Amendment. His complaint is that part of his entry at Wikipedia is [was, it has been corrected] wrong and potentially libelous:

John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.

Now I can see why he wasn't happy with that particular passage, especially since other sites picked up on it, but his reaction seems to be a tad strong. First, Wikipedia entries can be corrected by someone with more/better information. Now I know that might have been a little late if the information was already out there on other sites, but was the passage that "bad"? True, the use of, "nothing was ever proven," leaves the impression that he might have had some involvement in the Kennedy assassinations, but the man is a very public figure. Is this the worst thing that's ever been printed/said about him? While I don't know of his involvement in the Kennedy administration, is this even a false statement? Notice that the entry doesn't claim he was involved, just that he was at one time thought to be involved.

I believe Mr. Seigenthaler should have calmed down and asked, how would a "reasonable" person respond when reading this? I don't know if I'm "reasonable", but I read it as the ranting of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy nut. The part about "direct involvement" and the tag line of "nothing was ever proven" just seemed to be a little too much for me. So I did not leave with the conviction that, "Magic bullet be damned. It wasn't Castro, the Mob, or the CIA. It was John Seigenthaler."

As I said, I understand why Mr. Seigenthaler was offended by the entry, but he seems to have gone a little overboard for someone who is such a champion of the 1st Amendment. In his op-ed he laments that he has "little legal recourse":

Federal law also protects online corporations -- BellSouth, AOL, MCI Wikipedia, etc. -- from libel lawsuits. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, specifically states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker." That legalese means that, unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others. ... Recent low-profile court decisions document that Congress effectively has barred defamation in cyberspace.

While he doesn't directly call for the ability to sue or shut down Wikipedia, he comes dangerously close to implying that would be a reasonable solution. In fact, I think a "reasonable" person would come a lot closer to that conclusion at the end of Seigenthaler's column than he would believing old John had the Kennedy boys killed after reading Wikipedia. Does John Seigenthaler really mean he'd sue a newspaper if it printed this statement? First, he'd have to get over the "public figure" hurdle (see below), but more fundamentally this just seems the wrong tack for the founder of the 1st Amendment Center!

In an overview of press freedom on its website, the First Amendment Center proclaims:

Sullivan and its progeny also hold that the First Amendment protects the publication of false information about matters of public concern in a variety of contexts, although with considerably less vigor than it does dissemination of the truth. Even so, public officials and public figures may not recover civil damages for injury to their reputations unless they were the victims of a reckless disregard for truth in the dissemination of a 'calculated falsehood' [emphasis mine, but it seems to deflate his "unlike print and broadcast companies" argument].

In so holding, the Court ushered in a new century of First Amendment jurisprudence by reaffirming ... the "central meaning of the First Amendment" on which it is based -- Sullivan's recognition that the "freedom of expression upon public questions is secured by the First Amendment" so that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open."

I know Wikipedia is not perfect and I have doubted some of the "facts" I've seen there, but I think it's pretty darned cool -- an online encyclopedia where anyone can share his or her "expertise". If your expertise isn't so "expert" someone will remove it. Yes, there are going to be errors and situations where people "go too far", but it seems odd that John Seigenthaler would be opposed to this "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate".

Shame on you John. I'd expect this reaction from a member of the general public, but I really think you should be able to see the larger principle involved.