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| My choices! |
I
won’t hide my main point until the end today. Here it is: Your freedom of
choice does not cancel out mine, and my discretionary decisions are not
censorship.
This
isn’t the first time I’ve addressed the question of censorship, but it keeps
coming up, the latest brouhaha in the publishing industry a $.25 million
advance to a young memoirist, Milo Yiannopolis, an editor at Breitbart News.
The author describes himself as a “free speech fundamentalist,” but many
writers, editors, and publishers are shocked that Simon & Schuster would
choose to promote what they regard as “hate speech” and are calling for a
boycott. No, say defenders of Yiannopolis and Simon & Schuster, the
publisher is simply standing up for freedom of expression and should not be
criticized, let alone boycotted.
Here
is the anti-boycott position: The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC,
not to be confused with the Northport Community Arts Center!) worries that
calls for a boycott of Simon & Schuster will lead to censorship. NCAC’s
executive director says,
We know of instances in which books that contain certain kinds of content have been shelved, deferred, redacted, edited deeply to remove content that people might object to.
Another
point of the view is represented by the head of a small independent publisher,
Melville House. In Dennis Johnson’s words,
No one is saying [to the author] ‘you have no right to be published.’ ... What they’re saying is, ‘we’re shocked and outraged that you [the publisher] would stoop so low....
For
more on the story, see full article here.
At
the heart of the disagreement are these questions: Does a boycott constitute
censorship? Or does it somehow lead – maybe -- to censorship, and if so is a
boycott an infringement of an author’s and/or publisher’s freedom of speech?
Here’s
how I see it:
1)
Freedom to express my views, whether in speech or in writing, does not obligate
anyone else to publish them. I am free to publish at my own expense and to
distribute as best I can, or I can try to persuade a publisher to take on the
job.
2)
A publishing house is free to select among submitted manuscripts those it
chooses to publish. (The majority of submissions will be rejected. Everybody
wants to be “an author,” or so it sometimes seems, but the world just doesn’t
need that many “books.”) Publishers’ decision does not obligate bookstore
owners or the general public to buy any particular book.
The
two preceding paragraphs should make clear a symmetry of freedom, in that a
writer’s freedom does not cancel out the freedom of a publisher, nor does a
publisher’s freedom cancel out that of wholesale or retail customers.
Turn
now to the question of a boycott.
(3)
As I see it, in choosing to join a boycott I exercise together my freedoms of
speech and of association. A boycott puts the power of numbers and money on both sides of the table,
rather than leaving all the weight only on one side.
I
could, of course, choose simply to refrain from purchasing a particular
product, be it a book or anything else, and say nothing to anyone about my
decision or the reasons behind it, but my quiet, individual,
sure-to-be-overlooked non-purchase will never bring about change in corporate
behavior. When individuals take a stand together, likelihood increases that
their voices will be heard. A study (cited in recent New Yorker column by James
Suroweicki) that came out of the Kellogg School of Management showed that
boycotts affected corporate stock prices for every day they were in effect and
that over a third of boycotted companies changed their behavior as a result.
According
to Wikipedia, Simon & Schuster publishes 2,000 titles a year under its
various imprints. The publishing house was acquired by Gulf & Western in
1976 and since then has bought up many other publishing companies, with
complicated connections to and holdings in television (they are now part of CBS)
and educational products. Threshold Editions, their “conservative” imprint was launched in 2006. (Please note that “conservative” no longer means what it used to mean.) It is under this imprint that the Yiannopolos book
will appear.
Big
publishing is big business. Make no mistake. Simon & Schuster has approximately 1300
employees worldwide and
makes millions annual in profits. CEO Carolyn Reidy cites, among factors for
the company’s rising profits in 2015, that books for which high advances were
paid “performed well.” No publisher hands over a quarter-million-advance
without expectations of huge profit.
Small,
independent publishers and bookstores operate within very different parameters.
Staying in business, which means staying in the black, is always a focus, but
we are not beholden to shareholders. (Get serious! If maximizing profits were
our sole
concern, none of us would be in this business at all!) But
As
a reader, a bookseller, and a bookstore owner, I am proud to be one of a
like-minded legion, each of us carrying a torch for cultural values that go
beyond the almighty dollar.
Look
at it this way: If there’s nothing wrong with the wealthy joining together in
publicly traded corporations to increase their wealth, to buy influence, and to
shape the country's future to their wishes, how could it be wrong for those of us in the
trenches to join together to exert whatever influence we can to shape the world
we want to see for our children and grandchildren?
If
the government forbids publication or sales or a book, that is censorship.
If a
publisher decides not to publish, that is discretion. It is an exercise of
freedom.
By the same token, a boycott is the exercise of freedom by a different
segment of society. Deny the right to boycott, and you deny freedom itself. I don't think Martin Luther King, Jr., would have any trouble understanding collective action.
