Opening Pandora's Box

For the classical scenario to achieve any real measure of success without resort to Orwellian tyranny, two concepts of traditional first­amendment jurisprudence would have to be redefined: first, the concept of censorship, and, second, the character of the perceived enemy to free expression. To empower the government with a high level of authority to regulate commercial television programming, certain forms of censorship must fall outside the first amendment. The speech and press clauses must be narrowed to justify governmental "suppression"' of commercial television expression. Further, the classicists must elevate the Huxleyan tyranny over Orwellian tyranny as the greater enemy of free speech. Yet, armed with a redefined first amendment, the paratroopers' paradox opens a Pandora's box. The classicists are apt to invoke the first amendment as a sword against private commercialism which assaults their notion of freedom of expression. ¹⁴³ Among other things, once the classical agenda places an entire communications industry outside the first amendment's boundaries, it must then allow for a hierarchy of protections based on the commercial or noncommercial character of expression or its technological medium. ¹⁴⁴

Curiously, the classicists' indictment of the status quo overlooks an important cyclical principle of the past: the commercial television medium, which the classicists so abjure, merely replaced a commercial oral predecessor, the radio, which in turn replaced another commercial predecessor, typography. Of course, classicists do not appear to abhor the effects of the typographic medium, which replaced its scribal predecessor, or the scribal medium, which replaced its oral predecessor. ¹⁴⁵ Yet, each of these transitions exacted its own toll from the fullness of the social and psychological experience that was represented by the preceding mode of communication. ¹⁴⁶ From the vantage point of the critic of the typographic culture, for example, print artificially reduced and abstracted the world to the cold confines of the typed page. ¹⁴⁷