Recent Op-Ed Misreads the Moment: Free Speech Is Worth Defending

To the Editors:

I greatly respect Joel Simon’s lifetime of work defending journalism. So I was surprised by his recent op-ed (“The PEN America Crisis, Free Speech, and the Future of Big Tent Organizations,” May 21). His argument — “free expression as a value divorced from a broader social and ideological purpose is losing its appeal” — reads as a regrettable retreat from the defense of free expression as a necessary end in itself.

To Simon, social media’s ascension means “the implicit bargain of the liberal order has less value” because “activists and advocates no longer need institutional cover to be heard.”

But this misreads the moment. Activists and advocates don’t need “institutional cover” so much as a robust, viewpoint-neutral commitment to free speech as a universal human right. Social media doesn’t obviate that need — it intensifies it. The students and faculty punished nationwide for what they’ve said about Israel and Gaza, both online and off, know all too well that social media has only made a principled, consistent defense of free speech more necessary.

Simon also argues that institutions should ask questions about the “goal” of defending expressive rights, “drawing lines” and “imposing a hierarchy of action” to benefit the “community that the organization serves.” But any worthwhile commitment to free speech requires defending views one doesn’t like. Free expression cannot become transactional. Defending speech only when it advances an institution’s goals further erodes society’s understanding of free expression as an intrinsic human right, beyond ideology or partisanship.

Simon contends that if “big tent organizations” such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, which he previously led, “applied our mandate consistently, we would be trapped in the paradox of defending speech that threatened the very outcomes we hoped to achieve.” This is functionally the same argument the government advanced during the Red Scare. Thankfully, the Supreme Court ultimately rejected it, setting the stage for modern First Amendment jurisprudence. If, in decades past, civil society groups stopped defending dissenting or unpopular speech, as Simon seems to suggest should happen now, the legal precedent that protects free expression today would be radically abridged, to everyone’s detriment.

Protecting free speech need not be in service of a goal; it is the goal itself.

Will Creeley
Legal Director
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression