Two anniversaries reveal a warning for America at 250

The First Amendment is, by global standards, in robust health. What has eroded is the civic architecture around it: the habits, institutions and tempo that once gave free expression the room to become something other than noise.”

Stuart N. Brotman, Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute

Two anniversaries fall this year, and they belong in the same sentence. America turned 250 on July 4. The film “Network” turns 50 in November. One is the Republic’s birthday. The other is its mirror. Read together, they describe a problem the First Amendment alone was never built to solve.

“Network” arrived in November 1976, at the tail end of the Bicentennial, when the bunting was coming down, and the country was trying to decide whether the year had meant anything. Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky gave it an answer in the form of Howard Beale, the news anchor who loses his mind on the air and is rewarded for it with a time slot. The film is remembered as a biting satire of television. It is also something more useful at 250: a civic diagnosis.

Beale at the window, telling America to throw open the shades and howl, has been quoted for half a century as a populist anthem: “I am as mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore.” 

Watch the scene again. Beale is not leading a revival. He is a tired man being used. The window opens, the country screams, and the network sells the screaming back to the screamers at a premium; the scream is the product.

That is the line that should concentrate the mind in this Semiquincentennial year. The Founders, whatever else they disagreed on, agreed that a free people must also be a patient people. The Constitution they wrote is, among other things, an instrument of patience.

Bicameralism, staggered terms, the separation of powers and the deliberate friction of amendment are not bugs. They are thermostats. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 about the "violence of faction" and helped design a machine whose whole purpose was to keep the temperature down long enough for reason to arrive.

The First Amendment sits inside that machine, not outside it. It forbids the government from silencing citizens. It does not guarantee that citizens, given a microphone, will use it well. The Framers understood the difference. They protected free expression because self-government requires it, and they built slow institutions around it because they knew expression alone would not cool the fever.

“Network” is about what happens when the slow institutions are outrun. Diana Christensen, the programming executive played by Faye Dunaway, is not a villain imposing degradation on an unwilling public. She is a reader of numbers. She knows what the country will watch in primetime, and that reasoned deliberation is not on the list. The audience she serves is the same audience Madison worried about, only now it has a remote control.

Fifty years on, the audience has smartphones. The cooling devices the Framers installed — institutions, intermediaries, the friction of time and space — have been progressively engineered away in the name of engagement. We have built, with great ingenuity, the precise delivery system Madison warned against.

This is the part of the free expression question that gets too little attention in a year of anniversaries. The legal architecture is sound. The First Amendment is, by global standards, in robust health. What has eroded is the civic architecture around it: the habits, institutions and tempo that once gave free expression the room to become something other than noise. 

None of this argues for less expression. It argues for a better understanding of what expression is for. The Framers protected both free speech and free press because they believed citizens, given time, would mostly choose the argument over the scream. “Network” warned, gently and then not gently, that an industry was rising whose interests ran the other way. Both were right; both are part of the inheritance we mark this July.

The film’s closing narration tells us that Howard Beale was “the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.” The line is funny, but it’s also a civic warning. In a republic that confuses audience with citizenry, a voice gets measured by its reach rather than its truth. That is not a media problem wearing a constitutional costume. It is a constitutional problem wearing a media costume.

Two hundred fifty years of our nation. Fifty years of “Network.” The work in front of us for both anniversaries is the same: to be worthy of a freedom whose exercise the Founders entrusted us with, and whose difficulty Lumet and Chayefsky never let us forget.

Stuart N. Brotman is Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He can be reached at snbrotman@gmail.com