Unprecedented: The Right To Offend

WAMU 88.5

Published November 20, 2019 at 10:06 AM CST

Surrounded by microphones at his office in Beverly Hills, pornography publisher Larry Flynt announces that paramours and former CIA and FBI agents delivered evidence showing about a dozen legislators had extramarital affairs.

After “Saturday Night Live” parodied the president in December 2018, Donald Trump tweeted that the show “should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?”

In fact, the right to mock presidents, preachers and other public figures already had been tested in the courts.

In 1983, Hustler Magazine published a joke so offensive that it made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Court’s 1988 decision in Hustler Magazine, Inc. vs. Falwell enshrined the right to lampoon and even to offend as a fundamental part of free speech.

It has gone down as one of the country’s most important First Amendment cases. But today, those protections are presenting new challenges to our democratic system.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Mike Vuolo of WAMU’s Unprecedented podcast and Brandie Nonnecke, director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, join us to discuss the legacy of this landmark case.

Produced by Orion Donovan-Smith.

GUESTS

Mike Vuolo, Co-host, WAMU’s “Unprecedented;” @MikeVuolo

Nina Totenberg, Legal affairs correspondent, NPR; @NinaTotenberg

Brandie Nonnecke, Director, CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley; @bnonnecke

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

Unprecedented: The Right To Offend

👋 Looks like you could use more news. Sign up for our newsletters.