politicartoons | (no subject)

According to some scholars I'd be happy to name if pressed, when it came to "freedom of speech" it was the freedom of the press to print that was more the focus of the founders. Without a free media keeping check on government and large group abuses, one cannot have assembly or political expression.

I believe you're correct.

However, what does "free press" mean, if not the freedom of political expression. Is it something different to independent media?

Is it something different to independent media?

That might be the problem here. To journalists, "free speech" has often meant "freedom to intrude in the name of journalism". In the case that inspired the OP, the student journalists simply couldn't take "you're not welcome here" for an answer. It blew their tiny minds.

Obviously, it blew the tiny mind of the cartoonist as well. In fact...

[After some digging]... Let's consider the artist (http://www.gorrellart.com/about-bob-gorrell/):

Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, Bob Gorrell attended the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1977.

Let's assume he spent four years in college (as is the norm). That would put him at 18 in 1973, thus born sometime in 1955. Which puts him almost smack in the middle of the Baby Boom (those born in the US 1947-1960).

Why is this relevant at all? Bear with me.

In their book Generations, authors Strauss & Howe posit a fascinating theory of behavior based on a model that follows generational cohorts. They theorize that the most influential determining factor in behavioral development is the social group surrounding an individual as they mature. Every twenty years or so—sometimes a bit longer, sometimes a bit less—something Big happens in society that shifts the cohorts. For the Boomers, it was the end of WWII.

Important to the theory is the element that there are only four types of cohorts, and that every cycle, lasting between 85 to 100 or so years, the cycle resets.

Civic (those that fought in WWII as young people)
Adaptive (too young to fight, but old enough to remember the war)
Awakening (Baby Boomers)
Reactive (born 1961-1980)

Long story short, the college-age kids being denigrated roundly by this Boomer cartoonist are exactly opposite generationally from the cartoonist (new Civic generation born after 1980). Opposite cohorts, again according to the authors, have an amazingly difficult time understanding each other.

Thus, to Boomer Gorrell, packed with his Boomer values of confrontation and self-importance, Civic cohorts saying a journalist—a journalist! one of the people (like Gorrell) responsible for changing society for the better!—isn't welcome, why that's akin to saying Bob Gorrell himself is wrong, which is akin to saying "Let's get back to Jim Crow."

That's why above I suggested that the signs over the fountains should be reversed. The cartoonist is completely oblivious, it seems to me, that insisting a reporter be able to attend every gathering of individuals no matter what the opinion of those gathered might be is akin to a white-dominated society insisting that a sub-group have inferior fountains.

Sorry to ramble too much. I just find their theory fascinating and find elements of society in general fitting so closely to it that I am in awe of its predictive powers.

That was some pretty fascinating stuff. I hadn't heard of that book before, but it sounds....well, fascinating!