Larry Flynt,  who turned strip clubs and a fledgling nudie magazine in the 1970s into a pornographic empire, died Wednesday at the age of 78. To say he changed the field of publishing  and the concept of “adult publications” with his launch of Hustler magazine, is akin to saying Babe Ruth changed how baseball was played.

To put my editor’s mind at ease, as I can already picture the folks at SAGE breathing heavily into a paper bag and fighting off heart palpitations when they saw this headline, this piece isn’t a lionization of a man who clearly had more than his share of  marks on the negative side of his ledger in life.

Critics note that his magazines were not only horrifically crude, but also that his efforts were misogynistic and taboo, as Flynt seemed to revel in the idea of pushing the boundaries of taste and legality as far as possible. Gloria Steinem referred to him as a “violent, sadistic pornographer,” and it’s hard to argue with that, given one of Hustler’s more famous covers featured a woman being fed into a meat grinder.

However, whether you abhor everything to do with pornography or your computer cowers in the corner when it sees you opening up an internet browser, Flynt had an impact on journalism in three key ways that still matter to this day:

 

SATIRE AND HYPERBOLE WERE CODIFIED AS PROTECTED SPEECH

The words “pornographer Larry Flynt” and “landmark Supreme Court Decision” don’t seem like a logical coupling, but they are, in fact, linked in history in a way that provides us with crucial speech and press protections.

In the early 1980s, Campari liquor was running a series of ads in which famous people described their “first time.” The Q and A format had an interviewer asking about the “first time” and the answers contained a great degree of sexual innuendo. At the end, of course, it was revealed that the people were talking about their “first time” drinking Campari liquor.

In 1983, Flynt parodied the ad, using as his subject the Rev. Jerry Falwell. In the Hustler version, Falwell was said to have had his “first time” in an outhouse with his mother and a goat. It also referenced his need to get drunk before preaching because how else could he spout such ridiculous religious garbage.

Falwell sued Hustler and won a six-figure jury award for emotional distress, which Flynt appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. The Rehnquist court delivered its decision in 1988, unanimously finding for Hustler Magazine. The ruling noted that public figures could not sue for emotional distress over statements that were patently offensive unless those statements could be shown to be factually inaccurate in nature and demonstrated an instance of actual malice.

The bigger point, however, was that the court noted that the First Amendment rights of individuals to make patently offensive statements outweighed the interest to protect public figures from them, so long as the statements could not be reasonably construed as true. In other words, nobody in their right mind was reading Hustler in Jerry Falwell’s congregation and thinking, “Wow! I never knew he had an Oedipal/bestiality obsession before! Guess you learn something new every day!”

The case established both a strong position for journalism in general, codifying actual malice as a standard for libel against public figures as well as providing a shield for humorists who relied on hyperbole to make their points. If Ted Cruz could sue Seth Meyers every time Meyers says his beard looks like a pile of raccoons died on Cruz’s face or something similar, we’d probably never have “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on TV.

If you enjoy shows like “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “The Daily Show,” “Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” “The Colbert Report” or any other show that relies on hyper-exaggeration to make you laugh about public figures, you’ve got Larry Flynt to thank for their existence in their current stasis.

 

THE MAN UNDERSTOOD (AND SOME WOULD SAY EXPLOITED) AUDIENCE CENTRICITY

In the 1960s, the primary men’s magazine was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. It combined humor, culture, interviews and literature with photos or illustrations of semi-nude or fully nude women to entice its readership. The description of Hefner and the magazine was often “bon vivant,” which roughly translates to a cultural person with refined social tastes and interests.

While Hefner was hobnobbing around town, reflecting the kind of people you’d see in “Mad Men,” Flynt was grinding out a living in the dirtier parts of Cincinnati. The people who visited Flynt’s bars and dance clubs were the blue-collar, truck-driver, factory-worker gritty folks that populated much of the Rust Belt and other similar parts of the country. They weren’t interested in the latest stories from Jack Kerouac or Jean Sheppard. They weren’t buying the silk socks and calf garters advertised in the back of Playboy. They didn’t see the social incongruity of having African American Alex Haley interviewing George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party.

To borrow a phrase from comedian Jeff Foxworthy, they wanted a beer and to see something naked.

Flynt understood this and used that understanding to tap into a completely under-served audience. He saw things from the perspective of readers who weren’t rich or smooth or refined, but had extremely base tastes and were willing to pay for content that reflected them. He came at the publication itself from an audience-centric perspective, knowing that for every one person who would gasp audibly at the horrifying indecency of his publication, there were at least three others who would buy it specifically for that indecency.

A perfect example of his comprehension of how best to serve his audience was illustrated in the 1996 film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” in which Flynt (played by Woody Harrelson) is arguing with a photographer about how best to shoot a photo of a naked woman. The more the photographer is trying to soften the content and hide the nudity, the more Flynt is pushing back to make the nudity more prominent. Finally, Flynt says, “Look we’re not running a flower shop here. We’re selling the girl. So stop playing with all the props and pillows and flowers and just shoot the girl.”

The concept of audience-centricity has been one that journalism in general has been painfully slow in comprehending. It’s a safe case to make that newspapers continue to crumble because they still have a major disconnect between what matters to the writers and what matters to the readers. The degree to which internet publications have succeeded or failed over the past decade is almost entirely linked to their ability to define, reach and appease an audience. It’s something we now teach in journalism as a matter of course.

You might not like that Flynt was “selling the girl” or how he sold it or what else he did, but the truth is, not many publishers (now or then) had as keen of a sense for whom they were publishing and what those people wanted. You can also argue what people should or shouldn’t want, but that’s a completely different discussion.

And it also leads to the final point…

 

SPEECH AND PRESS SHOULD BE PROTECTED, EVEN IF THEY OFFEND YOU

People who debate the various aspects of the First Amendment have a wide array of opinions regarding Larry Flynt and his overall place in its pantheon. To some, his efforts have created a wider array of protections for speech that otherwise could not have existed had he not gone to such outlandish lengths with his publications. To many, many more people, however, he’s a filth monger who exploited women, debased sex and profited greatly by abusing one of the most important rights of our society: The right to free expression.

Wherever you fall on this issue or this person is completely understandable, particularly if his actions offended you. That said, the concept of a free society is that sometimes you get offended by the expressions of others. You cannot, however, simply destroy speech or press because you dislike what it has to say. Edward Norton, playing the role of Flynt lawyer Alan Isaacman, makes that case in this scene from the film:

Your rights to say what you want are always in jeopardy if other people have the right to shut you up because they don’t like what you have to say. Then the question becomes, “Who sets the standards and who gets to determine the penalties?” The freedoms accorded to us in the First Amendment need to protect all of us, or they protect none of us.

Or, as Flynt was known to say, “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it’ll protect all of you.”