The phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” came into play while visiting with the folks at the University of Central Florida this week. Rick Brunson was nice enough to invite me to speak to his class via Zoom and before the kids arrived, he asked me the traditional question people in the South ask people in the Midwest around this time of year:

“So, how’s the weather by you?”

It wasn’t terrible, but I’m used to the idea that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line views anything below 50 degrees as an arctic blast. I’m also used to the idea that usually the Florida folk have bragging rights on us around this time of year, so I explained how 45 is actually pretty good this time of year and then asked him about the weather down there.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about before we started,” he said.

Rick had planned on the traditional Zoom meeting of me on the big screen, all the kids in a class and basically a one-meets-group dynamic. However, a tropical storm of some kind was settling over his area and he didn’t want the kids risking, life, limb and squishy shoes coming to school in 7 or so inches of water. Thus, we were doing a big individual Zoom thing.

If the grass is truly greener down there, at least for one day, it was under water…

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA — Orlando, Florida

THE TOPIC: Rick was going through law and ethics, so we agreed to touch on pretty much whatever the kids wanted. We ended up with a few good questions about both, with one central lecture point: What does and doesn’t the First Amendment cover.

THE BASICS: Understanding the First Amendment is both simple and complex. It’s simple if you understand exactly who it limits, who it supports and what kind of speech tends to be involved. It’s a lot more complex because courts make rulings that drill it full of holes in many cases and people generally don’t learn enough about it before making it a centerpiece in their personal reality.

Here’s the class recap about what the First Amendment does and doesn’t do, drawn from some earlier lectures and posts:

It does:

Prohibit the government from suppressing unpopular speech or unpopular press. City, county, state or federal officials cannot stop a person from expressing an opinion or punishing that person for doing so. Those same officials cannot prevent a newspaper, magazine or other “press” from putting out content that might be unpopular.

It does NOT:

Cover everything ever said or printed. The law has deemed some forms of speech (fighting words, words that create a clear and present danger etc.) to be unprotected. The traditional example is that you can’t yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. The law has also deemed some content (child pornography, for example) to be irredeemable in any way and thus not be afforded protection under the law.

Prevent the speaker (or writer) from ramifications from free expression.The law says the government, or any of its agents, can’t prevent you from publishing a story that your university president is running a pedophile ring out of the basement of the student union. However, when that story is proven to be false, you better believe the president can sue your pants off for libel. The law protects speech, but it also protects people FROM speech in many cases, which is why we have to be careful every time we publish (or say) something.

Stop private businesses from suppressing or punishing speech.Private institutions are perfectly capable of hiring or firing people for a wide array of reasons. We talked about this with the Scott Adams “Dilbert” issue as well as when Joe Rogan kind of went off the rails in a particularly weird way. Companies hire people to speak on their behalf or represent them based on a number of factors and can fire them for other factors as well.

If you’re paid as a spokesperson for “Amazing Cheese,” and you go on an Instagram rant about cheese being a lactose-based plot of the woke Left to kill people who speak truth to power, well, you’re probably getting fired. The company is not violating any elements of the First Amendment by doing this. The same thing is true if a private school teacher speaks out on social media in a way that the private school’s administration feels would go against the ethics and standards of the school.

Privates get a clearer pass on this stuff because they are not related to the government, which is where the First Amendment stops and starts.

Force other people to listen to you or be happy about what you say.  If there were laws against ugly speech that bothered people, Fred Phelps would have never been let out of his own house. One person’s outrageous speech is another person’s truth-telling and neither of you has to be happy about it.

You have a choice when it comes to ugly speech: Listen to it, counteract it with more speech or simply shut it out by walking away/plugging your ears/deleting your racist uncle’s email/etc.

Promote “cancel culture.”  The thing about the First Amendment is that it’s essentially content neutral. You want to tell people you hate dogs, that’s fine. You want to tell people you love dogs, that’s fine. You want to tell people you want to eat dogs, that’s fine. It’s gross and you’ll likely be home alone a lot on weekends, but it’s not against the law.  With the legal exceptions outlined above (and a few others), the type of speech doesn’t really play into whether that speech should be “free” or not.

Whatever rejecting of your premises that the general public does is not cancelling you or your position. It’s just people deciding that they do not want to hear your nonsense.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: Have you ever found yourself going to do something or interview someone that you felt you shouldn’t be doing or interviewing? If so, how did you deal with it? (I’m paraphrasing here a bit.)

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: I tend to separate law and ethics by explaining them this way:

• The law deals with what we CAN or CAN’T do.
• Ethics deal with what we SHOULD or SHOULDN’T do.

It’s a bit simplistic, but it gets to the core of the question. I’ve been sent to places to interview people after deaths, car crashes, fires, robberies, dismemberments and other such things, which tends to put me in a position of having to make the decisions the question touched on in real time.

Legally speaking, if I’m at the scene of a car crash and one of the drivers is standing there on a public street, I CAN ask a bunch of questions regarding what happened and such. That said, if this person is clearly traumatized, I need to ask SHOULD I be asking a bunch of questions.

I have found myself sent to places I did not feel comfortable and asking people questions that I felt I shouldn’t be asking. A lot of that I got past because I was a young reporter at the time and I was told I needed to go and do the interviews or bother the people and I didn’t feel like I had a choice. In short, my boss sent me there, I thought that’s what I was supposed to do and I did it.

In some cases, it turned out OK, while in others it was really painful. Those experiences helped teach me how to better deal with the SHOULD/SHOULDN’T situations and later in my career, I think I was better off for having experienced those situations, in kind of a strange way. It was like I’ve said about a bunch of other things: I’ve learned more by doing things wrong than I ever learned by doing them right. I wish I didn’t have to do those things, and I’m better about teaching people how to decide what to do in those situations going forward.