
Stuff your lady with a large pizza and a pack of menthol cigarettes. Now that’s true love!
I am afraid that we are in a slow but inexorable slide toward the erosion of free speech. To a significant degree, this erosion is due to the erroneous belief that people have a right to be free of offense.
In fact, our constitution guarantees exactly the opposite. It guarantees us the right to offend whomever the hell we want whenever the hell we want to. That’s what free speech means.
Our courts have held that as a general principle commercial speech enjoys similar protections as individual speech. This means that businesses and advertisers have the same right to offend that individuals do.
I happen to hold very liberal views about individual liberties, including free speech. But there is a branch of “liberalism” these days that has become very intolerant. These people are humorless scolds who are very easily offended and demand instant redress for their injured sensitivities.
There is also a branch of conservatism that thinks we need to be protected from “dangerous” ideas. Well, I appreciate your concern, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to draw my own conclusions.
The tricky part is this. Government is prohibited from censoring what we can say. But well-meaning citizens, believing they are protecting society from dangerous, offensive, or prejudicial ideas, have substantial power to censor by applying economic pressure.
In the internet age, it has become much easier to band together to exert pressure for the purpose of silencing ideas we don’t like. And we have every right to do so. But before we exercise this right we need to think seriously about the implications.
I don’t believe our sensitivities are so profound that they trump someone else’s right to offend us. I don’t believe we want to allow the limits of commercial discourse to be determined by the loudest bullies on the web.
Do ethnic, racial and sexual stereotypes cause offense? Absolutely.
Should we act to silence them? Absolutely not.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Mr. Gieselman: [The commercials] definitely have broken through. The Russian character was the first in the campaign. Everybody absolutely loved him so we created a new set of characters, the banker, the Whale and “Tommy the Truth.” They are larger-than-life characters but have some twist in them that make it fun to watch. They are intended to be entertaining, over-the-top characters that no one would ever take literally.
Ad Age: Why, then, did you take “Tommy the Truth” off the web?
Mr. Gieselman: The debate ensued with a string of dialog that was completely inappropriate and had nothing to do with the spot or DirectTV and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
Ad Age: Do you have a sense if those offended are a vocal few or something bigger?
Mr. Gieselman: We’ve been getting the same amount of feedback [as prior spots]—no more, no less. We get feedback on all our creative; people share their opinions and that is great. You just have to be careful with that and when there is a very vocal minority, you have to keep that in perspective. We run close to 20 to 30 different spots during the year so we have a baseline for what’s typical. You know pretty quickly if it’s something that’s causing a negative reaction more intense than something has in the past, so this is not unusual. Some of the commentary … it’s amazing what people take away sometimes.
Ad Age: Do you think the critics have a point or are they just missing the point?
Mr. Gieselman: In my judgment these are farcical characters. It’s altered reality. If some people take it literally and don’t like it I apologize for that. Sorry, you didn’t like it; that’s not what it was intended to do. Everybody’s measure for what’s appropriate is different and there is no way to reconcile everyone’s yardstick. What you don’t hear are the 99% of people who either didn’t have a reaction or liked it and chose not to take the time to write an email.