Back to document

Dramatic events surrounding fight for Elián highlight the First Amendment in action

By Douglas Lee
Special to freedomforum.org

04.24.00

Maybe the government used too much force. Maybe the relatives in Miami left Janet Reno no choice. Maybe everyone cared too much about this little boy. Maybe no one cared enough.

Overnight polling results aside, these questions aren't easily answered. Legitimate arguments can be made from a variety of perspectives, and the law, unfortunately, seems to raise more issues than it resolves. In a weekend saturated with live Elián González coverage, in fact, only one position seemed utterly preposterous.

That position, not surprisingly, was the one uttered most often by opportunistic politicians. We should be ashamed, they said. Look what we've become. This is how Fidel Castro would have resolved the situation.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the Cuban government might use force in a similar situation, the similarities end there. And the differences that remain remind us why the First Amendment is so important.

Under no circumstances, for example, would the oppressive Castro regime have allowed scores of media outlets to stake out the Miami home of Elián's relatives. Before the raid, Cubans would not have seen the live reports, the interviews with psychologists or the footage of a little boy playing happily while his relatives openly defied the government.

Nor would Castro have allowed the dramatic coverage of the raid. Cubans wouldn't have seen the breaking down of the door, the masked government agents or the crying Elián. And had a journalist attempted to photograph the taking of Elián, the agent almost certainly would have turned the gun on him, confiscated the camera and destroyed the film.

Post-raid Cuba also would have been much different than post-raid Miami. Police in riot gear would have stopped the demonstrations, not controlled them. Every reporter and every camera operator would have been removed from the streets, by force if necessary. News of the raid and the reaction to it would have been doled out by the state, not served in heaping portions by hundreds of newspapers, broadcast stations and Web sites.

Because of the First Amendment, the U.S. government's handling of the situation was — for better or worse — played out almost entirely in public view. Agency determinations, court rulings and legislative actions were open to public scrutiny and debate. Participants in the negotiations, though perhaps without the purest of motives, spoke with the media often and freely. Then came the raid itself, conducted under the glare of spotlights from rolling cameras.

The coverage of these events, of course, was not without incident. An NBC cameraman and a soundman were struck by agents during the raid. Five journalists were arrested while covering post-raid demonstrations. Until more facts are known, it is difficult to assess whether these incidents resulted from aggressive law enforcement or overzealous newsgathering. Overall, though, the coverage of this story was amazingly free.

While the members of the media exercised their First Amendment rights to gather and disseminate the news, thousands of citizens exercised their First Amendment rights to assemble, protest and speak. Staged and unstaged, protests and press conferences dominated the weekend, from Little Havana to Andrews Air Force Base to Capitol Hill. From people on the street to university professors, talking heads filled the airwaves. And when the government responded, it did so with its own speech and its own press conferences, not with censorship and mass arrests.

The comparisons with Castro's Cuba, while misplaced, valuably remind us of the First Amendment freedoms we so often take for granted. Whatever conclusions one reaches about the events of this weekend, no excuse exists for being uninformed. As it so often does, the First Amendment has produced the marketplace of ideas it was designed to foster.