If you want a good example as to why the First Amendment is so important, you need look no further than Britain’s Max Mosley.
Mosley, a 77 year-old former racing executive with fascist family ties, is waging a somewhat successful war against Britain’s freedom of the press, with the help of the U.K.’s legal tolerance for frivolous defamation and libel lawsuits.
A top activist and financier against free speech, Mosley’s specific focus is on deterring and restraining media outlets from reporting on the private lives of public figures like himself. The cause has been a personal one for Mosley since 2008, when a British tabloid newspaper reported on his participation in a fetish-sex orgy with prostitutes. Back then, Mosley successfully sued the newspaper for breach of privacy rights.
Yet today, Mosley’s reported significant financial support for a state-recognized media regulator called IMPRESS signifies his growing confidence in being able to crack down on speech he does not like.
As the Telegraph reported last month, Mosley’s lawyers have written to a number of British newspapers demanding that they remove references to Mosley’s funding of IMPRESS from their articles. Mosley also apparently wants to scrub the Internet of any references to his 2008 orgy.
This should concern us because it illustrates the power to threaten the free exchange of information. It’s pathetic, but it’s also dangerous.
A Daily Mail report published this week suggests Mosley’s involvement in racist campaign literature from 1961, chiefly on the grounds that the literature in question says he published it. Mosley denies he has ever seen the campaign literature in question. The exigent issue here is not whether Mosley was or is a racist, but rather whether public figures deserve a legal right to excuse themselves from negative media attention.
It’s a tale of two different legal systems.
Unfortunately, because of Britain’s excessively deferential defamation laws, Mosley and others like him are often able to dissuade media outlets from publishing stories they don’t like. Fortunately, President Trump’s whims aside, the First Amendment protects the right to shine a light on matters of public importance — even where powerful individuals like Rinat Akhmetov get their lawyers to start whining. To British journalists investigating Mosley, there’s a simple remedy: Come to the U.S. and run your stories with U.S. publications.
Then watch as Mosley squirms again, this time less enjoyably, in face of U.S. law.
