By John Brummett

They celebrated the U.S. Constitution last week at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. What they chose to emphasize for “Constitution Week” this year was the First Amendment’s glorious bestowal of freedom of the press.

It was in that context that I was flattered with an invitation to the campus to hold forth Thursday on the burden of that freedom.

A man who writes the kinds of things I write in the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith sure enough ought to appreciate freedom of the press. But perhaps it would be his readers who could better elaborate on the burden.

Actually, our constitutionally guaranteed liberties are ever-burdensome. We don’t really treasure them as much as you’d think we would or should. They keep getting in the way of physical safety, economic security, peace of mind and reasoned orderliness.

So I identified three burdens of the free press and free expression generally.

1. We face the burden of overcoming fear, which is the very scourge of liberty, to have the courage to exercise freedom.

It is fear that causes Yale University to excise caricatured depictions of the prophet Mohammed from a forthcoming book about how those very cartoons, published by a Danish newspaper, set off calculated rampages of murder and violence by Islamic terrorists.

It was fear soon after 9-11 that compelled us to sit idly by while our president put mechanisms in place to spy on domestic telecommunications.

It was fear of a loss of vital advertising dollars when, many years ago, a newspaper publisher directed that a politician who owned an actively advertising retail store would get the editorial endorsement over a superior candidate.

Constitutional freedoms merely protect us from jail. They don’t protect us from going broke.

2. We have the burden of enduring free press and free expression — of putting up with all the racket and claptrap, more to the point.

Here I could cite many examples, such as cable television news and talk radio. But none would be better than the recent town halls where people shouted, screamed, frothed, misstated, abused, bullied and interrupted. And they did so by the very sanction of the wise men who founded the country.

Probably the greatest burden of liberty, actually, is overcoming our instinct, if so empowered, to suppress others.

I related the story the other day, but it’s worth retelling: I was speaking in the late 1980s to the American Civil Liberties Union. I was extolling the importance of championing liberties because of that very human instinct to suppress those we know to be wrong and irresponsible.

As an example, I said my instinct would be, if so empowered, to tell a certain now-deceased newspaper columnist that he couldn’t write any more columns. Rather than consider my point about our naturally ignoble instincts, these supposed libertarians instead proved it, without any apparent sense of irony, by cheering the prospect of such silencing.

3. We have the burden to overcome free expression. Yes, overcome it.

Freedom of expression is a glorious liberty, one to be treasured. But when speech is free, words can come cheap. More costly, and a more vital investment, is the serious, thoughtful and fair-minded quest for something approximating truth.

Freedom of expression could destroy a place if people didn’t have the good sense and decency not to accept at face value all these free expressions with which they are flooded every day.

As news professionals were always taught, be grateful when your mother says she loves you, but check it out before you accept it.

Skepticism is a good thing. You say you’re not sure of that? Good. That’s what I’m talking about. Check me out.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.