Lori Klein, profanity in the classroom, Willie Horton and Citizens United

by David Safier

Another big hat tip to Debbie Reese who writes on the American Indians in Children's Literature blog out of New Mexico for linking me to this AP article connecting Lori Klein's bill to use FCC broadcast standards as the touchstone for speech standards in the classroom to Floyd Brown, founding chairman of Citizens United and the producer of the "Willie Horton" ad used against Michael Dukakis during his 1998 presidential race.

According to the article, it was Floyd Brown's complaint to Klein that led to her writing SB1467, which says teachers can lose their teaching certificates if they "engage in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the Federal Communications Commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio." Administrators can lose their certificates if they know teachers are violating the law and don't act accordingly. which says teachers must not "engage in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the Federal Communications Commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio." [Note: My comments about the punishment for violating the regulation are incorrect. They are part of Klein's "partisan instruction" bill, SB1202. I regret the error.]

Apparently, Brown pulled his daughter out of an Anthem school because she said her teacher used the F-word in class. She's currently being home schooled. (I certainly hope he's got parental controls on her television, radio and internet or his daughter may not be safe from more verbal pollution.)

According to the AP article,

Brown is a longtime Republican strategist who produced the infamous "Willie Horton" ad during the 1998 presidential campaign, which tied Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis to the release of a convicted murderer serving a life sentence.

Brown is also the founding chairman of Citizens United, the group whose lawsuit led to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that barred the government from limiting corporation and labor union spending for political purposes.

If you want to know more about Brown, there's an excellent article in last week's New Yorker by Jane Mayer — Attack Dog — which talks about him in relation to Larry McCarthy, probably the top negative political TV ad man in the business. McCarthy was hired by Brown to create the "Willie Horton" ad. The godfather of today's negative campaigning, Lee Atwater, apologized for the ad as well as other campaigning tactics when he was on his death bed.

Before Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret over the “naked cruelty” he had shown to Dukakis in making “Willie Horton his running mate.”

Neither Brown nor McCarthy have any regrets about the blatantly race baiting ad which implied a prison furlough program in Dukakis' Massachusetts was unique, even though Reagan instituted a similar program when he was governor, resulting in a few murders in California.

Dukakis told me that the Horton ad took his record wildly out of context. A Republican predecessor had created the Massachusetts furlough program, he said, and forty-four states had similar programs at the time, including California; Ronald Reagan had instituted it there when he was governor. Two California parolees committed murders while furloughed.

To me, that ad and many other blatantly false and misleading ads perpetrated by Brown and his cohorts are far more obscene than the occasional F-word in the classroom.

A WHERE-THE-HELL-IS-THE-ARIZONA-MEDIA UPDATE: When I read the AP article today, I assumed it was new. Nope. Came out Feb. 15, a week ago. So why haven't I seen it? Because so far as I can tell, it was only picked up by one Arizona media outlet, KTAR Phoenix. But, according to Google, you can read the article uncovering the origin of Klein's bill in Chicago, Texas, Detroit, Seattle, Missouri and Pekin [not China, Illinois]. Why isn't this information in the Star, the Republic or other papers around the state?