This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 4th, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Vice Presidential debate gave us a glimpse of two campaigns with similarly troubling

views on freedom of speech.

On one side, a candidate apparently confused about the speech protected by the First Amendment.

On the other side, a candidate complaining about government censorship

just as his running mate is actively threatening to punish private companies

for speech presented on their airwaves or websites that is critical of him.

Cato's Brent Scorrup and Nico Perino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and

Expression offer their thoughts.

There were a lot of discussions about the First Amendment, at least First Amendment adjacent

discussion over the last few weeks and in particular Tim Waltz an old interview

that he did had resurfaced where he suggested that hate speech and misinformation are somehow not protected by the First Amendment

and in the vice presidential debate he sort of weirdly sort of doubled down on some of that.

So can you give us the rough understanding of First Amendment

Scholars and anyone who's paying attention really of what we understand

about what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't.

Yeah, I mean so I mean this idea that I think there's an assumption by perhaps some people that misinformation

disinformation is a new thing and the First Amendment wasn't really you know if

we rewrote the Constitution today we would you, perhaps the framers would ban it, but that's a major misconception.

If you look at, say, Revolutionary War history, you know, some scholars have called Sam Adams the most unethical journalist in in the

English language I mean just you know he exaggerated you know the crimes of British

...