I’ve offered up any number of dire pronouncements about the present and future of journalism in America in recent months, but this latest one (thanks to SBU J/MC colleague Pat Vecchio for pointing me toward it) takes the proverbial cake: the Durham Herald-Sun has fired a reporter for the anonymous exercise of free speech.

This post, like all entries in Mosteller’s online diary, did not name her company or the writer. It did not name co-workers or bosses. It did not say where the company was based. But apparently, Mosteller’s supervisors and co-workers at the Durham (N.C.) Herald-Sun were well aware of her Web log.

The day after that posting, she was fired.

Wow. What kind of shape is free speech in when fucking newspapers are turfing people for it?

I can understand it when a person gets fired for hammering an employer in a way that hurts the company. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good policy, but in cases like this the termination is at least defensible. Frankly I believe that in a lot of cases open criticism of a company’s practices can be very healthy for the business, but that’s an entry for another day. But we’re now edging into very dangerous territory. In this case, the company couldn’t have been damaged by Mosteller’s blog because it wasn’t identified. So what’s next?

Well, what’s next is that somebody is going to axed for an off-the-clock expression of speech that doesn’t even address an aspect of the blogger’s job. Perhaps the blogger will make statements that don’t mesh with the politics of his or her boss. Maybe the blog will detail a personal sexual topic that offends the Puritan sensibilities of the employer (could you hypothetically be fired for having sex with your spouse in your own bedroom? – actually, yes you could, if you admitted in your LiveJournal that you prefer a position that your boss and his/her minister find unnatural). If you read blogs (hell, if you know human beings) you can probably envision several more scenarios without too much trouble. For that matter, the victim could, like Mosteller, even be totally anonymous so that no reader could possibly link the blogger to the employer.

I’ve been saying for awhile now that our society has evolved to a point where the 1st Amendment now needs some revision (and hey, I’m a pretty strict constructionist, so I don’t say this casually). The problem is this: the 1A protects us against government intrusions into speech, but it does not protect us against corporate repression of fundamental civil liberties, and in a world where all the real power lies in the private sector, this is a significant problem. By law (in a right-to-work state, of which I think there are 22?) you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. So Mosteller could have been legally fired for blogging of any nature, whether done at work or at home, publically or privately, anonymously or otherwise, etc.

In other words, your right to speak is safe from government meddling (in principle, anyway), but it is on the verge of being completely framed and determined by the whim of your employer, who by the way has no legal obligation to establish in advance and/or inform you about what speech rights you have or do not have.

Well, I’m no Constitutional law attorney, so I’m sure there’s all kinds of nuance surrounding this issue, and I’d be happy to hear comments from experts who can fill in the substantial gaps in my knowledge. But from what I see happening, it’s clear that we’re already ass-deep in a crisis of civil liberties that is more dire than we apparently realize. In a society where you are not free to say what you want, even on your own personal time with your friends and family, how free are you, really?