The views expressed in this article represent the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, its staff, or its board of directors.
The world marked May 3 as World Press Freedom Day. The annual Reporters Without Borders index, released the same day, reported the lowest global press freedom score in the 25 years the index has existed. For the first time, more than half of all countries fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories. UNESCO’s World Trends Report finds that the global Freedom of Expression Index has dropped by 10 percent since 2012. The space for independent reporting is contracting almost everywhere.
The trend is not confined to authoritarian regimes. In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people were arrested in a single year for online speech offenses. Germany has prosecuted citizens for mocking politicians, and a journalist there received a seven-month suspended sentence for a satirical meme criticizing the interior minister. The European Union’s Digital Services Act and the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act impose substantial fines on platforms that fail to remove content the government deems hateful. The justification offered is consistent: restrictions are necessary to protect minorities from harm, hate, and discrimination.
Chattanooga has its own reason to take the question seriously. The slogan “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor” was minted not in New York but on Georgia Avenue. In 1878, a twenty-year-old named Adolph Ochs borrowed $250 to buy a controlling interest in the financially struggling Chattanooga Daily Times. He guided that paper for the next 57 years, even after he moved north and purchased the New York Times in 1896. The Chattanooga slogan still runs above the masthead of both papers today, and the Times Free Press carries it on its front page every morning.
Ochs is also a one-man case study in the question now being debated in European legislatures. He was the son of Jewish immigrants. He used his platforms to fight antisemitism in American media at a time when caricature of Jews was routine in the popular press. He served on the executive board of the Anti-Defamation League in its earliest years and pressed other newspapers nationwide to abandon the practice. He helped fund the Chattanooga public library, the preservation of Lookout Mountain, and the Mizpah Congregation Temple, completed in 1928 and still standing on McCallie Avenue. He did this work not by suppressing the speech of his opponents but by competing with them, on equal terms, in a society that protected expression on both sides.
That is the mechanism. The European approach now expanding across the democratic world rests on a different premise. It assumes that minorities are best protected by restricting the speech of their opponents. The empirical record across countries and individuals does not support that premise.
What the Individual Evidence Shows
In a paper forthcoming in Kyklos, I examine survey responses from over 600,000 individuals across 115 countries between 1981 and 2022. The question is straightforward. Are people who prioritize free speech more or less racially tolerant than their neighbors?
If the censors are right, the people who care most about free speech should be the least tolerant. They are, after all, supposedly defending the right to say cruel things. The data say the opposite. Those who name protecting free speech as their top national priority are more likely to be racially tolerant than otherwise similar neighbors, not less. The same pattern shows up in a separate survey of 33 African countries, conducted at a different time and by a different organization. It does not go away.
The pattern extends well beyond race. The same people are also more tolerant toward immigrants, members of other religions, Jews, gay people, and even those with criminal records. The largest effect of all is for Muslims. The one place the pattern breaks is revealing. Free speech advocates are less tolerant of right-wing extremists. That matters because it rules out the easy explanation that the survey respondents were simply giving polite answers. If they were, they would profess tolerance toward every group on the list. They do not. They draw the line at the groups they see as threatening open discourse itself, the pattern Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance.
What the Country-Level Evidence Shows
The natural next question is whether attitudes translate into actual protection. People can hold tolerant views in private and still live in countries that mistreat their minorities. To test that second link, my UTC colleague Daniel Sanchez-Pinol Yulee and I assembled data on 164 countries between 1950 and 2019 and asked three things. Do governments protect the legal rights of minorities equally across racial, ethnic, and religious lines? Can minorities actually participate in politics, hold office, and shape policy? Or are they shut out of public services and civic life because of who they are?
On all three counts, countries with stronger free speech do better. The size of the gap is meaningful, not marginal. Moving a country from the bottom of the speech-protection distribution toward the top is associated with a difference in minority political access on the order of the gap between Russia in 2003 and the United States in 2019. That is not a statistical curiosity. It is the gap between countries where minorities can meaningfully participate and ones where they cannot. The same pattern shows up when we compare countries that look almost identical except for their speech protections.
The natural objection is that free speech is merely a proxy for democracy. Free speech, the argument runs, is just a proxy for elections, and the elections are doing the work. The data say no. Hold suffrage and elected office constant, and free speech still predicts how a country treats its minorities at least as strongly as voting rights themselves. The history fits. Greece’s 1975 constitution, written after the military junta collapsed, expanded both press freedom and protection for religious minorities in the same document. Chile’s transition from Pinochet produced both the repeal of speech restrictions and, three years later, the 1993 Indigenous Law that formally recognized native peoples for the first time. Where speech opened only briefly and then reversed, as in China after the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s, the minority protections never followed.
Why the Connection Holds
The mechanisms are not mysterious. Free speech lowers the cost of publicizing discrimination. Minorities and their allies can document mistreatment, share testimony, and mobilize opinion without fear of prosecution. Publicity raises the political cost of discriminatory practices. Officials, employers, and institutions face reputational and electoral consequences when scrutiny exposes mistreatment. Those rising costs incentivize change, both legal and cultural. Governments codify rights, and private institutions revise their conventions, when the alternative becomes too expensive to defend.
A second mechanism is counter-speech. Open discourse allows false stereotypes to be challenged and corrected. The legal scholar Nadine Strossen calls this the safety valve function. When grievances and prejudices can be expressed, they can also be answered. Censorship removes the corrective mechanism. It does not eliminate prejudice. It only drives it underground, where it cannot be argued with.
A third mechanism is cultural. Free speech and tolerance are both expressions of a broader liberal framework that emphasizes individual autonomy, skepticism of state-imposed conformity, and openness to diverse perspectives. People who internalize one of these commitments tend to internalize the other. Recent research finds that East Germans, after decades under a regime that suppressed speech, hold systematically less favorable views of free expression than West Germans. Institutions shape values, and values shape how people treat one another.
The Local Stakes
A vibrant local press is not a sentimental concern. It is the practical infrastructure through which discrimination gets exposed, accountability gets enforced, and the reputational price of bad behavior gets paid. When a Hamilton County contractor falsifies invoices, when a public agency mishandles a complaint, when a business shutters quietly under pressure, the institution that surfaces the story does so under exactly the protections that European governments are now eroding in the name of protection.
For the Chattanooga business community, the connection runs further. Open inquiry is not separable from open commerce. The institutions that protect dissent in the public square also protect competition in the marketplace, accountability in government, and the credible legal protections that allow capital to be invested with confidence. Hong Kong’s economic vitality eroded as its press protections did. Countries that suppress voice tend to suppress enterprise as well. The packages travel together.
The Burden of Proof
The European model rests on an empirical claim. Restricting speech, the argument runs, protects minorities from harm. The cross-country evidence does not support that claim. Across 164 countries over 70 years, the countries that protect even controversial speech provide stronger legal protections for minorities, more political access for marginalized groups, and less government exclusion. The individual-level evidence runs in the same direction. People who value free speech are more tolerant, not less, with the predictable exception of those they perceive as threats to open discourse itself.
The bet now being placed in Brussels and London and Berlin is that the right response to social tension is more rules about who is allowed to say what. The data assembled across decades and continents say the opposite. Free speech and the dignity of vulnerable people are not opposing values. They have traveled together since a twenty-year-old in Chattanooga decided to print the news without fear or favor, and the institutions that protect one have tended to protect the other.
Dr. Claudia Williamson Kramer is the Scott L. Probasco, Jr., Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise, Professor of Economics, and Executive Director of the Center for Economic Education at UTC.
