It may be the most classic bit during the nine-season run of the iconic TV sitcom "Seinfeld": The time that Jerry shows up at the airport car rental place with his reservation, only to be told there aren't any cars. Like every other annoying aspect of everyday life, the mishap causes the comedian to go into full didactic, observational-humor mode about the meaning of a reservation, sparking the annoyed clerk to blurt out, "I know what a reservation is!"
"I don't think you do!" Jerry responds. That was hilarious, but how funny is it when the most prominent news organization in the United States — the one that tends, for better or worse, to set the agenda for all the smaller fish in the media pond — launches what it hopes will be a decade-defining campaign around free speech in America with a gobsmackingly wrong-from-the-git-go misunderstanding of what free speech in America actually means.
"For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," begins the New York Times editorial board in its roughly 2,500-word broadside headlined simply "America Has a Free Speech Problem."
