Corporate Lying Is Bad

But allowing it is good

Jonathan Rauch | June 9, 2003

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Moreover, Coppess says, "by the reasoning of the California Supreme Court, we're next. We may not be selling products, but we're also engaged in economically motivated speech. We're pushing to achieve economic benefits for our members."

In its amicus brief, ReclaimDemocracy.org argues that corporations' free speech rights should be limited "because corporations are artificial, state-created entities." Nonprofits, however, are themselves corporations. They, too, are artificial, state-created entities. And in America, playing fields tend not to stay tipped for long. If profit-making companies are placed in legal jeopardy for rebutting public-interest groups' charges against them, they will look for a way to draw public-interest groups under the same umbrella. Already, campaign finance law regulates election-related speech by nonprofits, and recent reforms tightened those restrictions. So it is not nutty for the AFL-CIO to worry that lawsuits targeting corporate speech may come back to haunt unions and nonprofits.

Conservatives have recently charged the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, with conducting fraudulent research in order to help pass the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. "Deliberately faked," accused David Tell in The Weekly Standard. The center and its supporters dispute the charge—plausibly, as far as I can tell, but that isn't the point. The activists who want to put Nike in the dock for fraudulent speech might ask themselves how they might feel in a few years seeing, say, the Brennan Center in the same place.