For at least three years, we have all suspected — well, known — that the federal government has been pressuring social-media companies to censor speech that government officials dislike regarding the pandemic and other matters.
One clue: officials like Jennifer Psaki, White House press secretary from 2021 to 2022, forbiddingly and publicly demanded that social-media firms do more to suppress disapproved speech.
Even so, many left-wingers stressed that once allegedly open public forums like YouTube, Facebook, pre-Musk Twitter et al. were private entities with every darn right to set standards for posting.
Just market decisions, that’s all that was happening here!
Now that litigation has delivered so much evidence that government agencies have been colluding to censor, directly and chronically “working with” social-media firms to suppress dissent, many on the left are not even pretending to favor protection of First Amendment rights to express speech they disagree with.
Jonathan Turley notes that according to The New York Times, a recent ruling temporarily enjoining the Biden Administration from colluding to censor would, by fostering open discourse, lamentably “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”
Washington Post editors and others on the left “no longer deny censoring,” agrees Jeffrey Tucker. “Now they defend censorship as a policy in the national interest.… They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation.”
Yes. Cat’s out of the bag.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “First Amendment: Irrelevant?”
The major fault is with the press itself. Consider that on some issues in the past, you would have contrasting columns, each defending its side. You had reporters looking for multiple sources for a story or an event before publishing it. Makes one wonder if we’d be better off going back to openly partisan news outlets. Let’s stop pretending that objectivity is valued by so-called journalists. No news story with a single source or with only anonymous sources should be believed. It’s gossip, nothing more.
Some decades ago, various journalists and writers argued that objectivity was unobtainable, and that thus journalists should stop pretending to be objective and embrace their biases. These journalists and writers did just that. But it would not have been natural to declare, on each occasion, that they had thrown objectivity to the wind. So the example that they set, and the example that was followed, was of biased reporting. Unfortunately, in an exercise of double-think, a pretense that the reporting were objective was continued. Of course, these results have suited the purposes of culutral Marxists and of the corporatist left.
My own, unsurprising view is that much in this world is unobtainable but shows the direction towards which we should always reach. For scientists and educators (including journalists), objectivity may not always be obtainable, but that does not excuse movement in some other direction.