WATCHDOG IS NOW A POODLE
The scariest part of the revelations that the Biden administration is working with social media companies to suppress “misinformation” about the virus vaccines wasn’t the revelation per se (as bad as that was), but that the media in question are apparently cooperating in such docile fashion and that there was so little outrage among liberals who once prided themselves on being robust defenders of free speech.
Such prodding of media to censor vaccine commentary isn’t a direct violation of the First Amendment, but it definitely outsources the kind of censorship the First Amendment exists to prevent and establishes a precedent for government to play a similar role on other issues.
Government “suggestions” to censor your content necessarily contain an “or else” that can’t help but exert a chilling effect on media decision-making. When unprecedentedly powerful media go along with such efforts, our descent down the slippery slope
acquires the speed of Chevy Chase’s greased-up sled in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
To grasp how truly dangerous this is, it is useful to recall the primary purpose of the First Amendment and the free speech it exists to protect. That primary purpose, clearly expressed by the American founders and reflexively understood by all good liberals until recently, was to protect “political speech,” which for all practical purposes means speech about the government.
The crucial idea was that free speech kept us free by allowing us to criticize the government without fear of governmental reprisal. Freedom of speech and press was the “first freedom” because without it other freedoms (religion, assembly, etc.) would be lost to governmental tyranny.
Thus, the primary issue isn’t speech about vaccines, however misleading or detrimental it might be, but the loss of the proper (meaning inherently adversarial) relationship between government and media, along with the idea that we should allow the very entity (government) that most requires our vigilant monitoring to become our vigilant monitor of information and truth.
A remarkable inversion of our traditional understanding of freedom of speech is being suggested in all this, wherein the need to tell the truth about government is replaced by government deciding what is true and permitted to be said. Our “watchdog” vis-à-vis government thus becomes an instrument of it.
Even the “truths” that the marketplace of ideas reveals through continuous, robust debate are, of course, purely contingent, with what is false today often being viewed as true at a later point and vice versa (as has been so amply demonstrated during the pandemic).
But when that marketplace is replaced as a mechanism for seeking truth by the state, the concept of truth itself becomes inevitably corrupted — when truth is whatever the government says it is, whatever serves the interest of government, however false, becomes true, and there no longer exists any mechanism to disprove it.
In Michael Brendan Dougherty’s words in National Review: “Censorship laws by the government aimed at ‘misinformation’ about contentious events don’t actually prevent the spread of misinformation; they merely license the spread of official information, whether that be the truth, lies, or just nonsense.”
It isn’t just that it isn’t the government’s job to censor what it claims to be false ideas, but that allowing government to do so inevitably also gives it power to censor any ideas critical of government. Such power can’t be used with good intentions in one circumstance (to combat a pandemic) without opening the door for it to be used with ill intent in others.
Suppressing information in order to control what information reaches the people is what dictatorships do, not liberal democracies.
The Biden effort to encourage suppression of what it calls “misinformation” (whether it actually is or not is entirely beside the point) also contains an attack upon the bedrock assumption upon which the free society is built, implying that free citizens cannot be relied upon to determine true from false, even on matters of life and death, and therefore must be shielded from dangerous information for their own good.
The First Amendment doesn’t contain a codicil which says the government will let us debate and have information about some things but not others and that speech has to be judged to be “true” in some way to be permitted. Rather, it means that government has an obligation to permit even the most unpopular and noxious forms of speech, regardless of wars, depressions or pandemics.
Government and media working together to create some kind of dystopian “Ministry of Truth” will inevitably only further erode faith in both government and the media.
In the late and unlamented Soviet Union, the Communist Party controlled all aspects of the government and had an official newspaper named Pravda.
Pravda means “truth” in Russian. The most distinctive thing about Pravda was that nobody believed anything in it was true.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette