By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
The American media — long stalwart
defenders of the First Amendment — are now having second thoughts.
For decades, it was a commonplace
sentiment among journalists that freedom of the press was one of the glories of
our system. It helped to make the government accountable and to air diverse
points of view — even unpopular ones — to be tested in the marketplace of
ideas.
Media organizations were at the forefront
of the fight to vindicate First Amendment rights, with the New York Times involved in two landmark Supreme Court decisions (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and the
Pentagon Papers case), and tended to rise as one against any perceived threat
to their prerogatives and freedoms.
This advocacy has been sincere, although,
if nothing else, journalists should be First Amendment purists out of a sense
of self-interest. In a 2018 essay in The
Atlantic representing the bygone conventional wisdom, titled “Why a Free
Press Matters,” the longtime newscaster Dan Rather noted, “As a working
journalist, I know I have a stake in this concept.”
One would think so.
Yet now journalists have lurched from
finding a threat to freedom of the press in every criticism of reporters and
news outlets by former President Donald Trump to themselves calling for
unwelcome media organizations to be shut down.
They’ve become the thing they profess to
hate — closed-minded censors who want to stifle free expression, First
Amendment be damned.
Perversely, the TV program and email
newsletter of the top media analyst at CNN, Brian Stelter, have been
clearinghouses for such advocacy, whether it is demands to get right-wingers
removed from social media or — more astonishingly — to keep conservative cable
networks off the airwaves.
Stelter’s colleague, media reporter Oliver
Darcy, tweeted about his effort to get cable companies to answer why they carry
pro-Trump channels such Newsmax and One America News Network. “Do they have any
second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election
denialism content?” he asked on Twitter. “They won’t say.”
In the same vein, Washington Post columnist Max Boot drew a direct line between how
we deal with foreign terror groups and how we should treat right-wing media
organizations. “We need,” he wrote, “to shut down the influencers who
radicalize people and set them on the path toward violence and sedition.”
Boot noted, approvingly, that the U.K.
doesn’t have the equivalent of Fox News because regulators won’t allow it. The
U.K. also doesn’t have a First Amendment, a small detail that might be worth
considering if the point is to protect our freedoms rather than to destroy them
in a fit of ideological vengeance.
A writer at the progressive publication Mother Jones argued for an advertiser
boycott instead of regulatory action in a post called, charmingly, “It’s Time
to Crush Fox News.”
A boycott wouldn’t violate the First
Amendment like a direct crackdown on Fox and others. Still, it would be private
action undertaken in the service of a profoundly illiberal goal, running
counter to the country’s culture of free speech.
All of this would be bad enough if it
weren’t people who write and comment on TV for a living advocating it. But
journalists have been moving in this direction for a while now, as Armin Rosen
catalogues in a disturbing report for Tablet
magazine.
The author Steve Coll, who is no less than
the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, said last
December, “Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that
free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the
principles of journalism.” The former managing editor of Time magazine, Richard Stengel, has written: “All speech is not
equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails.”
And so its erstwhile champions are ready
to retreat from strict adherence to the First Amendment to a new rule of “free
speech for me, but not for thee.”
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