But it’s a situation, the likes of which… we don’t have freedom of the press in this country. We have suppression by the press. They suppress. You can’t have a scandal if nobody reports about it. This is the greatest fraud in the history of our country, from an electoral standpoint… What is bigger than this? This is the essence of our country. This is the whole ball game. And they cheated…
— excerpt from an interview with President Donald Trump, published on Breitbart.com on November 29, 2020
It’s so easy to spin the news, these days, and to disseminate disinformation. That’s one of the controversial results of modern technology — the type of technology I’m using right this moment, to publish an editorial on the Daily Post. Truth and untruth are equally easy to spread.
I stopped by a friend’s house yesterday to chat about the politics of public health, and as I walked in, my friend was listening to FOX News on the radio. I heard just a bit of the commentary before my friend switched off the radio so we could talk face-to-face without unnecessary distractions.
The FOX commentator had just said something like this:
“The First Amendment says, ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ And yet here we are…”
Yes, here we are. But where, exactly, are we?
The commentator was presumably complaining about the threats to open and free communication posed by recent decisions, by big tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon — to ban or censor certain individuals, including President Trump and popular alt-right websites like Parler.
Those threats, to free and open communication, are very real. But they have nothing to do with the First Amendment.
The First Amendment restrains the US Congress from abridging our freedom of speech, and our freedom of the press — later interpreted to mean “freedom of all media, including radio, TV and electronic media”. As far as I can tell, the Constitution and the US Supreme Court have done a reasonable job of defending freedom of speech and freedom of the press from government abridgment. (Allowing for slight detours into government censorship during, for example, the American Civil War, when journalist were jailed for publishing articles critical of the Lincoln administration.)
There is nothing in the US Constitution, however, that grants all individuals equal access to privately-owned media outlets. Broadcast and print communications in the United States of America have never been “free and open” in any realistic sense. Within each media outlet, the owners and the editors have complete control of what content is shared, and what content is rejected. If the media outlet has its own printing press, its own broadcast towers, its own satellite, its own cable network, that media outlet has the ability to share whatever content it chooses, whenever it wishes to share it.
Smaller, independent news outlets (I am thinking here of the Pagosa Daily Post) make use of internet infrastructure owned by third-party corporations. We must therefore abide by the policies set by those private third parties. To date, I’ve never had any of our Daily Post content questioned by the companies we depend on for distribution. (I have, meanwhile, had our content questioned by individual readers.)
President Donald Trump has spent the past several years criticizing certain privately-owned media outlets as purveyors of “fake news”, and for whatever reason, those very same news outlets have shared the President’s vocal criticisms, with their readers. If they had so wished, these privately-owned news outlets could have completely ignored everything the President said. They were under no legal obligation to share complaints coming from the White House.
A free press is under no legal obligation to publish comments — by the President or anyone else — that they consider to be false or misleading.
Presumably, the private media shared the President’s criticisms and questionable statements because they saw it as their job to share “the news”. (Which is also their bread-and-butter.) The decision — by any particular private company — to broadcast political news, or to host a website like Parler, or to provide search engine links to a website like Breitbart, or to share the President’s tweets, have nothing whatsoever to do with the First Amendment. The decision reflects only a particular private company’s policies and agenda.
My apologies to the FOX News commentator, but the First Amendment concerns only government censorship. When a nation allows private individuals to own and control monstrously influential tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple — and monstrously influential broadcast corporations — MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, Comcast, NPR — and monstrously influential news outlets — The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Washington Post — we can guarantee that certain voices will be louder, and more widely shared, than other voices.
Some of my friends have been complaining, recently, about the disappearance of certain commentators and websites upon which they have been depending for “alternative news” — information they view as more truthful than what can be found in the “Lamestream Media.”
Welcome to the world of ‘democratic capitalism’… where, in so many cases, the government doesn’t make the rules. Instead, the ruling capitalists make the decisions… thanks in part to the First Amendment, and thanks in part to a massively inequitable economic system.
It’s not, by any means, a perfect system — if by a ‘perfect system’ we mean that every person has equal access to a media soapbox. But it probably beats a system where the government makes all the decisions about which voices and opinions are heard, and which are not.
When President Trump or FOX News complains that “we don’t have freedom of the press in this country”, they have things completely turned around. “The press” has an incredible amount of freedom in this country. It is free, even, to ban the President of the United States from its pages and websites and channels.