Trump Is Targeting Media and Chilling Free Speech
I was thrilled when the technological revolution pushed aside the old media gatekeepers and Americans could, finally, gain access to a treasure trove of information. After the internet came into its own, the mainstream media could no longer tell us what to think. We could read and publish stories that never saw the light of day. With a few keyboard strokes, people could now watch legislative proceedings, access court documents and delve into academic reports.
I naively thought that a new dawn of truth telling was emerging. Sadly, that dawn often looks like the dark of night. I’d never want to go back to the old media days, but people now largely exist in their own information bubbles. No one can even agree on basic facts. Partisanship so severely distorts how we see the world that even the best reporting can’t compete with some cockamamie YouTube video offered by some basement-dwelling poseur.
Even the basic concept of free speech has become another truncheon in the nation’s ongoing battle between tribes. Each side claims to be its champion, but neither consistently supports such principles. Conservatives were rightly aghast when the Biden administration tried to muscle social-media companies into quashing alternative views about pandemic-related policies.
That wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment—a point with which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed given that social-media platforms are private entities. But it was tawdry, nonetheless. Shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that claimed to restore our free-speech protections. Nice, but Trump continues his attacks on free speech through a variety of disreputable strategies.
Multiple lawsuits he’s filed against media operations are “chilling attempts to convert Trump’s complaints about press coverage into causes of action are legally baseless and blatantly unconstitutional,” notes Reason‘s Jacob Sullum. He used as an example Trump’s recent social-media post after MSNBC cancelled a TV show: “Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN! The whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country.”
Trump, who calls the media the “enemy of the people,” is all for a free press as long as it’s parroting his political line. He recently booted the Associated Press—which despite its biases provides mostly nuts-and-bolts reporting—from presidential events after it refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, following our Chief Mapmaker’s childish edict. This is bullying.
The New York Times reported that the administration “would st
Article from Reason.com
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