We are learning so much about how the world works, aren’t we?
The naïve view from the past, for example, is that any news media company would certainly oppose all government censorship. During most of my adult life, everyone knew this. There was no question that free speech and the First Amendment were core doctrines of American civic belief. This is partly because the media is the watchdog, holding the feet of the powerful to the fire of truth.
Never would I have imagined that major organs of U.S. news production such as The Washington Post and The New York Times would defend press censorship.
Delightfully, the targets of the piece refused to speak to the reporters. That left the writers to push their pro-censorship line without assistance from the victims. It seems the newspaper’s ability to scare people into defending themselves—only to find out that they are later misquoted—is going away. It’s a far better idea simply to ignore the calls and notes.
That’s what journalist Mike Benz did. He was the main target of the article. He ignored the reporters for weeks. When the expected gibberish came out in the paper, he looked briefly and then forgot about it. Later that night, he remembered and then had to laugh. The NY Times had just done a front-page story attacking him, and it had made zero difference in his life.
Overall and remarkably, the piece frames the demand for free speech as a Trump issue that good people should oppose.
At issue here is what’s come to be known as the “censorship-industrial complex,” involving dozens of federal agencies (led by intelligence agencies), many adjacent nonprofits, and university centers, plus embedded employees within major social media companies. Together, they have worked to suppress all discussion of news that could diminish the credibility of the Biden administration’s priorities.
With thousands of pages of evidence concerning this machinery, there is no longer a question that it exists. But instead of defending the right of private companies to manage their business according to their own lights, the NY Times has tribalized the conflict. It attributes the demand for free speech to conspiracy theorists, Trump-loyal agitators, election deniers, and misinformation-spreaders generally. In other words, the NY Times is signaling to its readership that polite society is all for censorship.
In the litigation against the censorship machinery, we can note the absence of, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union or any other traditional free-speech organization. In briefs filed in court cases, we can observe the presence of universities and most blue-state governments. Big Media is decisively on the side of restriction.
Amazing, isn’t it? The NY Times, which sued the government to release the Pentagon Papers, now pushes for government power to restrict speech!
Why would this be so? Why are these major organizations that once bestrode the public culture as goliaths suddenly favoring controls on speech?
The answer comes down to industrial dynamics and competition. We are living in exciting times when the legacy media are being replaced by new media. The Epoch Times is ascending in the readership ranks. Substack is essential for staying informed. Elon Musk’s X, a new iteration of Twitter, is the top social media and news source in the world.
Where does that leave legacy media? You can tell by watching their internal decision making. The NY Times bought Wordle, the enormously popular puzzle app, and offers it for free with registration. They use that to send marketing emails for paid subscriptions. Their content increasingly emphasizes music, recipes, and movie reviews, with pro-regime propaganda tacked on. This is their strategy.
Other legacy media outfits are doing the same.
In industrial history, what do big businesses finally do when faced with threatening competition from upstarts? They turn to the government for help. They attempt to restrict and regulate the competitive landscape. They join with the state to bolster their industrial standing and profits.
In the case of the media, that means turning to censorship in league with the government. The corporate media are pushing this as a tactic to beat the competition. It might be their only way out of the meltdown that is happening across the board to legacy newspapers and media generally.
At this point, we have vast evidence that a free market in ideas favors uncensored venues. Look at what happened to Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads. It was deployed as a competitor to X and was released to great fanfare. It was advertised as a disinformation-free space; that is, one that is censored in cooperation with government authorities.
To bolster signups, the company Meta even pillaged its own platform of Instagram to get people to sign up. As a result, not only did Threads completely fail within weeks of release, but Instagram itself began to lose a tremendous number of users! This might have been the crucial event that made these legacy venues realize that censorship was their only hope for industrial advantage.
So in this case, censorship is not only a way for government to curate the public mind with its cognitive priorities. It is also a means by which market-dominated business smashes the competition by eliminating its competitive advantages. In this way, censorship can be seen as a form of regulatory capture: Big Media using government to shore up its market share.
Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s certainly not something I would have expected. But that is exactly what is happening. There’s no question that government leaned on social-media companies to censor dissent, but that’s not the entire story. There is also a willingness to be coerced if, in exchange for that, government can suppress the truth-telling alternative.
This is legacy versus upstarts, with legacy deploying power against the free-speech alternative. Once again, you would only know or understand this by following the money trails.
The additional factor here is legacy media’s long relationship with government administrative agencies, as sources and protection. They work together and are happy to cooperate to upend new media writers and institutions.
When you look at the problem this way, you can better understand the whole history of censorship. During the century or so of religious upheaval in Britain, with the crown changing church loyalties depending on the attachments of the monarch, the power of copyright was deployed as a censorship tool. Far from fighting this, the main publishers at the time welcomed copyright as a way to bolster their industrial cartel and upbraid their smaller competitors who were trying to publish but found their work declared seditious.
This is the real issue behind the centuries-long struggle for free speech. Very often it is about big versus small, powerful versus marginal, established versus disruptive, well-connected versus independent. The old establishment is fighting against freedom, and the small and independent media sources are for freedom. It is precisely to stop these kinds of industrial struggles that the Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment. It’s the only path to true peace and freedom.
