House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core
Press Freedoms
Democrats' justification for silencing their adversaries online and in media
-- "they are spreading fake news and inciting extremism" -- is what despots
everywhere say.
Glenn Greenwald
Feb 23
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (C) with other House Democrats at
the U.S. Capitol January 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the
White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that
one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday,
I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten
social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they
dislike - including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for
the third time in less than five months - is implicating, if not already
violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they are going further - much further. The same Democratic House
Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media
companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable
outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
Subscribe now
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24
hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled "Fanning the
Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media." Claiming that "the
spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a
tangible and destabilizing threat," the Committee argues: "Some
broadcasters' and cable networks' increasing reliance on conspiracy theories
and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their
devotion to journalistic integrity."
Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce
precepts of "journalistic integrity"? Unless you believe in the right of the
government to regulate and control what the press says - a power which the
First Amendment explicitly prohibits - how can anyone be comfortable with
members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what
media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and
analyze the news of the day?
But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is
revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that
Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA)
also sent their own letters to seven of the nation's largest cable providers
- Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice - as well as to
digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu)
demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to
prevent conservative "disinformation" prior to the election and after -
disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only
conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In case there was any doubt about their true goal - coercing these cable
providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices,
including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban
right-wing voices from social media) - the House Democrats in their letter
said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative
outlets by these cable providers:
Congresswoman Eshoo boasted on her official site about these efforts,
lauding herself and McNerney for "urging 12 cable, satellite, and streaming
TV companies to combat the spread of misinformation and requesting more
information about their actions to address misinformation, disinformation,
conspiracy theories, and lies spread through channels they host."
For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump
posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even
flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while
claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian
Assange - which most Washington Democrats cheered - what did the Trump
administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely
compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal
of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the
same with dissident voices online?
There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the
people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital
role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by
the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political
agenda and ideology?
Evidently not. While many conservative outlets are covering this story, it
is difficult to find any liberal outlets writing about it at all. An article
from The New York Times was one exception, though it largely attempted to
justify these censorship efforts, with paragraph after paragraph purporting
to demonstrate the dangerous misinformation spread by these channels. The
only nods to the dangers of press freedoms in the article came from
statements by Fox News and a GOP member of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC).
Revealingly, these same two members of Congress who sent this threatening
letter to cable providers said during the Trump years that freedom of the
press must be safeguarded at all costs. "The First Amendment prohibits
Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of the press, and we
cherish our country's culture of free expression," they intoned when writing
to the FCC in 2019 to complain that Russian news outlets were concealing
their affiliation with the Kremlin. "We're not requesting any press
censorship," they assured the FCC under Trump. Yet they are clearly doing
exactly that now.
In a statement he emailed to me and publicly posted, FCC Commissioner
Brendan Carr denounced the Democrats' actions as a "marked departure from
First Amendment norms." He said "it is a chilling transgression of the free
speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys." In response
to my inquiries, Commissioner Carr added in a separate statement to me:
The greatest threat to free speech in America today is not any law passed by
the government-the First Amendment stands as a strong bulwark against that
form of censorship by state action. The threat comes in the form of
legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence
the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.
The letter sent by two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce
Committee to cable companies and other regulated entities, and the
Committee's own hearing this week on "disinformation in the media," are the
latest examples. They are singling out selected newsrooms for their
coverage of political events and sending a clear message that these media
outlets will pay a price if they do not align their viewpoints with Democrat
orthodoxy. That is a chilling transgression of free speech and journalistic
freedom. No government official has any business inquiring about the 'moral
principles' that guide a private entity's decision about what news to carry.
Carr's GOP colleague on the FCC, Commissioner Nathan Simington, similarly
accused House Democrats of seeking to "intimidate into silence those who
would distribute on their platforms disfavored points of view."
________________________________________
The way Democrats justify this to themselves is important to consider. They
do not, of course, explicitly acknowledge that they are engaged in
authoritarian assaults on free speech and a free press. Not even the most
despotic tyrants like to think of themselves in that way. All tyrants
concoct theories and excuses to justify their censorship as noble and
necessary.
Indeed, the justifying script Democrats are using here is the one most
commonly employed by autocrats around the world to silence their critics.
Those they seek to silence are not merely expressing a different view, but
are dangerous. They are not merely advocating alternative ideologies but are
destabilizing society with lies, fake news, and speech that deliberately
incites violence, subversion and domestic terrorism.
In her boastful posting, Rep. Eshoo says her efforts targeting these cable
outlets are necessary because "misinformation on TV has led to our current
polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit
seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues
in our public discourse." This is the rationale invoked by virtually every
repressive state to imprison journalists and ban media outlets.
The Democrats sound a great deal like the Egyptian regime of Gen. Abdel
el-Sisi. Just two weeks ago, Sisi's regime finally released an Al Jazeera
journalist who had been imprisoned for four years based on accusations that
he had "spread false news" and was guilty of "incitement against state
institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos."
Sound familiar? It should, since that is precisely what House Democrats are
saying to ennoble their multi-pronged assault on free expression.
International Federation of Journalists, Feb. 5, 2021
Accusing one's domestic opponents of being subversives and domestic
terrorists is by far the most common way that despots on every continent
justify their censorship and silencing campaigns of oppositional media
outlets. In 2014, the French journalist Valeria Costa-Kostritsky warned in
the Index on Censorship that anti-terrorism laws and accusations of
promoting subversion were becoming the primary means which authoritarian
states from Turkey and Jordan to Russia and the UAE use to justify the
silencing of journalists:
Anti-terror legislation seems to be the perfect tool for a state seeking to
crack down on opposition. "It's so elusive. You can [see] anything as
terrorist propaganda. There needn't be any evidence of violence, any praise
of violence. Plus, if you blame someone for having a connection with the
[Kurdistan Workers' Party] the public buys that argument easily, especially
in a country that is suffering from terrorism, as Turkey is," said Sevgi
Akarçeşme, former editor-in-chief of Turkey's Today's Zaman (the
English-language edition of daily Zaman), who had her newspaper taken over
by the government in March 2016.
A similar means used by repressive governments to silence disfavored media
outlets is to claim they are promoting "extremism." As Costa-Kostritsky
detailed:
There's another word one can use to browse through reports published on the
[Mapping Media Freedom] map: "extremism". Anti-extremism legislation is used
to intimidate journalists in post-Soviet countries, particularly in Russia.
On the map, of the 35 incidents flagged with "extremism", 11 took place in
Russia, and seven in Crimea, others include Belgium, Italy, Hungary, France
and Spain. Five reports connecting the media to "extremism" took place
during the first half of 2016. They include website closures and journalists
being put on a list of extremists. In Russia, most cases using
anti-extremism legislations against journalists happen via Roskomnadzor, the
national media regulator.
When China arrests journalists it typically justifies its actions by
accusing them of fomenting extremism that jeopardizes national security.
And accusing journalists of spreading "fake news" - always a dangerously
vague term from its inception - is equally commonplace when government
authorities want to silence media outlets. The Washington Post reported that
"as 2019 draws to a close, there are 30 journalists in jail worldwide on
charges of 'false news' - or, as it's also called these days, 'fake news.'"
In sum:
It has now become commonplace to throw around fake-news accusations in the
United States. But in other countries around the world - like Egypt, Turkey,
Somalia and Cameroon - such charges can have very chilling and stifling
impacts on the press, according to an annual report by the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists.
In Egypt - where General-turned-President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has been
overseeing a crackdown that human rights groups say is harsher than any
before - there are 21 journalists in jail for allegedly publishing "false
news," according to the CPJ's data. In practice, press freedom advocates
say, these charges stem from a simple fact: The journalists published news
that Sisi didn't like.
In a passage that the Post would only publish about foreign countries but
never about House Democrats, even though it now applies equally, they
observed: "There is a serious global problem of disinformation spreading
online and sowing distrust and sectarianism. The problem, say press
advocates, is that the laws regulating fake news all too often are a means
of stifling the media rather than fostering a more transparent environment
online."
The Washington Post, Dec. 12, 2019
This framework is hardly rare in the west either. When the Obama
administration collaborated with the UK Government in 2013 to detain my
husband David Miranda at Heathrow Airport in connection with the work he was
doing in the Snowden reporting, they cited an anti-terrorism law to justify
his detention, and repeatedly threatened to prosecute him for terrorism if
he did not cooperate by providing all of his passwords to them. He
ultimately prevailed in his lawsuit against the U.K. Government on the
ground that it constitutes an illegal assault on press freedoms and human
rights to abuse anti-terrorism frameworks to intimidate or silence
journalists.
Justifying the silencing of journalists by accusing them of inciting
domestic terrorism and extremism is now the most common means used globally
for censorsing the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013 said
they had "tracked a significant rise in journalist imprisonments." The
culprit, said the group, was "the expansion of anti-terrorism and national
security laws worldwide" after the 9/11 attack, which had been repeatedly
abused to criminalize media outlets. "The number of journalists jailed
worldwide hit 232 in 2012, 132 of whom were held on anti-terror or other
national security charges." In sum: "CPJ's analysis has found that
governments have exploited these laws to silence critical journalists."
Share
Are there conspiracy theories and disinformation sometimes found on the
conservative cable outlets which House Democrats want taken off the air? Of
course there are: all media outlets disseminate conspiracy theories and fake
news at times. MSNBC and CNN spent four years endorsing the most deranged
conspiracy theory imaginable, one with very toxic roots in the Cold War:
namely, the McCarthyite script that the Kremlin had taken over control of
key U.S. institutions through sexual blackmail over the President, invasions
into the nation's heating system and electric grid, and criminal conspiracy
between Moscow and the Trump campaign to hack into Democrats' emails.
All of that was false, just as the one-month tale told over and over by the
media about a pro-Trump mob murdering Brian Sicknick by bludgeoning him to
death with a fire extinguisher was false - a story which remains unretracted
or corrected by most who spread it.
Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power
to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning
liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the
grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is
hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and
the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free
speech and a free press.
And I would have joined in those denunciations (as I did with the Assange
prosecution): as much as I loathe so much of what those outlets do, it is
not the role of the government to regulate let alone silence them. The
corrective is for journalists to rebuild trust and faith with the public by
exposing their misinformation and proving to the public that they will do
accurate and reliable reporting regardless of which faction is aggrandized
or angered.
But corporate media outlets and Democrats (excuse the redundancy) who spent
the last four years posturing as virulent defenders of press freedoms never
meant it. Like so much of what they claimed to believe, it was fraudulent.
The proof is that they are now mute, if not supportive, as Democrats use
their status as majority party to launch an assault against press freedoms
far more egregious than anything Trump got close to doing.
