We have been discussing how reporters, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and key advisers. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Now, Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. That’s right. A journalism dean and writer declaring that the problem is that free speech itself is allowing too much freedom on the Internet and other forums.
Coll’s comments came in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he was asked by Kasie Hunt about the need for Big Tech to censor speech. Rather than defend the right of people to express themselves freely, Coll lashed out at companies like Facebook as “motivated, as all companies are, to make money” though at the same time is “acting like a public square.” He decried the failure to have more expansive regulation of free speech and showed little concern or merit for arguments from free speech advocates. Like Harvard academics who recently declared “China was right” about censorship, Coll just assumed that it was self-evident that too much free speech is a bad thing and that these companies need to protect people from harmful or false ideas.
“And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They’ve had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016. They’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s his passion and he profoundly believes in free speech.”
What is most maddening is that Coll spoke on behalf of journalists in calling for less freedom:
“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 principle of journalism and what do we do about that,. As reporters, we kind of march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered as if they were going to win the day and what we’re seeing that is because of the scale of this alternative reality that you’ve been talking about, our facts, our principles, our scientific method–it isn’t enough. So what do we do?”
That used to be an easy question. What you do is allow free speech to combat bad speech. What you do is support the right of citizens and journalists to publish without censorship. What you do is to embrace the freedom of expression while reinforcing the need to use that freedom to counter disinformation. Instead, Coll is joining the forces seeking to silence or curtail the speech of others. You do not support free speech by calling for its curtailment. For free speech advocates, it is as compelling as saying that we needed to “save” villages by destroying them in Vietnam. Worse yet, he is doing it in the names of “good journalism.”
Your Latin motto: Res ipsa loquitur–The thing itself speaks– is being disregarded by academicians who should know better. The holy grail of this democracy is free speech. They are ripping a page out the Soviet Union’s 1950s and 60s playbook on censorship. The modern censors’ playbook is being fomented by the Forbidden Kingdom. Debating the issues and persuading your ideological adversaries is as important as breathing and eating and drinking water. Shame on Google/You Tube and so-called “Big Tech”, who were founded by atheists and agnostics and are only interested in the bottom line and an impaired zeitgeist, exhibited by the ideas and beliefs of this time. Columbia Journalism
Dean–Steve Coll–and others who think as he does, are knowingly trying to dismantle every person’s right to freely articulate ideas and opinions that dissent from their own.
Statist authoritarians are always absolutely terrified of losing control.
Now they have become so desperate that they are openly calling for censorship of anyone who is not willing to be controlled.
2021 is going to be a really bad year for them, and 2022 will be even worse.
If you read Coll’s stuff in the New Yorker you quickly see he is no journalist. He is a highly biased far-left propagandist.
Was Coll was a student at the Columbia school of journalism?
Don’t let Coll speak or don’t publish his apCray.
No such thing as ‘too much free speech.’ There are types of speech that were not article 9 and 10 allowed such as talking like a democrat with lots of porn Harris and Comrade Uncle Tom of the DNC and Poke A Haunt USA Warren. when their are children close at hand. The fire in a theater variety and intentionally lying or opinionating far beyond the pale witihout providing any proof, sources nor facts. Hmmm sounds like I am beating up on Pelosites and Schumerians but thenm they made their bed let them ;lie’ in it.
Such a bore you are with your childish nicknames.