Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Sunday magazine and a professor at Yale Law School, earned the Sunday Magazine’s newest cover story – an 8,000-word jeremiad against free speech. The cover itself was ironic and oh-so-clever: “Free Speech Will Save Our Democracy,” with an online-style warning label overlaid that suggests such thinking is naive: “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”
Bazelon’s screed is more relevant and sinister now, after both Twitter and Facebook proudly censored a New York Post expose about alleged emails from Hunter Biden showing his father Joe had met with Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. That’s the firm that paid Hunter $50,000 a month to serve on the company’s board while his father served as vice president.
Bazelon saw a right wing using conspiracies and lies to steal the election for Trump.
"The conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amount of information, the anger encoded in it -- these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical and cynical about politics. The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up….Trump’s election put him in the position to operate directly through Fox News and other conservative media outlets, like Rush Limbaugh’s talk-radio show, which have come to function “in effect as a party press,” the Harvard researchers found.
While virtually every other news network and media outlet is part of the anti-Trump “resistance.”
"It’s an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech…."
Uh-oh.
After laying out the “fundamentally optimistic vision” of the First Amendment, the author fully reveals the revised mindset, now popular at the paper, that the First Amendment at present is just a cudgel used by the rich for in their own self-interest. A peculiar position for a business that relies on the First Amendment, but in this case political ideology trumps journalistic principle.
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