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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26331 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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they were also getting their news from the print media and the broadcast media and cable media, and I just can't imagine the federal government doing that to them. But maybe I'm naive. Maybe that goes on behind the scenes. I don't know. But I -- I -- it struck me as wow, this is not what I understand the relationship to be. That's all.

I think Alito is slightly over egging this point. The US government absolutely does pester and bully 'established print and broadcast media' into supporting government policy. The CIA and White House directly fed the entire press pro-Iraq War talking points in 2003.

More recently, the owner and publisher of the New York Times, AG Sulzberger, said the White House was "extremely upset" with their coverage of Biden's cognitive decline, presumably because as the liberal newspaper of record, this was reaching donors, officials and other elites. How was that "extreme upset" conveyed if not, as it almost certainly was, by some senior administration official calling up Sulzberger or his editor-in-chief and complaining personally about it? In fact, I'd be very surprised if such a thing had not occurred.

The difference between the administration's pressure on the NYT and their pressure on Facebook is more likely to be the fact that the administration's leverage over the NYT is limited, and if anything the NYT can likely do more harm to Biden than the inverse. Biden can't threaten to break up the NYT, and it's too important to his elite voters and donors for him to be able to touch it. He can threaten to break up Meta, which at best means long and expensive antitrust investigations and endless summons for management to appear in Washington.

As a result, Zuck is much more likely to be willing to sacrifice principles to get the state off his back than Sulzberger is, especially because news isn't central to his business.

I agree that the government theoretically has more leverage over Facebook than the NYT. But what exactly do you think would have happened had Bill Barr requested Facebook censor anti-trump stories because there was an anti-trust investigation raring to go?

Presumably, Facebook's lawyers would correctly have surmised that California / the 9th circuit going apeshit on them for being too close to Trump posed more of a threat than ignoring Barr and the rest of Trump's impotent executive. Biden doesn't have power by himself, he has power because he sits at the (nominal) head of a vast state and federal infrastructure of progressive/Dem policy and governance.

The way Alito framed it, I almost wondered if he was trying to goad the government into claiming that it actually has the same right to bully and coerce news outlets.

They did get into the difference between platforms a bit later:

MR. AGUIÑAGA: Yeah, and I would say, in the mine-run case that you're describing to me, it's the government going after the speaker itself and trying to get them to change their speech. What's so pernicious here is that you don't see any of these facts in this record unless we get discovery, which is when -- when Rob Flaherty, who's Deputy Assistant to the President, sends an email to Facebook or to Twitter and complains that they're not doing enough to censor what they view as vaccine hesitancy speech. America never sees that. And the third party, people like Jill Hines and -- and Jim Hoft, whose speech wishes to express the kinds of viewpoints that the White House is targeting, they never know that that's happening behind the scenes. And I think it makes a difference, Justice Kagan, that you have an intermediary here who really has no incentive to itself defend Jim Hoft's speech or to defend Jill Hines's speech. In The New York Times's hypothetical, you have a story, a publication that itself is familiar with those kinds of --

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Well, what about op-eds?

JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean --

JUSTICE BARRETT: Don't you think --

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: What about op-eds?

MR. AGUIÑAGA: Your Honor, with op-eds, you know, if it's third-party speech that -- that has that issue --

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: That happens too, right?

MR. AGUIÑAGA: And I guess there are a number of ways I would think about that, Your Honor. One is, if the newspaper declines to run an op-ed because the government asked, that op-ed author can go to any number of other publications and it has an outlet. It's not the same here because, if I'm on Twitter and I wish to express a viewpoint that the government wishes to censor and Twitter bows to that pressure, then --

JUSTICE KAGAN: But if one --

MR. AGUIÑAGA: -- I lose my account.

I almost wondered if he was trying to goad the government into claiming that it actually has the same right to bully and coerce news outlets.

It would be in character, right? I guess it was too much to hope that we'd get another win that easily, though.

"You can't handle the truth!

Son, we live in a world that has mass media, and those media have to be guarded by men with banhammers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Justice Alito? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the publisher, and you curse the Congress. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that chilling effects, while tragic, probably saved elections; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves elections.

We use words like "fact-checking," "regulation," "trust." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line."

"Would you order the book ban?"

"I do the job..."

"Would you order the book ban!!?"

"YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I WOULD!"

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