There’s a new administration in town. On Monday, House Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both members of the House Energy and Commerce committee, sent letters to 12 grand poobahs of television to make sure they were properly updating their ideological software.
‘Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm,’ the letter says. ‘Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN… now and beyond any contract renewal date? If so, why?’
Sadly, America’s government grows less transparent by the day, so the letter conceals half its content beneath a layer of subtext. That’s a nice TV company you have there, it says. Would be a real shame if something happened to it. TV companies that want to avoid a regulatory stink-eye are encouraged to make the bad voices disappear from the television.
Tragically, like Funes from the Borges story, Cockburn is cursed with the ability to remember things. So he remembers the four years of shrieking that every Twitter tantrum by President Trump was the worst attack on Liberty since the Israelis accidentally strafed it in the Six-Day War. In 2018, Trump was sued by CNN because he wouldn’t allow CNN’s Jim Acosta to keep Acostabating in the White House. PEN America sued the Trump White House in part because he was supposedly targeting the Washington Post by wanting Amazon to pay higher Postal Service delivery fees. The ACLU kept a running list of offenses which they claimed represented ‘an assault on the cornerstone of American democracy.’
Now, instead of merely complaining about news outlets, Rep. McNerney and Rep. [Sneezing sound] want the ones they disagree with taken off the air. So far, the ACLU hasn’t found the time to say anything at all about their demand. They must be too busy. Interesting how that works.
The unspoken truth is that if being a ‘misinformation rumor mill’ warrants shutting down news outlets, we need to purge far more than just Fox and its competitors. Consider the eight months America has now spent on its ‘racial reckoning.’
Skeptic magazine recently polled the public on the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks in America. They found that more than half of self-identified ‘very liberal’ individuals believe at least 1,000 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Seven percent thought the number was at least 10,000. The actual number was 27.
How did so many Americans become so badly mistaken? It might have something to do with the years-long operation by dozens of media outlets to convince everyone that America is suffocating under systemic racism and police oppression.
‘This country has failed to provide one of the most fundamental protections in the Constitution: the right to life,’ the New York Times editorial board wrote last summer. ‘Stop killing us.’
‘Police killing black people is a pandemic, too,’ blared a June headline in the Washington Post, which later described America’s least-peaceful protest wave in decades as ‘remarkably nonviolent.’ Inventing a pandemic that doesn’t actually exist might reasonably be considered ‘misinformation,’ and given the dramatic rise in America’s murder rate since last summer, it’s far more damaging misinformation than any conspiracies about a stolen election.
Despite all that, Cockburn doesn’t actually want press outlets shut down. Instead, he has a solution for those worried about misinformation: lower your expectations. Of course journalists lie all the time. Morally, we are somewhere between people who don’t tip at restaurants and pedophiles. The good news is that journalists are hateful as well as dishonest, so they will gleefully expose each other’s lies for the pure animal joy of humiliating one another. So if you allow enough journalists to exist, rather than stamping them out, you’ll eventually manage to cobble together something approaching the truth.
