NPR Against the First Amendment

If there are few hard and fast features of the journalism racket, it’s at least a safe bet that publishers and other top brass favor the First Amendment. After all, that’s where the Framers forbid the government from abridging the freedom of the press. Not so the new head of National Public Radio, Katherine Maher, who frets that freedom of speech could hinder efforts to combat that latest bête noir of the left, so-called “disinformation.”Ms. Maher appraises the First Amendment as “the number-one challenge,” as she put it, impeding “government regulation” of speech online. That assessment was turned up by journalist Christopher Rufo. He earned his stripes by bringing to light questions over plagiarism in the academic work of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. It helped precipitate her resignation. Mr. Rufo is now ramping up scrutiny on NPR.“NPR’s censor-in-chief,” is how Mr. Rufo describes Ms. Maher’s comments about fighting disinformation, presenting her apparent unease over the First Amendment as a case of liberal petulance with the constitutional right to free speech. Ms. Maher has run afoul of conservatives lately in part because of an essay in the Free Press by an ex-NPR editor, Uri Berliner, who reckons the radio network has “lost America’s trust” by tilting to the left in its news coverage.Such charges gained credence when Mr. Rufo aired left-leaning tweets by Ms. Maher, prior to her tenure at NPR. These include her observation, in 2018, that “Donald Trump is a racist.” Ms. Maher responded by noting that “everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen.” The remark takes on some added shades of meaning in light of Ms. Maher’s First Amendment musings, which date from 2021 but were unearthed by Mr. Rufo but this morning. At the time, Ms. Maher had just stepped down as chief executive of Wikimedia. She was being interviewed by an NBC News reporter about how, in contrast to the press, “people do trust Wikipedia.” Ms. Maher touted Wikimedia’s “sense of humility” and its refusal “to bend to censorship.” What about the 2020 election, though, the NBC reporter asked, describing it as “rife with misinformation and disinformation, and just a real threat to democracy, actually.”The question failed to note that much of what the liberal press and social media firms at first called disinformation — such as reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop — proved to be the genuine article. Ms. Maher seemed unaware of that, noting that Wikimedia “took a very active approach to disinformation” at the time and sought to “identify threats early on through conversations with government,” though in many cases the government itself was a misleading source. On this point, critics of President Biden’s anti-disinformation efforts, decried by a Federal judge as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth,” contend that the government in effect censored online speech it didn’t like. The matter is currently being weighed by the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, and some justices appeared sympathetic to the government’s claims that it sometimes needs to lean on social media firms to curb what it sees as disinformation.One of the towering chairmen of the Wall Street Journal, Warren Phillips, used to tell his reporters that the First Amendment wasn’t enacted to protect the responsible press, which didn’t need protection. It was calculated to protect the irresponsible press. We took that to mean that the right to err was needed to protect the true freedom of the press. In other words, a free marketplace of ideas is the best way to sort out disinformation from truth.Ms. Maher frames the First Amendment less as a way to protect freedom of expression, and more “a protection of rights” for social media platforms to “regulate what kind of content they want on their sites.” It reminds us of A.J. Liebling’s remark about how Freedom of the Press is reserved for those who own one. In truth, though, press freedom benefits — “shines for,” as we put it here at the Sun — all. No wonder NPR has “lost America’s trust.”

NPR Against the First Amendment

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