Two of my favorite political columnists, liberal Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and conservative Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, have recently denounced efforts by so-called "progressives" to censor the news.
In a column titled "'Just Asking' for Censorship," Strassel wrote about a recent House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing on "disinformation and extremism in the media" during which progressive lawmakers accused conservative media of fomenting disinformation and extremism. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, asked the CEOs of a dozen cable, satellite and broadband providers what they planned to do about "the right-wing media ecosystem."
"Just asking …" wrote Strassel, "whether private companies that – if they know what's good for them – will do the dirty work for her (Eshoo), thereby saving her the hassle of complying with the Constitution," which guarantees free speech.
For her part, Pulitzer Prize-winner Dowd wrote that "many on the Left don't understand what a reporter is. It was so enthralling and gratifying to assail Donald Trump as a liar and misogynist that it was bound to be jarring when the beast slouched out of town and liberals had to relearn the lesson that reporters don't – or shouldn't – suit-up for the Blue Team," which they're doing in droves.
So the battle lines were drawn and respected columnists Dowd and Strassel found themselves on the same side of the battle, fighting against political agendas in media newsrooms. Dowd warned her fellow liberal journalists against taking sides in their straight news reporting. "It's a lot more pleasant to be hailed by the Left than demonized, as you are when you're holding a Democratic president to account," she wrote, "because the Left can be just as nasty as the Right." So true.
Strassel asserted progressive politicians and journalists are "just asking for censorship" when they suggest that mainstream and social media companies should censor "disinformation, a code word for conservative ideas." Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr says "politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying," so progressives want social media companies to act as politically correct speech enforcers.
Actually, both sides bully each other, as we saw when ex-President Trump described the media as "the enemy of the people." "There they are," he used to shout, pointing at network TV cameras, "the enemies of the people." Please! Trump wants to silence liberal media and Democrats now want to shut down Fox News.
We see some very tendentious reporting here in Northern Nevada. I'm thinking of the way the Reno Gazette Journal covers "social justice" and "systemic racism" issues, making it very clear in its news columns how we should think about those issues. On the local scene there's a biased reporter for a Carson website who often slants her stories way to the left. Last year she wrote a story about the "numerous assaults" that allegedly occurred during a peaceful law and order demonstration in Minden. The "assaults" were nothing more than verbal confrontations between demonstrators on both sides of the Black Lives Matter issue who were exercising their First Amendment rights.
I learned about the dividing line between straight news reporting and opinion in Journalism 101 at the University of Washington in Seattle many years ago, but that line has long since been obliterated by partisan journalists and politicians. Nevertheless, I think Dowd got it right when she wrote that "the role of the press in a functioning democracy is as watchdog, not partisan attack dog." Amen!
Guy W. Farmer, a retired diplomat, has worked in and around journalism for more than 50 years.
