We receive phone calls (or emails or text messages) all the time from government people urging us to write one way or the other, or not to write at all. The officials are from the local, state and federal level, both legislative and executive. Some are elected types. Some are appointed types. Some are career civil servants. And some are staff of the elected or the appointed.
And it’s not just this Editorial Board; our colleagues elsewhere at the Daily News get the same entreatments, as do our competitors at other news organizations.
Once, some of these specialized employees were called press agents, now they carry titles like press secretary and communications director and senior advisor. But whoever is making the outreach, from the president to the dog catcher’s deputy assistant, it’s all allowed with the open exchange of ideas. It is not censorship of the media. And none of it is “abridging the freedom of the press” as prohibited under the First Amendment.
That was the question before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday as the justices considered a ruling from the lower courts that found the Biden administration had managed to violate the First Amendment by asking social media companies to curb some of the crazy conspiracy junk and medical garbage about COVID.
The altruistic public health motive was to get Americans to wear masks and take the vaccine and not drink bleach, but the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued and won a ruling from a Louisiana federal judge that the government could not talk to the social media providers in this manner. An appeals panel upheld the bad decision. The Supremes should now knock it down.
The federal employees reaching out to highlight some of the nutty anti-vax ravings and other nonsense on the sites (often going against the sites’ own rules) were perfectly within their authority to make contact and ask for changes. Just like we get asked by government employees to support their positions or programs. It’s not only the press that can ask. But we don’t have to answer and we don’t have to obey. The same for social media.
Thankfully, it sounded from Monday’s oral argument that most of the nine justices took that view and didn’t see any First Amendment problem or censorship. No one forced Twitter or Facebook to do anything and there were no threats of using government power for retaliation.
Even if the Biden administration had demanded that the dangerous and insane information be removed (which didn’t happen) it would still have been allowed. The social media networks were free to hang up and tell the government to get lost.
We and the rest of the press (including social media) can publish unpopular ideas. We can even publish provably wrong ideas, like the Earth is flat (it is not). And we can also publish provably wrong ideas that are dangerous, like playing in traffic is cool and fun, and the government can argue all they want against it, but they can’t stop us.
If they did come to seize the presses that we print on and grab the internet sites we publish with, that is censorship that is barred by the Constitution. Otherwise, it’s just words.
