In a powerful essay in The Guardian, Thomas Frank laments liberal criticism of modern American media. The “reality crisis,” as the New York Times has named it, has given liberals an excuse to endorse responses once thought reserved to the enemies of liberalism: censorship. Propaganda on the right, so the view goes, must be suppressed or silenced. Silicon Valley must take responsibility because only they can do anything about it: while the First Amendment would ban the government from punishing false or polarizing speech, it does not apply—we liberals insist, with all the excitement of discovering an extra $100 in our wallet—to private corporations.
All this triggers “incredulity” in Frank. “Liberals believe in liberty,” he affirms. “This can’t really be happening here in the USA.” Yet it is. And it is not only, he insists, stupid politically — as it will give the “right an issue to campaign on,” and “play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies”—but it is wrong morally: “it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for — a betrayal that we will spend years living down.”
Frank is, as always, right about the politics. The Left’s focus on techniques for suppressing lies will certainly mobilize the Right. But missing in this jeremiad is any account of the economy of understanding that stands behind the institutions of free speech…
