March 24, 2021
Wu Who?
This from Jim Church
A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment
From the article:
Tim adds:
"Fake News" is ultimately a result of the leftist media refusing to do their jobs, giving fake news themselves and filibustering alternative opinions. If it weren't for the slant of the media we wouldn't have any sort of problem. If Wu is concerned with this, the answer is NOT to limit speech but to empower other speech. The fact is the Russians and Chinese need only put stories and facts out that are not covered by the mainstream media. What they are doing is not so much "fake news" as providing hungry minds with truths the media choose to ignore because they have an agenda.
A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment
From the article:
(Columbia Law Professor Timothy) Wu’s appointment to the National Economic Council may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of "net neutrality†and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called "Is the First Amendment Obsolete?†that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech.
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a "devotee†of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that "these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.â€
If you hear a "but…†coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this "cheap speech†era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of "flooding†the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should "admit defeat†and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. "In some cases,†Wu writes, "this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.†What might that look like? He writes, without irony: "I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.â€
— More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) "boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.â€
That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a "devotee†of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that "these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.â€
If you hear a "but…†coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this "cheap speech†era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of "flooding†the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should "admit defeat†and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. "In some cases,†Wu writes, "this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.†What might that look like? He writes, without irony: "I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.â€
— More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) "boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.â€
That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.
Tim adds:
"Fake News" is ultimately a result of the leftist media refusing to do their jobs, giving fake news themselves and filibustering alternative opinions. If it weren't for the slant of the media we wouldn't have any sort of problem. If Wu is concerned with this, the answer is NOT to limit speech but to empower other speech. The fact is the Russians and Chinese need only put stories and facts out that are not covered by the mainstream media. What they are doing is not so much "fake news" as providing hungry minds with truths the media choose to ignore because they have an agenda.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:20 AM
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1
This is a similar argument to the one that the second amendment was written at a time when guns were single shot and threw a bullet no more than 100 yards. Now that guns fire one million times per second and one gun can kill an entire city in a single heartbeat, the amendment should be rendered obsolete because the framers were idiots who could not forsee the future.
Posted by: Bill H at March 24, 2021 08:09 AM (/sW5m)
2
Nobody can really foresee the future, but the Founders did so better than this guy. To him, I say "Be careful what you wish for!" Every time somebody on the Left comes along and "reasonably" advocates curtailing any of our freedoms, it's a lead-pipe cinch he'd loudly object if "the other side" made the same suggestions.
Personally, I think we should shut down MSNBC and CNN, but I'm careful not to tell anybody...
Personally, I think we should shut down MSNBC and CNN, but I'm careful not to tell anybody...
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at March 24, 2021 08:26 AM (26eyi)
3
Yeah Bill; I've heard that argument from the Left. It misses the whole point of the Second Amendment. Those guns weren't enshrined there for hunting and protection against crime...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at March 26, 2021 06:04 AM (M54E4)
4
Excellent point Dana!
Question; why is the right to vote (something not enumerated in the Constitution) more important than the right to bear arms or to free speech? I mean, the Democrats are always screaming about the right to vote and how we need to have more people voting and they are taking concrete steps to that effect, but they yawn at the First and Second Amendments these days.
They bring suit whenever voter I.D. is implemented by Republicans. Strange how that is so much more important to them.
Question; why is the right to vote (something not enumerated in the Constitution) more important than the right to bear arms or to free speech? I mean, the Democrats are always screaming about the right to vote and how we need to have more people voting and they are taking concrete steps to that effect, but they yawn at the First and Second Amendments these days.
They bring suit whenever voter I.D. is implemented by Republicans. Strange how that is so much more important to them.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at March 26, 2021 06:07 AM (M54E4)
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