Matt Taibbi and his colleagues at Racket News are doing important work with their #TwitterFiles project showing just how rampant and insidious political censorship is in our new America and the degree to which different power centers collude to enforce a single narrative. "The new media leaders see themselves as doing the same service police officers in the stop-and-frisk era called 'order maintenance,'" writes Taibbi, "pouncing on visible signs of discord or disruption."
In one respect, this is an apt comparison. The cops knew they were infringing on a citizen's individual rights, not to mention his dignity, when they stopped and frisked young black males in high crime areas, but they were doing it, they said, for the greater good of reducing crime in those communities. So, too, the guardians of the narrative know that, when they censor off-narrative voices, they are infringing on the ability of others to exercise fully the democratic rights of citizenship, and they, too, claim to be acting for some greater good like containing disinformation, or keeping communities safe and welcoming, or protecting the marginalized from the violence of hate speech, and so on. Does anyone remember the editor at the New York Times who published a defense of the paper's venomous coverage of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign? Yes, he admitted, we have abandoned all standards of fairness and accuracy in our coverage of Trump, but only because Donald Trump is such a huge threat it's a special case and necessary for the good of the country.
The difference between the stop-and-frisk cop in the Bronx and the New York Times narrative-keeper is, in the case of the cop, there was crime, it did drop, and the cops had a legitimate claim, likely sincerely made, that they were acting for the greater good. The censors, on the other hand, are really only defending their own elite interests, and to make their claims of acting for the greater good requires either cynicism, self-delusion, or a mixture of the two.
The sincerity of such claims of working for the greater good can be shown by the consistency with which the remedy is applied. If the cops applied the stop-and-frisk remedy for crime to all young black males except for members of the Crips, their claims of acting for the greater good would be discredited immediately. So consider the wild inconsistency with which the gatekeepers of the narrative apply their censorship. Some groups deserve protection from hate speech. Others do not. Some populist movements are to be squashed. Others are not. This external inconsistency with which the censorship remedy is applied cannot spring from an internal innocence. The censors are knowingly acting in an interest other than the greater good, despite any lip service they might give to it.
Taibbi and his colleagues are illuminating the actual mechanics of how the censorship industrial complex works and who the players are. From their work it may be possible to determine what the censors' actual interests are and, thus, where we are likely heading as a nation. But, to begin to answer those questions, it is helpful to understand how we got here.
A 26-year-old Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831 for a nine-month tour of the United States. He returned to France and wrote down his observations in a worthwhile, two-volume work called Democracy in America. Regarding the American press (Vol. I, Ch. 11), he wrote,
its influence in America is immense. It is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs
[what Taibbi calls "discord and disruptions"]
and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion. It rallies the interests of the community round certain principles, and it draws up the creed which factions adopt;
[e.g., we are a nation of immigrants, our values make us exceptional, terrorism is the enemy, China is the enemy, Russia is the enemy, Iran is the enemy, Saddam Hussein is the enemy, limited government versus expanded welfare, and so on]
for it affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which address each other without ever having been in immediate contact. When a great number of the organs of the press adopt the same line of conduct, their influence becomes irresistible; and public opinion, when it is perpetually assailed from the same side, eventually yields to the attack.
[put on a mask, get your vax]
In the United States each separate journal exercises but little authority, but the power of the periodical press is only second to that of the people.
De Tocqueville placed great emphasis on the importance of the number of newspapers in the United States. "In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper," he wrote. That multitude of voices, in his view, was the primary reason the press wasn't the destabilizing destructive force in the United States that it was in Europe.
The number of periodical and occasional publications which appears in the United States actually surpasses belief. The most enlightened Americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.
Since De Tocqueville's time, we've seen a steady erosion in the number of what today we call media outlets, while there has been a simultaneous concentration of those that remained into fewer and fewer hands. Prudent restrictions like those preventing media cross-ownership have been relaxed or removed. Owners of broadcast networks bought advertising companies. Cable networks bought record companies. Print magazines bought movie studios. And everybody bought senators. Eventually, the marketplace of ideas became a company store and the all-powerful company could select the ideas that would be available to its captive customers. That gave it the power to remove and install presidents, start and end wars, and dictate the narrative nearly at will.
With power and wealth comes status, and an elite formed around the centralized power of the media. De Tocqueville discerned the same phenomenon clearly, but from the opposite direction.
The facility with which journals can be established induces a multitude of individuals to take a part in them; but as the extent of competition precludes the possibility of considerable profit, the most distinguished classes of society are rarely led to engage in these undertakings. But such is the number of the public prints that, even if they were a source of wealth, writers of ability could not be found to direct them all. The journalists of the United States are usually placed in a very humble position, with a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind.
So, as the 20th Century wound down, we were left with the concentrated power of the press under the control of a very few, very powerful super elite surrounded and supported by of a powerful elite drawn from the most distinguished classes. They had nearly unlimited influence over the most powerful nation on earth. Like a king and his court, they jealously guarded their privileged position.
Then the Internet happened. Once again, anyone who wanted to could establish a journal--a blog. The elite's ability to dictate the narrative was no longer absolute and even began to erode. Technological advancement, which had enabled the centralization of the power of the press in the first place, now threatened to reestablish the conditions De Tocqueville had found prevailing in the America of 1831. The power of the press was again widely disseminated among the people; its liberty was regained. The elite responded as one would expect. As Taibbi's collaborator Mike Shellenberger described in his March 9, 2023 testimony before Congress, the response, what he calls the censorship industrial complex,
combines established methods of psychological manipulation… with highly sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial intelligence. The complex’s leaders are driven by the fear that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing.
Censorship. Propaganda. Demonization of upstart non-elite voices. All are employed to, as Taibbi puts it, "protect against the 'contagion' of mass movements." The powerful elite allied with the power of the federal government, in collaboration with radical attack organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and with tech giants like Facebook and Twitter and Google to maintain their privilege. Full-blown, permanent censorship of the press under the direction of a tiny, powerful super-elite had taken root in America.
In De Tocqueville's view, this is the end of our democracy.
But in the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd. When the right of every citizen to co-operate in the government of society is acknowledged, every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between the different opinions of his contemporaries, and of appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be looked upon as correlative institutions; just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed, and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people.
Taibbi confirms De Tocqueville's prescient claim,
A major subtext of the [censorship industrial complex] story is that ordinary people are going to have to build their own media and oversight institutions to represent them, as virtually the entire landscape of traditional institutional checks on power seems to have been compromised.
With the arrival of the Internet and its explicit, anything-goes ethos, we did build our own media. We regained the press freedom we had in 1831. The power of the press was being subordinated to the power of the people by its decentralization. The elite have nearly managed to derail that process and reestablish their choke hold on the public discourse. Efforts like those of Taibbi and platforms like this one deserve the support of any who want our democracy back.