If you’ve ever heard of the press critic A.J. Liebling, it’s probably because you’ve heard this sentence of his: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Liebling penned that for a 1960 dispatch from a publishers’ convention. The New Yorker correspondent had spent days watching newspaper publishers vigorously slap each others’ back over the purported strength of their industry.
This happy talk revolted Liebling, who saw publishers as self-interested and usually delusional. A big reason for their profits was newspaper consolidation that left cities with fewer voices, less newsgathering, and more bias.
Liebling proposed to address this by making it harder for publishers to sell their publications. (The “freedom of the press” quote is a parenthetical in an argument to use the capital gains tax to achieve this end.) That, he hoped, would discourage mergers and keep outlets alive.
“Diversity — and the competition that it causes — does not ensure good news coverage or a fair champion for every point of view, but it increases the chances,” Liebling wrote.
He couldn’t have expected the opposite to occur. Today, everyone has a printing press or its electronic equivalent. That’s the gift of the internet and social media.
And we have viewpoint diversity. If you don’t like what I write in these 800 words, a few keystrokes will bring you a counterpoint.
But good news coverage?
A few weeks ago, James Spann, north and central Alabama’s go-to man when storms roar through the state, told people to stop flooding his Facebook page with conspiracy theories.
Spann spent several days dealing with claims that there were political aims behind disaster relief; that research programs were secretly controlling the weather, and that the moon, for the first time in 4.5 billion years, had disappeared from the skies.
“I am trying to push critical weather information out in a calm way; your rhetoric is a huge distraction we don’t need right now,” he wrote. “I really don’t ask for much, but this would be very helpful.”
Spann said a few days later that he’s gotten threats over the high crime of informing people about the weather.
There’s more. Former President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his co-dependent ally, spread false rumors about communities being bulldozed or federal relief money being sent to undocumented immigrants. It’s hindering the delivery of aid, in part because responders now have to use time and resources to get on top of this nonsense.
“Everyone’s here because they want to be, not because they have to be,” one pilot who delivered 4,500 pounds of supplies in Tennessee told The New York Times. “We are fully in this. We really want to be here.”
Even worse, anti-semitic attacks on FEMA executives have proliferated on X, the former Twitter, requiring some to lock down accounts amid the abuse.
The traditional media of Liebling’s day had plenty of failings. So do contemporary outlets. And social media is not inherently terrible. It amplifies voices that, for whatever reason, may not have been heard before.
Without these platforms, marginalized communities would struggle even more to get their concerns and challenges heard. The death of George Floyd might not have had the impact it did without Black Americans sharing their stories of police violence on social media.
But it also makes it much easier to mount hateful attacks on the most vulnerable. Someone freaking out about the moon is amusing but harmless. Someone spreading lies about immigrants is not.
Social media companies could, of course, address this, and used to. But out of fear or admiration for Trump — who has the most to lose from executives showing some basic responsibility — they’re not.
They’ll say this is freedom of speech. It’s not. It’s freedom from standards.
When you remove editing or moderating from a platform, you end its usefulness as a place to understand the world. And you allow the most obnoxious people to scream endlessly at their neighbors and reality.
A forum becomes an arena. News becomes a cudgel to beat one’s enemies.
Spann having to deal with people seeking political calculations in weather forecasts is one example. So is X. It was never a perfect source of information when it was Twitter. But it was useful for getting vital news out during weather emergencies.
That’s no longer true. Not when Musk is spreading baseless garbage accusing FEMA employees of treason.
Truth, you hope, will win the contest with falsehood. But that battle will take time, spill into the streets, and leave a lot of collateral damage before it’s resolved.
This is a Liebling nightmare. Not that everyone has a press. That everyone is a publisher, subject to all the self-interest and delusions of the ones Liebling used to mock. Each can hurl bricks as they please, without any hesitation about who gets hurt or what gets broken.
We have an unprecedented ability to make our thoughts known. But without any sort of standards or responsibilities, we risk drowning in a cacophony of rage and falsehoods, totally unable to grasp the world around us. Everyone is a publisher; no one is an editor.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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