Who elected this guy to decide what viewers ’need’?
This weekend, on Brian Stelter’s alleged “media analysis” program, Reliable Sources, guest Alex Stamos yearned for cable and telecommunications companies to do to OAN and Newsmax what Amazon Web Services did to Parler — deem them too controversial or objectionable to be carried, and effectively shut them down.
“We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences,” said Stamos, who is director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and formerly the chief security officer of Facebook. “There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN.” (That sounds like more of a problem for CNN than for the rest of us.)
Stamos continued, “We have to figure out the OAN and Newsmax problem, you know, these companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and such to be bringing them into tens of millions of homes. This is, you know, allowing people to seek out information if they want to, but not pushing it into their faces, I think, is where we’re going to have to go here.”
Have you ever had OAN or Newsmax pushed into your face? Has someone ever come up to you, with a tablet or their phone, and pushed one of these networks into your face? Has anyone ever strapped you down and forced your eyes open, A Clockwork Orange–style, to force those networks on you?
Come on. The closest anyone has ever come to having a television network “forced” on them is when their in-laws or parents come to visit.
By calling on communications companies to stop carrying OAN and Newsmax, Stamos is not “allowing people to seek out information if they want to,” a concept he claims to support. No one’s television just turns to these channels by themselves.
And who elected this guy to decide what viewers “need”?
As laid out in yesterday’s Jolt, crazy beliefs are not, by themselves, inherently dangerous to others. No one fears Flat Earth terrorist groups, astrologer suicide bombers, or the militant wing of My Little Pony fans. Crazy beliefs become a problem when someone decides to act upon them in a way that harms or infringes upon the rights of others. Believing in a stolen election or QAnon or some other nutty conspiracy does not, ipso facto, make someone a threat to commit violence against other people.
Crazy beliefs and crazy speech are protected by the First Amendment. If someone wanted to create a “QAnon News Network,” it would be a terrible idea, but protected by the First Amendment, and it would be an even worse idea for the federal government to step in and shut it down. (Before anyone cries, “No one’s calling for that,” Max Boot calls for a ‘reinvigorated’ Federal Communications Commission to start fining Fox News in today’s Washington Post.)
Government restrictions and carrier bans are not the only tools that can discourage bad behavior in a cable channel. Particular forms of libel and slander can be adjudicated through the courts: The sudden about-face from the likes of Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, and the American Thinker website in response to the lawyers of Dominion and SmartMatic demonstrates that egregious falsehoods can bring serious consequences.
Beyond that, a cable channel that veers into repellent extremism will lose viewers and advertisers. Running a television channel is hard; recent history is full of channels that debuted with great fanfare and failed to find an audience large enough to sustain its operations.
Calling upon Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and other carriers to step into the role of speech police is likely to backfire, as people wonder what could be on those channels that is so controversial and terrible that some of America’s largest companies are being asked to step in and keep it away from viewers. Has no one paid any attention to how any celebrity has ever used controversy and threats of censorship to build a larger audience? Tipper Gore probably did almost as much as MTV to help the careers of pop musicians in the 1980s. A public pressure campaign to get OAN and Newsmax off the air will probably only help those networks in the long run.
I suppose that we should be thankful that Stelter took a week off from complaining about Fox News to complain about OAN* and NewsMax. Reliable Sources really ought to be called, Here’s What Was on Fox News This Week, or even more accurately, Here’s What Was on Fox News This Week That Infuriated Us.
*The name of the network is “One America News Network,” but the logo and legal name of the company says OAN, not OANN.