Human Dialogue, Freedom, and Censorship

 

As facts start to come out and scandals start to close in, I am reminded of the following phase that stems from Soviet era Russia:  “There is no news in the Truth, and there is no truth in the News (В Правде нет известия, и в Известие нет правды).”

Actually, this stems from the two Russian newspapers – Pravda and Izvestiye.   Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, was considered to be filled with lies even though its name translates as “truth”, while the name Izvestiye, the other Soviet newspaper, translates as “news” and was the official newspaper of the Supreme Soviet.  The saying, at the time, was a joke because all good Russians knew that they could not get the truth or the news from state-controlled media.

Today Americans also have difficulty obtaining news or truth.  The government is too often involved in dissemination and editing of what should be accurate news and truth.  The state of the American media and Americans’ access to news, facts, and truth can be summarized as: 

Let me define truth, for the purposes of this discussion, as that which is in accordance with fact, evidence, and reality.  News I will define as new or noteworthy information in which an audience will likely be interested.

Editorial Discretion has become Political Censorship

The mainstream media today is less interested in providing facts to its readers, viewers, and listeners than it is in pleasing government and elite powers by providing their narratives to audiences rather than facts of a situation.  And audiences are often more interested in the entertainment rather than factual aspects of a story.    Hence, the truth (factual recitation) is not the news, and the news, because it is not factually accurate, is not the truth.

I am not talking about editorial discretion which has always been part of news dissemination.  What to print, where to place a story, how much time/space to give a story – these have always been decisions for editors and have always been colored somewhat by their biases, both conscious and unconscious. 

But today these decisions go far beyond and are far removed from simple editorial discretion.  We now have concrete evidence of state involvement and control of what is/is not “truth” and what information will be disseminated or hidden.   Such involvement has permeated both the actual “news” media as well as social media platforms. 

For example, House investigations now provide documentation that Facebook confirmed to the White House that it was working to accomplish “the administration’s directives” on suppressing content that clashed with its COVID vaccine agenda.  There are processes by which the government can flag certain content on social media and request it be suppressed.  There is also evidence that the White House wanted social media to change its on-line algorithms so that users would see more information from sources supportive of the White House agenda.

The News or Mainstream Media is now also beholden to powers outside of the news itself.  While news editors, as noted above, have always made editorial choices, those editors ensured that the stories presented in their news sections were factual; they left opinion for the opinion pages.  Not so anymore.

Today’s news sources clearly support one or the other political party and every aspect of their “news” reflects that.  Not just the selection of which stories to present, but the manner in which any story is presented. 

The conservative and right-leaning media will slant everything to support right wing positions and politicians while the left-leaning media will slant in the opposite direction.  Stories that cover the front pages of media with one political leaning will be close to non-existent in the media of the opposite political leaning.  Indeed, we now have proof of news sources such as the NY Times and Washington Post deliberately omitting or revising facts of key stories such as the now debunked Russian collusion or the now confirmed story of the Hunter Biden laptop.  Stories that are presented will often be filled with adjectives and other modifiers that, while perhaps appropriate in opinion pieces, are blatant attempts to turn what should be a factual news story into an opinion advocating a particular political position.

Consider the two big stories over the past few days:  the Trump indictments and the concrete evidence of President Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling scheme that resulted in huge monetary payments to the Biden family.    To compare the coverage of these two stories between right and left leaning news media is to read accounts of two seemingly completely different worlds. 

It is next to impossible to find a full and objective account of the Trump charges along with the legal assertions that they are politically motivated and/or a form of election interference.  Similarly, one can barely find the Biden story in left-leaning media, and when one does it is downplayed as simply some sort of Republican witch hunt, while the right-leaning media perhaps over sensationalizes the clearly damning evidence of Biden’s quite likely illegal interactions with foreign countries and the possibility of its compromising of the President. 

The “news” from the left leaning media essentially has already found Trump guilty and Biden completely innocent while the right leaning media takes the opposite view.  This is not news.  This is not truth.  This is bias and propaganda.  And in many instances it is guided by the very people that we elect to protect us and our First Amendment rights. 

Information, Not Censorship, Heals and Sustains America

The First Amendment, a cornerstone of our American democracy, demands a free and objective news media in order that the people can voice and hear a variety of views and make their own decisions.  That others would decide what the people should and should not hear and, worse yet, make judgements about what information is made available in an attempt to do the people’s thinking for them is in complete antipathy to the First Amendment and all it stands for.

When those who should be leading our country become more concerned with their own power than their duty to the country and the people they serve, they find ways to justify their censorship and denial of free speech and the importance of narrative – their narrative – over truth or news.

Suppression of information is often done under the guise of protecting us from “misinformation” though as Robert Kennedy Jr. well-articulated in his July appearance before the House Committee regarding Censorship and Free Speech, the term is often rephrased as “mal-information” – not incorrect but just bad as in information that the government or its lackeys in the media have decided would be bad for the populace to hear, usually because it contradicts the narrative of those in power. 

Our country is split into two camps, and each wants to provide a narrative that benefits them.  To establish that narrative, censorship of truth and news becomes a temptation that is hard to resist.  That, however, is the worst possible reaction.

Words from Kennedy’s opening statement to the House Committee on Censorship are instructive.  He responded to Democrats’ concern about “the need to beat this toxic polarization that is destroying our country today and how do we deal with that?” Kennedy stated: “This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War.  How do we [deal with] that?  Every Democrat on this committee, do you think you can do that by censoring people?  I am telling you, you cannot.  That only aggravates and amplifies the problem.”

Recently Sen. Joe Manchin spoke and wrote about the division in America, stating that the United States is “not designed for” the level of division currently seen within the country, leaving many “common-sense” Americans without a political home.   He wrote:

The extremes on the left and right now control the Democratic and Republican Parties, defining our politics and policy debates. These partisan extremes are in the business of feeding political division and dysfunction everyday – and their business is booming.

They want America divided – because they benefit greatly from it. They want us to see each other as enemies because they feed off of it. They attack our institutions, whether it is our Capitol, our elected leaders or our justice system, without caring about the lasting damage it does.

In America, leadership is not a birthright but instead it’s the choice of voters after respectful debates of ideas. And partisan leaders on both sides of the aisle are increasingly threatened by the growing desire for debate.

To be clear, while both parties are to some extent responsible for resorting to narrative and aggravating division, it is the current Administration and the hard Left that are aggressively pushing censorship and even elimination of First Amendment freedoms.

Dialogue Is Our Humanity

But why does debate and this current censorship matter?  Why not just pick a left or right bubble and live within it?  Or simply allow the government and its media to tell us what to think?  The answer is not only that this contradicts the very core of the 1st Amendment, a necessary cornerstone of our government and our way of life.  It is not only that it furthers a nefarious goal of making the American people enemies of one another.  These, of course, are serious problems, especially to those who believe in American democracy.  But perhaps an even larger problem is that it works to destroy the very core of our existence.

Life in the end is a dialogue.  We participate by speaking, asking questions, listening, writing, reading, responding, agreeing, disagreeing, learning.  A dialogue cannot be open and honest if information is restricted or denied.  With censorship we lose part of the dialogue, and we allow someone else to create a dialogue for us.  We stop learning.  We stop thinking.  We stop speaking.  And we lose part of our humanity.  We become nothing more than a tool for those creating the dialogue for us.

Currently the government and others in power through pressure on private platforms are trying to shape our dialogue.  The media gives us the stories they want discussed in a way that will create preordained narratives.  But our information is limited and therefore our dialogue is limited and we are ultimately limiting our individual humanity as we delegate our power to dialogue to the state.

To retain our humanity and our freedom we must remember that goals of personal comfort and protection from negative narratives are not in the end in our best interest.  Free thought and free dialogue are.  We must remember that good dialogue requires others and their possibly differing and uncomfortable viewpoints.  Those others are not enemies.  Silencing and censorship are the enemy as is a state-controlled media. 

As the mounting proof of censorship and silencing becomes both truth and news we must demand that our news media actually provide us with news that is truth and truth that is news.  All of it.  Only then can we dialogue as fully engaged free people.

Let’s Just Grow Up

When I was six and in first grade my older brother would teach me about what he was learning in school.  Often his Jr. High learning went well beyond my first-grade curriculum; nonetheless, I loved learning about the many different things that he knew. 

I can remember when my big brother taught me about our First Amendment freedoms.  I was fascinated by this aspect of our democracy.  I grasped only a very basic idea of the complex concepts that my brother tried to explain but I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend about them.  The next morning I ran onto the playground, found my friend, and told her that we lived in a free society and we could do and say and think what we wanted.  She looked at me like I was a bit nuts, and said, “That’s not true.  I had to pay for my Popsicle yesterday.  It wasn’t free, so we don’t live in a free society.”

That’s pretty good logic for a 6-year-old.  But I knew she was wrong, that living in a free society was somehow still true, despite the cost of Popsicles.  I just couldn’t express why.  I didn’t have the understanding that my brother did, so all I could do was just repeat the “sound bite” from his lecture that had stuck with me: “Yes we do live in a free society.”  I didn’t have the depth of knowledge or related education and learning sufficient to explain what that meant.  So, after a few repetitions of “yes we do” and “no we don’t” our dialogue ended.

We never discussed this again, and we remained friends, but I think that interchange to some extent changed the relationship between us.  I thought she was stupid because she didn’t understand me, and she thought I was an idiot for claiming our society was free when it clearly wasn’t. 

This immature reaction is normal for a pair of 6-year-olds faced with a discussion about something beyond what they at that point are educated to understand.  It is not appropriate for mature adults. Yet, sadly, this is the sort of reaction we are likely to encounter when presenting a political opinion to someone holding a differing view. 

Had we 6-year-olds had a deeper comprehension of what we were addressing, a better understanding of the word “freedom” in the context of our democracy, we likely could have engaged in an actual discussion of the questions raised by each other’s assertion.  We could have both listened and explained to one another.   We would have been able to, without name calling, understand each other’s viewpoints and the issues raised.  Differences, rather than resulting in insurmountable obstacles and irreconcilable name calling would have produced a constructive sharing of information and working together to resolve differences.

That is what mature people do.  Immature people, people who are making statements about things that they don’t understand, act like 6-year-olds.  Because they often are simply parroting someone else’s rhetoric without any real understanding of the complexities of the issue or viewpoint, they do not have the ability to grasp and understand a differing point of view.  They have simply adopted a point of view (or sound bite) superficially, and when that view is not agreed with or is challenged, they think there is something wrong with the one challenging it, and often see it as a personal attack and then respond with either attack or complete dismissal of the challenger. There is no tolerance.

This is not only unproductive; it is dangerous.  When people are willing to accept assertions without their own investigation or critical thinking, without even attempting to hear, let alone understand another viewpoint, there can be no resolution of differences.  Instead, the “conversation” will be some form of my 6-year-old “yes it is; no it isn’t.”

It is only when one really understands the viewpoint that they are professing that they can openly listen to other view points and critically assess those views against their own, understanding the position of the person holding the alternate view point and honing in on where there are places for agreement as well as disagreement.  Only by exploring one another’s viewpoints and rationale behind them can those who seem to disagree come to any sort of mutual understanding about issues raised by those viewpoints.

Similarly, only when one truly grasps the depths and nuances of what they are professing can they explain their position to another.  Until then, disagreements become attacks as mere soundbites are simply thrown back and forth.  Disagreements generate not learning, but name calling or even more violent responses as the 6-year-old type responses escalate into what might be akin to playground violence or rock-throwing.  These are typical responses when one does not have the education or maturity to deal with what one does not, or is not willing to, understand.

It is not unreasonable that two six-year-olds would not be able to have a conversation about different viewpoints when the underlying subject was more complex and profound than they were ready to handle.   But it is less reasonable to tolerate such inability from adults who consider themselves educated, informed, and mature. 

Our political discourse these days is like that of 6-year-olds.  People spout their party line.  If disagreed with they name-call the one who disagrees with what they see as an appropriate epithet:  bigot, racist, deplorable, etc.  I, personally, have been called most of the epithets in vogue by the Democrats simply for holding a position on one or another issue that is contrary to theirs.  I have yet to find a member of the Progressive or Socialist Left who is willing to sit down and have a rational and mature conversation about why we might favor different policies towards an issue that is of concern to us both. 

Had my family not moved, I suspect that at some point my friend and I would have studied the Constitution together in school, developed a better understanding about it and the principles of our democracy, and had another discussion.  I would like to believe that we would listen and learn from one another, rather than simply reacting with complete negativity to the one holding a different view.  I also believe that in this particular instance, once we defined what we meant by “freedom” in the context of our societal principles that we would find that we were not really standing in opposition, or even very far at all from one another.  And any differences we did have would not be insurmountable obstacles to our ability to work together to resolve any issues presented by our differing views.

Such conversations require tolerance.  Tolerance of viewpoints that differ from one’s own.  They also require a desire to reach a common goal – in my example conversation it would have been to understand freedom in the context of democracy, its meaning and its limitations.  Our goal might have been to resolve issues we saw within those parameters that would make are freedoms clearer and more secure.  We would need to understand one another’s viewpoints to do that.

When we have a Democrat party that is focused not on having a dialogue with their Republican counterparts to address and improve problems facing our country, but is instead singularly focused on removing President Donald J. Trump from office, it is impossible to have anything more than the equivalent of the 6-year-olds’ dialogue.  We see this playing out in the impeachment.  The Democrats have their narrative – facts be damned.  If you counter their narrative, if you oppose them in any way, Adam Schiff tells us “you will have your head on a pike.”  Said with the maturity of a 6-year-old.

If we want this country to survive, we must remember that its greatness requires tolerance, wisdom, and maturity.  There is not much of that going around these days.  It is time to grow up!