CNN’s Don Lemon wants online speech to be regulated. He also wants social media users to be required to use their real identities so they can “face consequences” for sharing false or misleading information.
“We should not allow those things in our society,” the anchor said this week. “At the very least … what is posted on social media should be true.”
Lemon added, “If it’s not true, don’t allow people to put it up there. Have them face consequences. If you’re going to be on social media, you should put your real information on there, so that if you say something that is not true … then you should be able to face the consequences for it. It shouldn’t just be bots out there spreading BS.”
First, who gets to be the judge of what’s “misleading?” I am asking, please, think one step ahead before you speak. Secondly, let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that a member of the free press is openly advocating for speech regulations and even punishment for those who say the “wrong” thing. Does Don Lemon understand the First Amendment? Does he just not care? Has he given this any thought at all? Because I guarantee you what he is proposing will go sideways really fast, even for the people he considers the “good” guys. It’s not just people who support former President Donald Trump who will get scooped up by whatever regulations and “consequences” Lemon is fantasizing about.
Remember: The tactics you support against your enemies can and will be used against you later.
“If we say something on this network that is not true,” Lemon continued, “there are repercussions and ramifications, right? We face the consequences.”
Is that so? True, CNN recently settled a defamation lawsuit brought by a Kentucky teenager it wrongfully accused of racist, abusive behavior. It’s also true three CNN staffers resigned in 2017 after they falsely reported that one-time Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci had ties to a $10 billion Russian investment fund owned by a Kremlin-connected bank.
But there is still a mountain of false reporting and conspiracy theory mongering, including the time Lemon speculated on-air that a black hole swallowed a missing jetliner, that the left-wing network has yet to apologize for or even correct.
Let’s look at just the past couple of years.
In April, shortly after former President Donald Trump left office, CNN reported the Biden White House had to put together a coronavirus vaccine distribution plan from “scratch.” This is not even close to being true.
There were no consequences for CNN’s bogus reporting. The story wasn’t even corrected.
Earlier, in 2020, CNN contributor Lawrence Wilkerson claimed, without evidence, that “there was a little cheating” in the 2020 Kentucky Senate race, in which Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell defeated Democratic challenger Amy McGrath in a 19-point landslide.
No one on the network even thought to challenge the allegation that the then-Senate majority leader was the beneficiary of election fraud in an election in which he needed no fraud to waltz to a huge victory.
Republicans, Wilkerson said, are “never” investigated for election fraud. Did I imagine the entire Russia investigation?
In 2019, former Obama administration official and CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reported that the then-president referred to “immigrants as ‘animals.’” Trump was not speaking about asylum-seekers. Rather, he was referring specifically to members of the brutal, barbaric Salvadoran gang MS-13, whom his administration has targeted for removal from the United States.
Sciutto suffered no consequences for promoting the “animals” lie.
CNN reported in 2018 that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test showed there was “strong evidence” of her supposed Native American ancestry. The study had, in fact, found that the senator is anywhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. By any definition, that isn’t “strong,” it’s tiny. Does CNN’s report, which was never corrected or retracted, count as false and misleading?
That same year, CNN reported incorrectly that Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, then the commander of European Command and the NATO supreme allied commander, Europe, said he doesn’t believe there’s an effective U.S. response to Russian cyberthreats. Scaparrotti said no such thing. There were no consequences at CNN for its false reporting.
That is to say nothing of the hours the network dedicated to fantasizing, theorizing, and speculating that Russian President Vladimir Putin had installed Trump as a puppet in the White House.
CNN analyst retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters even accused Trump of “treason.”
This week, Lemon argued in favor of cracking down on online speech to root out falsehoods and misinformation.
“I do think that social media, just like any other media company,” he said, “should face some sort of consequences. And they should be regulated. And at the very least, what you put on there should be true, and if it’s not true, then it should be actionable.”
Be careful what you wish for.
If we’re going to get into the business of punishing people for spreading falsehoods, it won’t be long before CNN finds itself on the chopping block.
