President Trump and European socialists might not agree on much, but they do have one area of consensus: confronting what they believe is fake news.
On Tuesday, the European Union’s Justice Commissioner, Vera Jourova, attacked British press coverage of the Brexit debate and added that “exclusion, discrimination and lack of respect for minorities have spilled over from the margins to the center and don’t meet enough resistance from the media, politicians or opinion leaders.”
Unless the media altered its approach, Jourova said, the EU would “advocate for a European approach to media based on quality and smart regulation, if needed.” Then, on Wednesday, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, lamented that “a free press has far too often meant the freedom to spread lies and half-truths, and to smear the powerless, not take on the powerful.” While Corbyn has a personal gripe with the media for its reporting on his numerous love affairs with terrorists, he does speak for a powerful Labour constituency that seeks new media regulation.
Yet, while President Trump shares these sentiments towards greater restrictions on speech, the European proposals are far more dangerous, because only the Europeans have a realistic likelihood of successfully implementing their agenda. At both the EU governance and national levels, European speech laws are far more flexibly defined by politicians and judges than in the United States. In contrast, the First Amendment means that Trump lacks a means of restricting what media outlets can say.
But European anti-speech agitation is especially disheartening for another reason: It is driven by political ideology rather than personal ego. Consider that where Trump laments media reporting or analysis, his main gripe is that he believes he is being treated unfairly. But in the European agitators’ view, the problem is not simply the reporting, but the role of the media per se. Like any good socialist, Corbyn, Jourova, and Co. believe that they have a duty to guide the media into the better light of socialist idealism — into reporting that defends the interest of the state project, conforms with elitist sentiments, and dilutes the ability of individuals to speak freely and hold government figures to account.
In Corbyn’s case, the particular motivation is moving media reporting away from wealthy ownership or charity. Of course, in the absence of wealthy individuals, corporate interests, and charities to be able to fund journalistic output, we would see fewer high-quality publications being produced on both the Right (think National Review), and the Left (think The Guardian). Note that the Left never has a problem with big unions producing news or campaign materials. Regardless, there is a fundamental ideological divorce here between the American ideal of maximum speech of maximum subjects, and the European leftist ideal of speech that conforms to an ideological project.
That speaks to the final point: In America, all speech is equal. In Europe, all speech is equal, but some speech is more equal than other speech.
