Judge not the media, lest ye be judged

But, while anger and contempt are understandable responses to this bias, censorship is not the answer. Yet, this week, the Economist released a YouGov poll revealing that 48 percent of self-identified conservative respondents would allow courts to impose fines on media outlets that publish “biased or inaccurate” stories. Only 16 percent can say with certainty that they oppose criminalization of journalistic bias or imprecision.

It is instructive to ponder how, exactly, the state would decide what was true and what false. Would judges decide for themselves, or would there be a central database of facts that they’d use for reference? Who would put together this database, and where would be it stored? One idea would be for responsibility to rest with a Ministry of Truth, which was what George Orwell suggested in Nineteen Eighty Four, one of his two dystopian masterpieces.

How is it that so many conservatives could warm to the idea of judges punishing newspapers for media bias? Let’s hope it has something to do with faulty polling methodology, but we doubt it. This result is not just depressing. For anyone who calls himself or herself a conservative, it’s downright embarrassing.

Set aside the fact that blind faith in judges goes against every lesson conservatives should have taken from the last 50 years of political history. More importantly, it makes professed concern for the First Amendment appear self-serving and hypocritical. Today’s efforts to undermine the First Amendment are very real. Far too much is at stake for conservatives to abandon its defense.

Last week, conservatives flocked to a congressional hearing questioning the college campus culture of “safe spaces” and “microaggressions.” But can they condemn curtailments of free academic speech if they harbor hopes of punishing newspapers for content of which they disapprove?

Such hypocrisy also undermines the moral high ground to which conservatives appeal on the issue of religious freedom.

The viewpoint that conservative respondents expressed in this poll is surely motivated by a perception that the media have been unfair to President Trump. That is partly true. But it is unprincipled to respond by displaying a contempt for the Constitution that is normally the preserve of Democrats. It was Democrats who in 2014 voted in the Senate to weaken the First Amendment in the name of campaign finance reform.

There are practical considerations too. After Trump’s election victory, conservatives pointed out that former President Barack Obama’s abuse of executive power had paved the way for a high-handed executive under Trump. Have those same conservatives forgotten that they should never take more power than they would be willing to see later exercised by President Elizabeth Warren?

Any judicial mechanism to punish the press would soon be used against conservative media. This is how such legal structures are used in other countries that don’t have a First Amendment. Canadian freedoms, for example, have languished under the baneful judgments of “human rights” panels that have subjected opinion writers to show trials. Do conservatives really want that?

This is a good moment to remind conservatives that their commitment to the First Amendment and all of its freedoms must be complete and as close to absolute as reason allows. The First Amendment is the envy of the world and a model for the world. It repeatedly frustrates the classic ambition of the tyrant, who wishes to attain power and then silence dissenting voices.

Without a First Amendment or a similar guarantee to free political speech and opinion, the election of leaders becomes a charade. Thomas Jefferson recognized this when he wrote in a 1787 letter, “[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”