by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
…and, of course, the media ignores his promise to protect social media companies from government censors. Why? Because Trump likes speech (does he ever!) but he hates the media.
Reporters spend a lot of time warning Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution and civil liberties.
They spend less time – okay, let’s be honest, no time – covering him when he promises to protect the First Amendment. As he did at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, when he said he would stop the kind of government pressure on social media companies that forced Twitter to censor and ban me three years ago:
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I will bring back free speech in America… I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.
Given the power of social media companies to shape opinion, and Washington’s influence over them thanks to the law known as Section 2301, a promise to limit pressure on them is huge. At this moment, it is arguably the most important step any president can take to protect the First Amendment.
Yet Trump’s pledge received basically no coverage in the mainstream legacy media.
In contrast, his occasional calls for a Constitutional amendment to make burning the American flag illegal regularly produce complaints in the media that Trump doesn’t understand free speech. (I’m not in favor of Trump’s flag-burning proposal. But suggesting an amendment to ban an act the Constitution now protects is the opposite of disrespecting it. It signals Trump’s understanding that neither he nor Congress can ban flag-burning unless the Constitution is changed.)
So why won’t the media give Trump his due on free speech?
In part because legacy media outlets are aggrieved that the rise of social media has stolen their power to set the terms of debate. X in particular can set the news agenda in a way that even the most powerful legacy outlet cannot (as was obvious last fall, when Bill Ackman and X forced a reckoning over the fact that American universities hate free speech – except when it is antisemitic).
But there media’s unwillingness to give Trump credit for his stand against censorship comes out of a more particular animus as well.
And it can be found in the ellipsis in Trump’s statement below:
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