Why Was the U.S. Government Suppressing Speech and Press?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns suppression of speech and press by the U.S. government. According to an article by Gabe Kaminsky published in The Daily Signal, the Global Engagement Center (GEC) lost its congressional funding. The office was once housed within the State Department to “thwart disinformation and misinformation.” 

The GEC was founded in 2016 as a “product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism,” but it “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States,” according to Kaminsky. Here is his explanation of how it happened.

Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClear Politics.

My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push adversarial narratives’ and the pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”

In turn, these revelations and others culminated in a high-level pressure campaign in December that resulted in the GEC losing out on a one-year lifeline through a congressional spending package.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy joined President-elect Donald Trump in demanding that House Speaker Mike Johnson – who had initially brokered a controversial deal to allow the GEC to continue to receive more of your tax dollars – remove the pro-GEC provision. Once this powerful trio came out against more GEC funding, the nail was squarely in the coffin. It didn’t help Johnson that conservative lawmakers with clout in Trump World such as Dan Bishop, Trump’s pick for a high-ranking role at the Office of Management and Budget, fervently opposed the bill.

Soon, the bill was dead. And the GEC with it….

While the GEC is no more, the employees who helped lead the office over the years are being reassigned elsewhere in the U.S. government, likely within the State Department, the agency said in a recent court filing.

The GEC’s failure to win reauthorization is a further vindication of our reporting on its seemingly unlawful activities.

But make no mistake: We will be watching to see where the federal officials accused in court of facilitating “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation” end up next on the taxpayers’ dime. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Politically Correct Police

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the freedom to speak and to publish personal thoughts. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that Americans have freedom to speak and freedom of press. In the current politically-correct world, there are people who believe that certain things should not be said and try to enforce their belief by police action.

            C. Douglas Golden reports that a 75-year-old woman in England wrote something on her blog that brought attention from Suffolk Police. It seems that Margaret Nelson, a former teacher and journalist, was under the impression that gender is biological. She wrote on her blog that “gender is fashionable nonsense.”

            Nelson’s blog post discussed her intention to donate her body to science upon her death. She noted that the aspiring scientists would see her body as a female body no matter how she identified her gender. “So no, in life or in death, trans women are not women, no matter how many times you say it’s so…. It’s simply impossible to change your sex.”    

   

            It seems that the police – the actual police and not the thought police like in 1984 – did not like what Nelson wrote. She received a telephone call from a policewoman with a warning. Nelson was told that her words “could have upset or offended transgender people.” The policewoman asked Nelson to remove the offending posts and tweets and to stop writing that kind of stuff.

            The internet is good for a lot of things, and it came to Nelson’s rescue. When the news got out to her supporters, they raised an outcry that reached the ears of the police. They issued a public apology and a personal apology.

“We accept we made a misjudgment in following up a complaint regarding the blog,” a statement read, according to the Ipswich Star.

“As a result of this we will be reviewing our procedures dealing with such matters. We are sorry for any distress we may have caused in the way this issue was dealt with, and have been in contact with the woman who wrote the blog to apologize.”

            The above incident happened in England, and England seems to be further down the slippery slope than the United States. However, American freedom to speak and publish is under constant threat from the same kind of forces, and this same type of error could happen here. The only way to prevent such a thing happening in the United States is for Americans to realize that it could happen here and to stay alert to defend against it.

Freedom of Press

                Freedom of Press is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Do we actually have this freedom, or has it been taken away?  Are our newspapers, etc. free to print the real news or are they being told what to print?

                Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson used to work for CBS News. She resigned last month under some questionable circumstances.  She was recently interviewed on “Media Buzz” by Howard Kurtz, the host.  She said that the Obama administration has had a “chilling effect” on reporting and has applied pressure on her bosses.  “I didn’t run into that same kind of sentiment (at CBS) as I did in the Obama administration when I covered the Bush administration very aggressively.”

                Attkisson continued, “It never runs.  Or it dies the death of a thousand cuts, as some of us say.  If it’s something they don’t want, it will be changed and revised and shortened and altered so much that it’s a shadow of its former self if it does air.”

                While explaining that calls have come from the White House under other administrations when they did not like a particular story, Attkisson said the pressure coming from the White House under the Obama administration is different.  “There is pressure coming to bear on journalists for just doing their job in ways that have never come to bear before.”

                Attkisson was investigating the Fast and Furious scandal and the Benghazi terror attacks.  She was one of the few reporters that were not following the talking points put out by the administration.  She resigned because of frustration over her perceived liberal bias at CBS News.

                Apparently, the federal government has had some control over what was printed for several administrations.  Is the Obama administration more or less controlling than the Bush or the Clinton or even the Reagan administration?  The bottom line is, if the government is controlling what is being printed, we have already lost our Freedom of Press.

Freedom of Press

                The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday comes from the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:  “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press….”  This clause guarantees the right of Americans to have a free press.

                “Freedom of the press has been a difficult right to protect and preserve.

                “Almost from the moment that the art of printing began to be a significant cultural influence, efforts were exerted to gain control of its use by the king or the central government.  For example, Henry VIII (1509-1547) took absolute control of the press, both as to who could print and what could be printed.  When Cromwell ruled during the period of the Lone Parliament, the same control continued.  By 1758, however, freedom of the press had been established to the point where Blackstone could say, `Every freeman has an undoubted right to say what sentiments he pleases before the public….  But if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his temerity.’”  (See W. Cleon Skousen in The Making of America – The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, pp. 688-689.)

                According to Eugene Volokh at The Heritage Foundation, “there is little definitively known about “ what “the Framers meant by `freedom of speech, or of the press’?”  He stated that “today’s free speech and free press law is not much influenced by original meaning” but “is mostly the creature of the experience and thinking of the twentieth century.”  He listed nine rules about freedom of speech/press, which apply to most of the Bill of Rights. 

                1. The “free speech/press guarantee restricts only government action, not action by private employers, property owners, householders, churches, universities, and the like.”

                2. The “free speech/press guarantee applies equally to federal and state governments, which includes local governments as well as all branches of each government….”

                3. “The free speech and the free press clauses have been read as providing essentially equal protection to speakers and writers, whether or not they are members of the institutional press, and largely regardless of the medium – books, newspapers, movies, the Internet – in which they communicate.  Newspapers enjoy no more and no fewer constitutional rights than individuals.  The one exception is over-the-airwaves radio and television broadcasting, which has for historical reasons been given less constitutional protection….”

                4. “The free speech/press guarantee also extends to any conduct that is conventionally understood as expressive – for instance, waving a flag, wearing an armband, or burning a flag…”

                5. “The free speech/press guarantee extends not just to political speech but also to speech about religion, science, morality, social conditions, and daily life, as well as to art and entertainment….”

                6. “The free speech/press guarantee extends to all viewpoints, good or evil.  There is no exception, for instance, for Communism, Nazism, Islamic radicalism, sexist speech, or `hate speech,’ whatever that rather vague term may mean….”

                7.  “There is, however, a small set of rather narrow exceptions to free speech protection:  a) Incitement…, b) False statements of fact…, c) Obscenity…, d) Child pornography…, e) Threats…, f) Fighting words…, g) Speech owned by others…, h) Commercial advertising….”

                8. “All of the preceding rules apply to restrictions that relate to what the speech communicates – to the tendency of the speech to persuade people, offend them, or make them feel unsafe.  Content-neutral restrictions that relate to the noncommunicative impact of speech – for instance, noise, obstruction of traffic, and so on – are easier to justify.  The test for content-neutral restrictions is complicated, but the key point is that the government may generally impose content-neutral `time, place, and manner restrictions’ so long as those restrictions leave open ample alternative channels for communication….”

                9. “Finally, all of the preceding rules apply to restrictions that are imposed by the government acting as sovereign and backed by the threat of jail terms, fines, or civil liability.  They also apply to the government controlling what is said in `traditional public fora,’ such as parks, streets, sidewalks, or the post office.  But when the government is acting as, for instance, (a) employer, (b) K-12 educator, (c) proprietor of government property other than traditional public fora, (d) subsidizer, (3) speaker, or (f) regulator of the airwaves, it has broader (though not unlimited authority….”

                “Free speech/press law is sometimes called the tax code of constitutional law.  The discussion above suggests how complex the law is, but while some of the complexity may be needless, much of it is inevitable.  Communication is in many ways the most complicated of human activities, and no simple rule can properly deal with all the different kinds of harms that it can cause – or all the different kinds of harms that restricting communication can cause.”  (See The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, pp. 311-315.)