President Trump and his allies have gone to war with social media sites and digital communications platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Decrying supposed anti-conservative “bias,” Trump has even floated an Executive Order aimed at “Preventing Online Censorship,” that entails many new forms of government meddling with these private speech platforms. Section 230 is their crosshairs and First Amendment restraints are being thrown to the wind.

Various others have already documented the many legal things wrong with Trump’s call for greater government oversight of private speech platforms. I want to focus on something slightly different here: The surprising ideological origins of what Trump and his allies are proposing. Because for those of us who are old-timers and have followed communications and media policy for many decades, this moment feels like deja vu all over again, but with the strange twist that supposed “conservatives” are calling for a form of communications collectivism that used to be the exclusive province of hard-core Leftists.

To begin, the truly crazy thing about President Trump and some conservatives saying that social media should be regulated as public forums is not just that they’re abandoning free speech rights, it’s that they’re betraying property rights, too. Treating private media like a “public square” entails a taking of private property. Amazingly, Trump and his followers have taken over the old “media access movement” and given it their own spin.

Media access advocates look to transform the First Amendment into a tool for social change to advance specific political ends or ideological objectives. Media access theory dispenses with both the editorial discretion rights and private property rights of private speech platforms. Private platforms become subject to the political whims of policymakers who dictate “fair” terms of access. We can think of this as communications collectivism.

The media access movement’s regulatory toolkit includes things like the Fairness Doctrine and “neutrality” requirements, right-of-reply mandates, expansive conceptions of common carriage (using “public forum” or “town square” rhetoric), agency threats, and so on. Even without formal regulation, media access theorists hope that jawboning and political pressure can persuade private platforms to run more (or perhaps sometimes less) of the content that they want (or don’t) on media platforms.

The intellectual roots of the media access movement were planted by leftist media theorists like Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss in 1960s and 1970s, and later by Marxist communications scholar Robert McChesney. In 2005, I penned this short history of media access movement and explored its aims. I also wrote two old books with chapters on the dangers of media access theory and calls for collectivizing communications and media systems. Those books were: Media Myths (2005) and A Manifesto for Media Freedom (2008, w Brian C. Anderson). The key takeaway from those essays is that the media access movement comes down to control.

The best book ever written about dangers of media access movement was Jonathan Emord’s 1991, Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment. He perfectly summarizes their goals (and now Trump’s) as follows:

• “In short, the access advocates have transformed the marketplace of ideas from a laissez-faire model to a state-control model.”
• “Rather than understanding the First Amendment to be a guardian of the private sphere of communication, the access advocates interpret it to be a guarantee of a preferred mix of ideological viewpoints.
• “It fundamentally shifts the marketplace of ideas from its private, unregulated, and interactive context to one within the compass of state control, making the marketplace ultimately responsible to government for determinations as to the choice of content expressed.”

“This arrogant, elitist, anti-property, anti-freedom ethic is what drives the media access movement and makes it so morally repugnant,” I argued in that old TLF essay. That is still just as true today, even when it’s conservatives calling for collectivization of media.

It’s astonishing, yet nonetheless true, that the ideological roots of Trump’s anti-social media campaign lie in the works of those extreme Leftists and even media Marxists. He has just given media access theory his own unique nationalistic spin and sold this snake oil to conservatives.

There certainly could come a day where his opponents on the Left just take this media access playbook up again and suggest this is exactly what’s needed for Fox News and other right-leaning media outlets. If and when that does happen, Trump and other conservatives will have no one to blame but themselves for embracing this contemptible philosophical vision simply because it suited their short-term desires while they were in power.

I hope that conservatives rethink their embrace of communications collectivism, but I fear that Trump and his allies have already convinced themselves that the ends justify the means when it comes to advancing their causes or even just “owning the libs.” But there really is a strong moralistic slant to what Trump and many of his allies want. They think they are on the right side of history and that the opponents–including most media outlets and plaforms–are evil. Trump and his allies have repeatedly referred to the press as the “enemy of the American people” and endlessly lambasted social media platforms for not going along with his desires. This reflects a core tendency of all communications collectivists: a sort of ‘you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us’ attitude.

Steve Bannon scripted all this out back in 2018. Go back and read this astonishing CNN interview for a preview of what could happen next. Here’s the rundown:

>> Bannon said Big Tech’s data should be seized and put in a “public trust.” Specifically, Bannon said, “I think you take [the data] away from the companies. All that data they have is put in a public trust. They can use it. And people can opt in and opt out. That trust is run by an independent board of directors. It just can’t be that [Big Tech is] the sole proprietors of this data…I think this is a public good.” Bannon added that Big Tech companies “have to be broken up” just like Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts.” >> Bannon attacked the executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google. “These are run by sociopaths,” he said. “These people are complete narcissists. These people ought to be controlled, they ought to be regulated.” At one point during the phone call, Bannon said, “These people are evil. There is no doubt about that.” >> Bannon said he thinks “this is going to be a massive issue” in future elections. He said he thinks it will probably take until 2020 to fully blossom as a campaign issue, explaining, “I think by the time 2020 comes along, this will be a burning issue. I think this will be one of the biggest domestic issues.”

This is now Trump’s playbook. It’s incredibly frightening because, once married up with Trump’s accusations of election fraud and other imagined conspiracies, you can sense how he’s laying the groundwork to call into question future election results by suggesting that both traditional media and modern digital media platforms are just in bed with the Democratic party and trying to rig the presidential election. I don’t really want to think about what happens if this situation escalates to that point. These are very dark days for the American Republic.

One of the more troubling aspects of the contentious debate over Net neutrality regulation is the way some proponents have sought to cast Net neutrality as “the Internet’s First Amendment.” As a die-hard free speech advocate, I find this truly outrageous and a complete contortion of the true purpose of the First Amendment.  As I have argued here before, it is incredibly dangerous thinking that puts our real First Amendment liberties at stake by empowering a regulatory agency with more means of controlling online speech and expression. Simply stated, the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts the Federal Communications Commission in control of the Digital Economy.

On this point, I wanted to bring two things to your attention. The first is an outstanding address delivered today by Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, at a Media Institute event here in Washington, DC.  And the second is this new paper by my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin.

McSlarrow’s speech was entitled, “Net Neutrality: First Amendment Rhetoric in Search of the Constitution” and it squarely addressed the fundamental fallacy set forth by the Net neutralitistas when it comes to the First Amendment. “Whatever our present-day policy disagreements about net neutrality, or even differing politics, let’s not forget that the First Amendment is framed as a shield for citizens, not a sword for government,” he argued. “By its plain terms and history, the First Amendment is a limitation on government power, not an empowerment of government,” McSlarrow said. “And… if there’s one thing the Supreme Court has made clear, it’s that rules that directly restrict protected speech cannot be justified by a government interest that is merely hypothetical.”

Absolutely correct. And these views are buttressed by the comments of Barbara Esbin in her new paper, in which she argues that “Net Neutrality is not the First Amendment for the Internet.”  She continues:

Today we live in a world with no FCC-imposed network neutrality rules. Can anyone seriously maintain that the Internet’s potential for commercial, political, artistic, and social expression has been hobbled in this country? Or that diversity is lacking? It is far more likely that the Internet has thrived, as Congress has stated, in the absence of federal or state regulation.

“Nor has the evidence, amassed after years of trying, painted a picture of persistent market failure or consumer harms,” she argues.

Turning the First Amendment on Its Head

Both she and McSlarrow note that twisted rationales for Net neutrality “turn First Amendment protections on their head” by making private platforms and actors in the enemies of speech instead of the government, which has traditionally acted to curtail speech liberties and freedom of expression. And it has succeeded at times because the government has the coercive ability to imprison, fine or otherwise punish speakers in ways that no private media or communications platform can.

There’s also the question of whether Net neutrality regulation might constitute a form of “compelled speech.” As Barbara notes, “Under traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, the government compelling a speaker to speak or transmit a message that it does not wish to transmit is just as much a free speech infringement as it is to prevent a speaker from transmitting or posting messages it wishes to transmit or post.” She cites remarks delivered at a 2007 Progress & Freedom Foundation event by noted First Amendment scholar Lawrence Tribe on this issue, in response to a question about broadband ISP control of content delivered over their networks:

The general question that raises is the extent to which the government can, in effect, force media to act as common carriers, to be transparent, to force them simply to convey whatever content comes along. To the extent that someone, or an entity, is a content provider engaging in discretion is not simply an empty pipeline. It has the fundamental right of editorial discretion. For the government to tell that entity that it cannot exercise that right in a certain way, that it must allow the projection of what it doesn’t want to include, is a violation of its First Amendment rights.

The Madness of “Media Access” Theory

All this should seem logical to anyone who has taken a look at the plain language of the First Amendment. It could not be more clear when it says, “Congress shall make no law…”  There aren’t any caveats or footnotes. And the First Amendment most certainly was not intended as a tool for government to control the editorial discretion of private individuals or institutions. It was about restricting the power of the government to curtail speech and expression.

So how did this twisted theory of the First Amendment gain currency in Net neutrality circles? To answer that you need to go back to the 1960’s when a handful of liberal legal scholars began concocting a new theory of the First Amendment that eventually came to be known as the “media access” school of thinking. George Washington University law professor Jerome A. Barron’s 1967 Harvard Law Review article, “Access to the Press — a New First Amendment Right,” as well as the work of Yale University law professor Owen Fiss, gave rise to this new intellectual movement. Its goal, in essence, was to convert the First Amendment into a club to beat demands out of private media providers. Basically, these theorists wanted to expand “Fairness Doctrine”-like right-of-reply notions to newspapers, and simultaneously grant the government more leeway to use the First Amendment to alter media structures and outputs. As Fiss argued in a 1986 law review article, under the “media access” approach, a proper reading of the First Amendment requires “a change in our attitude about the state” such that we learn “to recognize the state not only as an enemy, but also as a friend of speech… [that should act] to enhance the quality of public debate.” (Iowa Law Review, Vol. 71, 1986, p. 1416).

Other left-leaning intellectuals and activists groups would come to integrate that logic into their work and public policy proposals. Now you know, for example, where the Media Access Project gets their name!  But many other regulatory-minded groups — Free Press, Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy, MoveOn.org, New America Foundation, and others — trace much of their intellectual heritage back to Barron, Fiss, and the other media access theorists. [Read my lengthy debunking of media access theory here.]

And now we have books being written with titles like Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age, by Dawn Nunziato of George Washington University. I’ll have a review of Nunziato’s disturbing new book up shortly, but suffice it to say, she has taken media access theory, put it on steroids, and brought it into the Information Age.  At least the media access old-timers could more reasonably use “media scarcity” as an excuse for their regulatory machinations. But Nunziato just dispenses with all that and instead conditions all the new regulation on “democratic participation” and other amorphous theories.

Will the Real Big Brother Please Stand Up

Indeed, with Nunziato’s book, we see how the seeds of misguided intellectual thinking sometimes spring into wild gardens in which the weeds slowly take over everything in sight.  This twisted conception of the First Amendment is so thoroughly ingrained in leftist media policy thinking today that even an abundant medium like the Internet is not exempt from potential regulations based on it despite the death of media scarcity. And that’s how we got to the point we are at today in the net neutrality regulatory debate, with many policymakers and activists groups painting private broadband operators as the supposed real Big Brother problem that the First Amendment must address.

Consider, for example, the comments then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made in 2006 regarding why she supports net neutrality regulation: “Each day on the Internet views are discussed and debated in an open forum without fear of censorship or reprisal.” As I noted at the time, when I read her statement I practically fell off my chair. It’s not just that Mrs. Clinton was asking us to believe in some asinine conspiracy theory about how broadband companies are supposedly out to censor our thoughts or engage in reprisals. (”Reprisals”? For what?) No, what really blew my mind here was the fact that Sen. Clinton had the chutzpah to declare that the private sector was somehow the real threat to online speech. After all, as I inventoried in that old essay, Sen. Clinton has led several notable efforts over the past decade to expand government regulation of television, video games, and even the Internet.

Where’s the Evidence? And How Would They Even Do It?

And yet Clinton and many other Net neutrality advocates continue to insist that it is the private sector, not the government, that is the real threat to our free speech rights. Practically speaking, these advocates of Net neutrality regulation have little to fear in this regard. It is almost impossible to believe that any Internet operator could limit speech or expression in the ways these regulatory advocates fear.  Unlike the government, which possesses the coercive power to completely foreclose all speech under threat of fine or imprisonment, the private sector lacks the ability to use force to bottle up speech or speakers. And even if private operators tried it, there would be hell for them to pay with the press, industry watchdogs, and their even subscribers. More importantly, there’s just no good business angle to censorship; they make more money by delivering more bits, not fewer. Finally, any attempt by one actor to stifle something becomes a prime incentive for another to offer it.

Tim Lee nailed all these points in an excellent paper from last year, “The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.” Tim noted:

Concerns that network owners will undermine free speech online are particularly misguided. Network owners have neither the technology nor the manpower to effectively filter online content based on the viewpoints being expressed, nor do profit-making businesses have any real incentive to do so. Should a network owner be foolish enough to attempt large-scale censorship of its customers, it would not only fail to suppress the disfavored speech, but the network would actually increase the visibility of the content as the effort at censorship attracted additional coverage of the material being censored.

I think that’s exactly right and, later in his paper (between pgs 22-3), Tim nicely elaborates about the “Herculean task” associated with any attempt by a broadband provider to “manipulate human communication.” Not only is it true, as Tim argues, that “no widescale manipulation would go unnoticed for very long,” but he is also correct in noting that the public and press backlash would be enormous.

Shield from Government or Sword for the Government?

But let’s get back to the principle of the matter at stake here because, for those of us who cherish the real First Amendment and seek to protect it, it is essential we not let regulatory advocates get away with their effort to convert it into something it isn’t and was never meant to be.  Jonathan Emord, author of the brilliant 1991 book, Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment, put his thumb on the real threat here: “In short, the [media] access advocates have transformed the marketplace of ideas from a laissez-faire model to a state-control model.” The ultimate danger of this twisted conception of the First Amendment, he noted, is that, “It fundamentally shifts the marketplace of ideas from its private, unregulated, and interactive context to one within the compass of state control, making the marketplace ultimately responsible to government for determinations as to the choice of content expressed.”  Or as Kyle McSlarrow noted in his speech today, these regulatory advocates are essentially saying that the First Amendment “a sword for government” instead of “a shield for citizens” from coercive government actions that would infringe our legitimate rights of free speech and expression.

In sum, “media access” philosophy and the regulatory approach its adherents counsel  is completely at odds with a proper understanding of the First Amendment.  Government — not the private sector — remains the true threat to our liberties.  And, most horrifyingly of all, empowering the state to use the First Amendment to regulate private actors will almost certainly backfire and result in more, not less, regulation of speech online.

I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney.  I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech and a free society.  That’s because, as media scholar Ben Compaine has noted, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.”  That’s exactly right and, more specifically, as I argued in my 2005 Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by taking the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets.  In other words, McChesney and the Free Press want an UnFree Press.  To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production.  And it begins, McChesney argues, by all of us having to give up this “sort of religious attachment to the idea of a ‘free-press'” from which we all suffer.

Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned.  But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.”  What exactly would all that mean in practice for media? In his 2002 book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”

If you want additional proof of his intentions, then I encourage you to read this lengthy interview with McChesney that appears in the new edition of The Bullet, an online newsletter produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.”  (If you ask me, there’s something strangely appropriate about a socialist newsletter named “The Bullet” in light of the millions of people who died while living under socialist tyranny!)  Anyway, let’s ignore that and focus on what neo-Marxist media reform entails according to McChesney.  Because never before has he laid his cards on the table as clearly as he does in this interview.

The “Struggle” for “Media Democracy”

In the interview, as in all his work, McChesney speaks repeatedly about the Marxist concept of “struggles,” which  usually refers to class struggles and worker struggles. But McChesney’s work focuses on “media democracy struggles” as part of an overall struggle for “social justice.”  He says:

Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.

In other words, media reform is part of The Big Struggle. The Big Struggle is the effort to overthrow free-market capitalism. And the struggle for “media democracy” is crucial to that, you see, because we are all just pawns whose minds are being manipulated by some far-off corporate puppet-masters in New York and L.A., who are, of course, just feeding us nothing but pro-capitalist propaganda 24/7.  Thus, we have to burn the village to save it, McChesney says:

Many say that corporate journalism, based on profit maximization, best serves a free and democratic society. The position is incorrect. The connection of capitalism to journalism, which has always been fraught with problems, has always been unstable. The relationship between capitalism, journalism, and democracy has never been a sure thing. In the U.S, the notion that capitalism is the natural steward of journalism and should be left alone to provide for a free and self-governing society refers to a period that began during the 19th century. This period ended when owners realized they could make a lot of money by turning journalism into big business. Corporations are not in a position to generate and pay for quality journalism. The news is not a commercial product. It is a public good, necessary for a self-governing society.

In other words, down with private media!  McChesney basically declares that the entire history of private media in America to be one gigantic case of market failure and must be abandoned.

Subsidies to “Save Journalism”

But what’s going to replace private media once McChesney and his media reformistas have moved the regulatory wrecking ball in?  In a nutshell, he wants massive state subsidization of the media:

Once we accept this [the supposed “public goods” nature of all media], we can talk about the kind of media policies and subsidies we want. What are the best ones? How should they be implemented? We are now trying to answer those questions and organize around them.

Herein lies one of the great ironies of McChesney’s work: He spends a great deal of time arguing that the entire history of American media has basically been one big government-created construct (monopolies, entry barriers, subsidies, etc), only to turn around and advocate massive state intervention and subsidies as a solution!  McChesney plays revisionist historian and even tries to paint Jefferson and Madison as media socialists because postal rates from the founding period on down have been reduced for print media mailings. Somehow, McChesney reads this to mean that “the U.S. state has always played a direct and indirect role in facilitating and legitimizing the corporate media system.”  Which is rubbish. The idea that postal subsidies have created “the corporate media system” is preposterous. McChesney is on stronger ground in arguing the state has occasionally helped foster and then protect monopolies, but that is a function of the very “public utility” regulatory regime that McChesney favors! [More on this point down below.]

Meanwhile, in true Rahm Emanual-ian “you-never-want-a-crisis-to-go-to-waste” fashion, the Free Press has started a new project to “Save the News” and move America “Toward a National Journalism Strategy” by endorsing a lot of the same regulations, subsidies, and tax credits that McChesney and John Nichols recently advocated in their Nation magazine essay, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers.” As I noted in my City Journal response to that essay back in March, you can file this all under “socializing media in order to save it,” complete with Soviet-style 5-year plans dictated by some faceless elite inside a Beltway bureaucracy. Oh, and there’s the little matter of $60 billion price tag that taxpayers will be left footing.  (But hey, what’s another $60 billion these days?)  Even Free Press favorite Dan Rather is on board with his plan to have President Obama give us “The News America Needs” by “form[ing] a commission to address the perilous state of America’s news media.”  Perhaps once the car commission folks get done driving the U.S. auto industry into the ground they can shift gears, so to speak, and see what they can do to steer journalism onto a supposedly better path.

Down with Advertising

If McChesney and Free Press don’t succeed in destroying private media with their regulatory plans, there’s always Plan B… bleed free market media operators and Internet companies dry by taking away their mother’s milk, advertising.  McChesney argues that “the Internet is increasingly hyper-commercialized” and it is “open[ing] our entire lives to 24/7 injections of advertising messages.”  Thus, wouldn’t you know it, yet another “struggle” is in order!

We need to organize against hyper-commercialism. This is an easy-sell for the Left. We understand that advertising is not something done by all people equally, but rather, done by a very small group of people working on behalf of multinational corporations. Advertising is commercial propaganda…  Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications.  […] There is a fundamental crisis when you are in a world that is entirely commercial, in terms of the integrity of speech and thought. We are at the tipping point and we need to struggle directly against it.

Struggle, struggle, struggle!

Of course, McChesney will have plenty of allies in this particular struggle as Washington continues to wage a war against advertising of all sorts. Of course, there really is no free lunch in this world and something will have to pay for serious news-gathering (and entertainment, for that matter). Of course, McChesney and his Free Press allies will, no doubt, respond that still more subsidies are in order!  There is, apparently, always someone else in their world to whom the buck can be passed.  [But I wonder: Who would be left to pay all the taxes needed to support public media if McChesney’s “struggle” to overthrow The Man succeeds??]

Net neutrality & Infrastructure Nationalization

And don’t for one minute think that McChesney and Free Press are only out for the old media operators.  They’re out for private broadband and Internet players as well.

When speaking about the centrality of Net neutrality regulation to this “struggle” and coming “revolution,” McChesney does a nice job reminding some of us why we have been so concerned about politicizing a debate over network engineering when he says: “What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility.”  Ah yes, because public utilities have been soooo efficient and innovative in other contexts!  Please.

In advocating increased regulation or state-ownership of communications networks or broadband companies and connections, McChesney seems utterly oblivious to the fact that the very state power he advocates on one hand is the same state power that private parties can corrupt on the other.  He says, for example, that “Our struggle to make the Internet into a public utility conflicts with the interests of telephone and cable firms,” because “Their power rests upon their ability to successfully buy off politicians.”  How does he not see the contradiction?  He’s certainly right to fear that public officials can be co-opted by private interests. (Read up on your public choice theory, buddy!)  But I suppose McChesney believes that his perfect socialist state will be immune to these pressures because it will be run by enlightened, public-minded philosopher kings… you know… like himself.  But that’s nonsense.  See my old essay on the fantasy of “Building a Better Bureaucrat” or Tim Lee’s old essay on “Real Regulators” for more details on why it never works out that way in practice. Or, better yet, since I know he would never read anything I penned on the subject, I encourage McChesney to take a hard look at the definitive 2-volume Economics of Regulation by a far more experienced progressive Democrat, Professor Alfred E. Kahn. In Kahn’s masterwork, you will find the following words of wisdom (and caution) from someone who spent a lifetime studying these issues:

When a commission is responsible for the performance of an industry, it is under never completely escapable pressure to protect the health of the companies it regulates, to assure a desirable performance by relying on those monopolistic chosen instruments and its own controls rather than on the unplanned and unplannable forces of competition. […] Responsible for the continued provision and improvement of service, [the regulatory commission] comes increasingly and understandably to identify the interest of the public with that of the existing companies on whom it must rely to deliver goods.

McChesney makes one final point about Net neutrality that is worth highlighting. When asked whether he had any reservations about making short-term alliances with new media companies or Internet operators such as Google, eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft in the push for Net neutrality regulations, McChesney says: “Absolutely.. But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances.” Nonetheless, he notes, ” the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.” And, so, the ends justify the means in terms of striking short-term alliances with those evil, blood-sucking capitalists.  I hope the folks at Google, eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft are reading McChesney’s radical thinking on communications policy and realize that he and his Free Press reformistas will eventually turn their sights on them just as soon as they are finished socializing the infrastructure layer of the Internet.

Conclusion: Against Media Tyranny

In a very strange sense, I admire Robert McChesney.  He is a man of principle.  And he isn’t ashamed to advocate his principles publicly (whereas some of his Free Press disciples do a very nice job disguising their true intentions).

That being said, McChesney’s principles are dangerous ones. Very dangerous.  They are antithetical to a free society, freedom of speech, and technological progress.  At its core, as I noted in my old essay, “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox,” the repugnant morality behind this “media access” movement is that nothing is truly yours.  “Media democracy” means everything is up for grabs.  Here’s how I put it in that old “soapbox” essay:

Imagine you built a platform in your backyard for the purpose of informing or entertaining your friends of neighbors. Now further imagine that you are actually fairly good at what you do and manage to attract and retain a large audience. Then one day, a few hecklers come to hear you speak on your platform. They shout about how it’s unfair that you have attracted so many people to hear you speak on your soapbox and they demand access to your platform for a certain amount of time each day. They rationalize this by arguing that it is THEIR rights as listeners that are really important, not YOUR rights as a speaker or the owner of the soapbox. That sort of scenario could never happen in America, right? Sadly, it’s been the way media law has operated for several decades in this country. This twisted “media access” philosophy has been employed by federal lawmakers and numerous special interest groups to justify extensive and massively unjust regime of media regulation and speech redistributionism. And it’s still at work today.

Indeed, McChesney has taken this old “media access” movement that Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss, Cass Sunstein and others pioneered long ago, and advanced it to a whole new level, and to its logical conclusion.  The aim is not just to co-opt someone else’s soapbox; it is to smash their soapbox into pieces. It is to tear the very fabric of the First Amendment into shreds and rebuild “media democracy” around the principles not of true freedom, but of state servitude.  You only have as much freedom to engage in speech, reporting, or entertaining as your media overlords will allow.  And God help you if any of it proves popular because then they will really want to crush you like an ant!

I’ll close this rant the same way I concluded my earlier “soapbox” rant:

This arrogant, elitist, anti-property, anti-freedom ethic is what drives the media access movement and makes it so morally repugnant. Freedom doesn’t begin by fettering the press with more chains, it begins by removing those that already exist and then erecting a firm wall between State and Press. The media access crowd has succeeded in breaching that wall with seven decades of misguided and unjust regulation of the press. The movement back toward a truly free press begins by understanding the error in their thinking, rejecting that reasoning, and then embracing, once again, the original vision of the First Amendment as a bulwark against government control of speech and the press.