Donald Trump has been booted from Twitter for inciting violence, but he still has the nuclear codes with which he can do more than incite violence. And the power to order the military into action. Pundits can decry this seeming anomaly and bluster about the irony, but this strange place we find ourselves brings us back to the essence of what it means to have freedom of speech and what responsibilities are tied to the exercise of free speech.
Twitter is exercising its freedom of speech by finally becoming a classic gate keeper, something we were told was so passé as to be amusing. But that is what we need and have needed for decades in the media. Someone should be in charge of public discussion. Who that is, how they exercise that power is all debatable and fixable. Personally, I miss Walter Cronkite. But rather than have the debate and make the eternal alterations that are needed every day, with the mutation of the Internet platform into social media we basically threw up our hands and said true freedom is having everyone (meaning no one) in charge. We are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. But instead of a field of clover being mismanaged, we have in this 21st century media example ploughed under public discourse with layers of bullshit and are for some reason committed to calling it a fertile place for expression.
The marketplace of ideas needs consumer protections every bit as much as the consumer marketplace. But we quit demanding high quality content, are unwilling to pay for it, even though its cost might be as minor as exposing our tender sensibilities to advertising, and let ourselves be led around by “influencers” who tell us how to make chili, do make up, and most tragically transact the business of democracy. And here the ads we get would make the authors of “The Hidden Persuaders” spin in their Betamax graves.
For years, I was a Gatekeeper in a very minor way. High School newspaper editor, college newspaper editor, local reporter, community newspaper reporter, eventually a regional business editor. I covered things I thought people needed to know, things that I thought were interesting. I wanted my outlet to be read, respected, looked to for wisdom. There is no perfect way to be a media Gatekeeper. You can have your standards and a finely honed sense of fairness, but you may not hear every voice and your ingrained attitudes may cause you to ignore some voices. And you may be pressured to look the other way or distracted by the circus’ high wire act when the story that needs to be told is the mistreatment of animals But if you remain open and never become too set in believing what it important, you can do more good than harm.
For a Gatekeeper, that is as good as it imperfectly gets. In college I was being trusted with these decisions at the age of 19. That says less about my innate brilliance than it does about how much the whole gatekeeping thing was cultural expression on autopilot. I covered a lot of things that might have been considered daring (Hey we were all under the influence of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers in the late 70s.) But still many folks found me tame. The editor a few years before decided that the most important issue in the country was the trial of the Native American leaders accused of shooting federal agents in South Dakota. Although her college paper was located in Portland, Ore. this did stop her from exercising her Gatekeeper speech. She largely ignored all local topics and blasted news of the trial every week, She traveled there herself and that raised all sorts of hell cause she did so with student fee revenue that helped fund the paper. So, me delving into the cafeteria and finding rate feces in the chili and giving voice to an assortment of campus malcontents was pretty tame.
But the key here is responsibility. A Gatekeeper owns the gate and what passes through it. My predecessor was fired as editor and faced some fraud charges for the travel expenses. If you publish something really poorly done, insensitive, inciteful or just plain dumb, you get called on it. They take away your keys to the gate.
You want to have standards so you can defend your decisions. How you create and then apply these standards can reveal many of the ingrained prejudices you don’t even know you have. As a good Gatekeeper you are trained to sluice out these prejudices, but in the meantime –because you let stuff through the gate every day—you are essentially the enforcer of these prejudices. If you are writing the first draft of history, even if you are covering a faculty senate meeting, then you are the voice of the current culture when you write your lead. In the 1960s, it was common for a newspaper to identify a speaker at a public meeting by race. I remember when Stokley Carmichael came to town in the late 60s he was identified as a “colored speaker,” which was one thing he definitely was not.
When I was starting out covering local government in the early 1980s my paper’s style guide called for me to ascertain whether a female speaker was Miss or Mrs. Or Ms. Of course, all men were Mister. I was enforcing this when people got up the speak at the planning board. More than once, my editor dropped a quote from a woman because I did not track her down after her testimony to ask her how she wanted to be addressed. I didn’t do my job; her voice was lost. Likewise, I might designate every woman who spoke as a Ms, That was easier for me and an attempt to strike a blow for feminism, circa 1982. Yet if I did that too broadly, I could well be called on the carpet by a nice old lady who might tell me she has been married to Donald Bentley for 42 years and you have no right to call me anything else than Mrs. Donald Bentley!
This is fairly small beer compared to Trump’s nuclear codes, but it was a process (more women and people of color in the newsrooms helped) and over the years how people were identified became less sexist and racists. Were we covering a full range of issues? Nope. Never have, never will. Was it at least kind of fair and able to adjust? Here I risk being defrocked as unwoke, but I think so. Like American democracy, it is the worst possible system—except for all the other systems.
Prevailing Gatekeeper wisdom is that I have exceed 1,000 words and must come to a halt. However, I will complete this assault on current standards soon.
Wonderfullest Things 