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Sinclair Says Kimmel Suspension is Not Enough, Calls on FCC and ABC to Take Additional Action
(marketchameleon.com)
Hey so I just wanna make one point about this that a lot of people aren't going to like
Whenever I said that Substack should be willing to host Nazi blogs, and it's kind of a shame IMO that the whole internet made them partially-stop-but-not-really, one of the things that the crowd of people that always formed to shout at me would be shouting is "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE FIRST AMENDMENT IT'S A PRIVATE BUSINESS THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT IT'S NOT THE GOVERNMENT"
And so what I would say is, free speech is a principle. Everyone gets to talk, no one gets shut out of the marketplace. It doesn't mean anyone has to host speech they don't want to host, but especially in our money-controls-the-means-of-informational-production society, you do have to worry in some sense about the slippery slope of deciding that some people need to be fully or mostly locked away by private business from the machinery of speaking their mind.
It happens that the text of the first amendment applies only to the government (and, in this case, Sinclair is working so hand-in-glove with the actual fascist government that it hardly matters anyway). But it doesn't mean that the principle of free speech stops outside Washington, DC. It applies on Substack, it applies on Lemmy, it applies on cable TV, in general there's a virtue in respecting people's ability to say their stuff (within certain baseline limits) without deciding for them whether the opinion they want to say is acceptable to you.
I don't think the situations are equivalent of course, or even close to. Substack banning Nazis might arguably be within the parameters of just safeguarding us all from the paradox of tolerance and fine. Sinclair banning Kimmel is much worse than that, and it's a quasi-governmental decision they're upholding anyway, it's not just a private business decision. The point I'm trying to make though is "it's a private business so they can censor whoever they want" isn't really the rhetorical slam-dunk that some people seem to feel like it should be, and this is a good situation to point to for why that's sometimes an important principle.
Bring on the shouting now, I guess