Thawing out the peaches

I'll conclude my discussion of freedom of speech with this. I don't know who first said it, but it's oft repeated, that freedom of the press pertains only to people who own one. Yeah, Blogger is free but I suspect I have many fewer readers than there are Fox News viewers. The vast majority of discourse in the metaphorical public square is mediated by for-profit corporations. Their main purpose is to make money, which they mostly do by selling eyeballs to advertisers. (Paid subscriptions are not generally a significant source of revenue for mass media, although they do matter for some special interest magazines.)

Now,, you can certainly sell eyeballs to advertisers by appealing to an ideologically distinct market segment. That's what Fox News does, and to some extent MSNBC, although most TV news operations try to claim neutrality, which is in fact impossible but we won't go into that now. But those operations are all content producers. They completely control their content, which they also create. Granted, there's some latitude for non-employees who they interview, but they get to decide who those are and who to have back. The First Amendment matters to them only because it means the government can't tell them what to say. It doesn't give you any right whatsoever to appear on their shows or have your views represented.

So-called social media like Twitter, however, are a different animal. Until the recent change of ownership, the managers' job was to try to make a profit for the shareholders. They weren't actually able to do that, but they were trying. Nearly all of their revenue comes from advertising, and in order to sell eyeballs to advertisers they had to try to exclude, or at least minimize content that would scare off their real customers, the advertisers. Business corporations that buy advertising generally don't have a problem with actual conservative content -- they advertise on Fox News, for example, and Sinclair's local stations. But they don't like to be associated with content that's going to offend a lot of their customers, such as Nazism, white supremacy, QAnon insanity, or outrageous lies. They didn't ban the Dumpster because he's conservative, which he in fact is not, his only ideology is narcissism. They banned him because he is a habitual and remorseless racist, liar and general all around asshole.

Now, you can certainly argue but what a social media company's content moderation should be. I actually have no idea what Muskmelon thinks he's trying to accomplish, but by opening up the site to Nazis, racists and lunatics, he's scared off advertisers. Which means he's going to keep losing money and presumably go out of business. So that's your Free Market™ at work. In fact the left and liberals have much less access to the corporate media than the right and conservatives. The corporate media are owned and run by rich people and so that's naturally who they favor. The liberal media™ is a myth perpetrated by endless howling from the right, which obviously you wouldn't believe in if the liberal media™ wasn't channeling their claim, which they are deathly afraid of for some reason..

But if you don't believe me and you don't like what's in the New York Times or CNN, just keep in mind that they aren't in business for their health. They're looking for an audience and giving it what they think it wants, within the limits acceptable to their advertisers. The only constitutional right in this whole discussion is the right of plutocrats to do what they want with their money, protected by the First Amendment. If you aren't wealthy, you don't have the same rights.