After Jimmy Kimmel was suspended nearly two months ago for allegedly making light of Charlie Kirk’s death, many liberals have noted this irony: While Republicans had framed themselves as the party of free speech and fierce opposition to cancel culture, they are now engaged in a campaign to discipline and ostracize any critics of Charlie Kirk. Some Democrats have gone further, even attempting to argue that their party should be viewed as the party of free speech. However, I believe that Democrats need to do more to convince the general public that they are truly the party of free speech.
To clarify, I do not subscribe to the conservative idea that the Democratic Party is controlled by a group of anti-free speech progressives. This idea is quite popular amongst former Democrats who embraced Trump’s Republican Party, including Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bari Weiss. All of these people, however, had no qualms about the Trump administration’s campaign against pro-Palestine activists, and some, such as Elon Musk, also actively encouraged repressing Kirk’s critics in the wake of his death. Moreover, Kirk was hardly an unflinching advocate of freedom of speech, as his website, Truthout, identified professors that supposedly disseminated left-wing propaganda.
However, liberals need to reformulate their earlier stance on freedom of speech if they want to expand their electorate appeal in 2028. First, they must emphasize that liberal online activists in the past were wrong to encourage traditional and social media companies to censor certain viewpoints. After facing internal backlash from staffers, The New York Times labeled an op-ed published by Republican Senator Tom Cotton as “failing to meet editorial standards.” In the June 2020 op-ed, Cotton called for troops to be sent in to put down Black Lives Matter protests. When media corporations removed posts and articles published by individuals linked with extreme, often conservative viewpoints, liberal political journalists, including CNN contributor AJ Willingham, suggested that cancel culture was just the “free market at work.”
While I found Cotton’s argument that troops should violently put down peaceful protests to be heinous, Willingham’s idea that the free-market can exclude certain ideas has clearly boomeranged on liberal commentators. Recently, The Washington Post allegedly utilized this line of logic to fire its last full-time Black opinion columnist Karen Attiah after she suggested that Kirk viewed Black women as incapable of holding serious jobs.
While Attiah was clearly punished more severely than Cotton, both cases involved media corporations engaging in retroactive censorship to stem public backlash. Moreover, both cases involved media companies justifying their decisions to engage in censorship by accusing the authors of publishing misinformation. Unlike ABC’s suspension of Kimmel, The Washington Post fired Attiah because it was afraid of public backlash rather than official retaliation from the Federal Communications Commission. By arguing in the past that corporations have a right to censor controversial viewpoints, certain liberal commentators have inadvertently given media corporations the justification to censor Democratic voices in the aftermath of Kirk’s assasination.
While conservatives will never admit their hypocrisy, Democrats should emphasize that corporations have a responsibility to publish differing viewpoints regardless of whether they are conservative or liberal. Moreover, the line of logic that corporations should be allowed, or even encouraged, to censor certain voices is problematic, given the Trump administration’s ability to manipulate media institutions. One should look no further than the recent right-wing takeover of CBS to see why liberals should be more skeptical of media institutions’ commitment to democracy.
Recently, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of the media company Paramount (owner of CBS News) to Skydance, which is a corporation led by CEO David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison and the co-founder of Oracle Corporation. However, the purchase was only approved after the father-son duo agreed to make several concessions to the Trump administration. Namely, Paramount-Skydance announced that CBS would install Republican and Trump ally Kenneth Weinstein as ombudsman of CBS. As an ombudsman, Weinstein would primarily monitor for media bias and report any bias-related complaints to Paramount President Jeff Shell.
However, some critics have suggested that Weinstein actually would report directly to the Trump administration (Guardian). They noted that appointing a conservative ombudsman that would monitor for media bias was one of Trump’s explicit conditions.
While Trump’s FCC certainly pressured the Ellisons, both men realized that only the Trump administration’s FCC would have approved such a deal. In other words, the Ellison father-son duo was not motivated by fear of the Trump administration but rather by their own greed. But if liberals should condemn what the Ellisons are doing, conservative critics can just tell liberals that Skydance is exercising its freedom of choice — using the exact same rhetoric that liberals used five years ago. What’s more is that an undecided voter may be unable to tell the difference and falsely assume that both parties are equally opposed to freedom of speech.
On the other hand, some critics would note the pressure to remove Cotton’s The New York Times article did not come from Democratic Party officials but rather by the Times’ staffers. This was also the case for X, formerly known as Twitter, and its decision to de-platform Trump in 2021. By admitting that they were wrong to ‘allow’ corporations to limit the parameters of free speech, the Democratic Party would be admitting complicitly for something that they themselves were not directly responsible for. In contrast, the Republican Party leadership, including JD Vance, has openly called for the silencing of major left-wing groups and voices. Moreover, some critics argued that the deplatforming of Trump was a necessary exception as he was censored, not because he was conservative, but because of his willingness to incite violence on Jan. 6.
That being said, I believe that the Democratic Party must work to disabuse the notion that they are opposed to freedom of speech. Undecided voters will only accept that Democrats support free speech if Democratic leaders actively demonstrate that they are open to hearing viewpoints from all sides. From there, the Democratic Party can win back their credibility as the party of free speech, while simultaneously holding media institutions accountable in the Trump era.
