by Bret Swanson
Real Clear Politics
In an MSNBC interview last Monday, Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was contemplating a staggering dilemma. He noted that Facebook had performed a bit better in 2020 than in 2016 at suppressing inconvenient election content, but it still is not adequately policing the ideas of its 3 billion users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg “profoundly believes in free speech,” Coll lamented. “And,” Coll continued,
those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism. And what do we do about that? As reporters, we march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered, as if they were going to win the day. And what we’re seeing is that because of the scale of this alternate reality … our facts, our principles, our scientific method, it isn’t enough. So what do we do?