The myth of conservative censorship
JUNIOR MWEMBA: In 2015, Kanye West was set to close out the Billboard Music Awards. Yeezy’s fans were eager to see the Chicago rapper perform two of his most recent hit singles, “All Day” and “Black Skinhead.” Instead, without warning, ABC censored more than a minute of Kanye’s highly anticipated performance.
In the days that followed, Mr. West’s representatives were quick to issue a statement asserting that “Kanye West was grossly over-censored... non-profane lyrics were muted for over 30-second intervals... his (Kanye’s) voice and performance were seriously misrepresented.”
According to TMZ, the show’s producers claimed they were unaware Ye would perform the explicit versions of his songs because he’d chosen to skip his dress rehearsal. Their reaction: “He’s Kanye. What are we supposed to do?”
To be fair, as we all know, Kanye is the same antagonistic rapper who, at the 2009 MTV VMA’s, infamously interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech and proclaimed that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” As if to top himself, West proceeded to make derogatory remarks, aimed directly at Taylor, in his 2016 hit song “Famous.” The lyrics included a sexual presumption based on the notion that it was actually West’s 2009 outburst, not Taylor’s talent, that made T-Swift famous.
To take things even further, Kanye subsequently went Twitter happy, stating that “First thing is I’m an artist and as an artist I will express how I feel with no censorship,” before claiming that it was actually Taylor Swift who birthed the idea behind the lyrics, before claiming that the entire controversy was an attack on his “art.”
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. I’m 99% certain this didn’t occur, but who’s to say the GOP apparatus didn’t make a trek out to Mr. West’s sprawling Wyoming ranch to make copies of his playbook? After all, it’s the same tactics that have been routinely employed: make controversial and inflammatory remarks, vehemently deny you did anything wrong and double down, then attempt to flip the script by claiming you’re the victim.
Censorship has emerged as one of the hottest issues in D.C. this year. But even though we’ve reached boiling point, the stove temperature has been steadily rising for quite some time now. Not surprisingly, the most involved cook in the kitchen was and is Former President Donald Trump.
Let’s not kid ourselves; we’d be foolish not to recognize that it was primarily Former President Trump who diligently kept turning up the heat. It was Former President Trump who continually attacked the legitimacy of American media and gave rise to the terms “mainstream media,” “lamestream media,” and “fake news.” It was Former President Trump who purported that conservative voices were being drowned out, knowingly suppressed and purposely silenced by the majority of American media outlets and communications platforms.
Look no further than March of 2019, when Former President Trump accused Big Tech of harboring liberal biases, claiming that they harbor hatred “for a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election.”
Following Former President Trump’s lead, other members of the GOP followed suit. During a June 2020 interview with Fox & Friends, Texas Senator Ted Cruz stated that “They’re (Big Tech) silencing conservatives and amplifying the voices they agree with.”
In October 2020, four Republican Congressmen, Ken Buck (Colorado), Doug Collins (Georgia), Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Andy Biggs (Arizona) released a report entitled “The Third Way: Antitrust Enforcement in Big Tech” as a response to a year-long investigation into Big Tech that the House Judiciary Subcommittee conducted on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative law. Rep. Collins said, “For too long, Big Tech has abused its dominance to engage in anticompetitive behavior and censor conservative voices...” Rep. Gaetz added “These predatory companies have used their vast size to unfairly harm competition and consumers. This has had many negative effects, including the widespread censorship of conservative voices...”
This past fall, Republicans jumped at the chance to voice their displeasure about Section 230, a piece of legislation passed on a bipartisan basis during the Clinton years. During a hearing in late October 2020, Republican Senators accused the leaders of Twitter, Facebook and Google of censorship. According to The New York Times, “The event had been billed as a discussion about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects social media companies from liability for what their users post and is regarded as sacrosanct by the platforms. But the hearing’s barbed exchanges pointed to how the debate over online speech has become increasingly divided, with the companies caught in the middle. According to a tally by the New York Times, of the 81 questions asked by Republicans, 69 were about censorship and the political ideologies of the tech employees responsible for moderating content. Democrats asked 48 questions, mostly about regulating the spread of misinformation related to the election and the coronavirus pandemic.”
Members of the party of Reagan would like us to believe that they are engaged in all-out warfare for the right to speak their mind. There’s just one problem though: what they’ve been alleging is unequivocally false. First, analysis conducted in 2020 by Politico found that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users share right-wing social media content more than ten times as often as liberal content. Every day, most of the popular Facebook posts in the U.S. come from conservative pages, including Fox News, The Daily Wire and Newsmax.
In the most startling rebuke of conservatives’ claims, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a comprehensive report in February that concluded “the claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” The report went on to state that “No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons or that searches are being manipulated to favor liberal interests.”
The report points out that conservative news outlets dominate when it comes to Facebook interactions, with Fox News and Breitbart leading the pack.
Even outside of NYU’s report, a recent study completed by ETH Zurich highlighted the impact Fox News can have on local newspaper coverage, concluding that “exposure to Fox News Channel in the market of a local newspaper increases the linguistic similarity of the newspaper content to Fox News shows, relative to shows on other news networks.”
Ironically, the very mechanisms Republicans claim are undermining their voices are the same mechanisms that played a leading role in Trump’s 2016 Presidential victory. During a 2016 post-election interview with 60 Minutes, Trump stated that “The fact that I have so much power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent.” Brad Parscale, Trump’s former digital campaign chief, told Wired just after the 2016 election that “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” During a 2017 interview with Fox Business, Trump said “I doubt I would be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest with you.”
Well, if we’re being honest, we’d acknowledge that conservatives’ claims of censorship are overshadowed by the fact that conservative culture has permeated American society for decades. Take The Bachelor, for example, a show I despise for its outsize impact on my Twitter timeline. It was only until recently that the show’s producers even thought to highlight someone non-white and who didn’t fit the background of someone who could’ve been in a fraternity in the SEC. Honestly, it would exhaust me to list the extensive number of conservative-leaning shows that have dominated American television. Laguna Beach and The OC both portrayed White, rich, privileged culture, all set amidst a county that was viewed as a bastion of Republican strength for years. Was there a myriad of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints portrayed in Dawson’s Creek or One Tree Hill? And don’t even get me started on 7th Heaven.
The fact of the matter is that it’s been conservatives who’ve used their platform, their microphones and their smartphones to push misinformation, conspiracy theories and lies. After all, it was conservatives who pushed the bold-faced lie that Former President Obama was born in Kenya. It was conservatives who claimed that it was actually Antifa, not Trump supporters, who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. It’s conservatives who still claim, without evidence, that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Today, an outspoken QAnon supporter by the name of Marjorie Taylor Greene sits in the House chamber.
According to The Washington Post, Trump lied over 30,000 times as President. However, based on NYU’s aforementioned report, “the platforms previously had given Trump a notably wide berth because of his position, seeking to appease him, despite his demagogic and routinely false claims.”
It would be a massive mistake to expound on the GOP’s increasing acceptance of disinformation, fabrications and falsehoods without mentioning Alex Jones. The creator of Infowars, Mr. Jones played a significant role in helping to elect Donald Trump in 2016.
Of course, it would be unimaginable to think that during 2016, the Trump campaign wasn’t already fully aware of Mr. Jones’ previous assertions. As a refresher: Mr. Jones had previously claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was a government conspiracy, that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government conspiracy and that Democrats were secretly leading a child sex trafficking operation out of the basement of a pizza shop in D.C.
From my vantage point, it seems the argument from conservatives is essentially that censorship shouldn’t exist at all. But that notion is deeply flawed. Should we allow powerful voices to spread falsehoods with no repercussions? Should there be no line? Let’s remember, many of the world’s most heinous crimes occurred as a result of the spread of false propaganda. Take Rwanda, for example. The 1994 civil war that ultimately led to the deaths of over 1 million Rwandans, in just 100 days, began with a steady stream of lies delivered by leaders of the Hutu ethnic majority over a radio station.
I’m not convinced that conservatives sincerely want to have a fair, honest conversation about censorship. Because if they did, the catalog of evidence illustrating that the federal government has, quite diabolically, sought to censor and silence voices from communities of color would be a part of the conversation. And we wouldn’t solely focus on allegations that some members of the FAANG stock group are intentionally stripping members of one political party of their voices.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll recap: In the 1960’s, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI engaged in an intense campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. and his work. The FBI also sought to get Billie Holiday to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” an iconic and deeply moving single for its imagery and metaphorical description of the lynching’s of Black people.
As if that wasn’t enough, the FBI even helped to orchestrate the assassination of Black Panther Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton, all behind the veil of “national security.” In a speech in 1968, J. Edgar Hoover said “The Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security. Our counterintelligence program must prevent the rise of a Black messiah from among their midst.”
Republicans can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim that they’re being censored, while in the same breath, they’re seeking to censor others. Like telling LeBron James to shut up and dribble, telling Fortune 500 corporations to stay out of politics, telling Lil Nas X to make more family friendly content and feigning outrage toward Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. Not to mention the fact that Republican legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states that would disproportionately stifle the voices of BIPOC voters.
Where is the governance? Where is the commitment to the implementation of policies meant to benefit the American public? Let’s face it, Republicans, for 11 years now, have claimed they would lay out a comprehensive healthcare plan to replace Obamacare. Infrastructure week during the Trump years became a long-running joke and Betsy Devos, Trump’s Education Secretary, was overwhelmingly disliked by thousands of teachers across the country for her out-of-touch educational policies.
Even with COVID-19 raging across the U.S., the GOP didn’t even bother to develop a platform leading up to the 2020 RNC, choosing not to address how the party would contain the virus. Republicans, without a second thought, decided that articulating detailed policies to solve America’s most pressing problems paled in comparison to simply boarding the entire party onto the Trump train.
Republicans need to stop crying wolf and begin building the party into a facts-based entity. The incessant act of self-victimization is highly annoying, if not infuriating. Conservatives used to position themselves as champions of fiscal responsibility, opponents of authoritarianism and proponents of free market economics. I have no idea what the party stands for now. Do you?
Junior Mwemba grew up in Midland, MI and is a second-year MBA student in the McDonough School of Business.