The answer to that question is very much “no” and for a very good reason.
This arises from an article that popped up in one of my feeds about ex-UK PM Liz Truss calling for the abolition of state-funded media, such as the BBC in the UK and PBS in the US.1
She reportedly said “We need to be prepared to dismantle the left-wing bureaucracy. We need to be prepared to defund state media.”
I take her meaning to be that state media needs to be defunded because it propagates left-wing views. As I say in Truth, Lies Or Something Inbetween?, I have some sympathy with her view of state media being left-leaning, though I generally feel the BBC does a good job of political neutrality. The fact that politicians from the left also attack it for bias seems to support that.
And also with most of the media being privately owned by very rich people who use it to push right-wing views, having at least a few counterpoints to those views feels essential.
In effect, Truss is saying that she wants to restrict free speech when free speech is used to promote views she doesn’t agree with.
An interesting position to take when just a few months ago she complained that a banner of a lettuce with eyes was an attack on free speech.2 That was clearly a ridiculous claim, but what should we expect from such a ridiculous person?
In fairness her equivocal views on free speech aren’t unusual and seem to be shared by far too many politicians across the whole political spectrum. Those on the left can be just as hypocritical as those on the right and vice versa.
It’s not just politicians either. So often cancel culture seems to be nothing more than an effort to punish people for saying things we don’t like. And, while the right love to claim cancel culture is exclusively a movement of snowflakes on the left, the reality is that the snowflakes on the right are every bit as sensitive. In Take Them, Not Me we look at the Dylan Mulvaney backlash after the right got so crazy upset about a woman’s face being printed on a can of beer.
While that last incident showed the hate and nastiness that be unleashed online, calls to defund state media to silence the voice of the centre or the left as Truss appears to believe is potentially much more dangerous.
Whoever controls the media controls the truth.
That sounds a bit crazy, but that’s how the world works. If every news source we watch, listen to and read tells us that individual A is a threat to our way of life, we’re going to believe that even if individual A is trying to protect our way of life. The truth has been established regardless. We go into this in more depth in What Is Truth? if you’re looking to kill more time.
We can see this in action by considering Putin’s war in Ukraine. His regime has near total control over media channels available to ordinary Russians. So, despite potentially hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians having been killed or maimed in a pointless conflict, the war still enjoys considerable support among the Russian people. That’s because the truth about the war that they hear is very different to the truth about the war that we hear. Ukraine is run by a new breed of Nazis, like those who invaded the Soviet Union in World War 2, and this war is essential to keeping Russia safe.
We can see the power of the media to bend truth in the West too. British newspapers refer to inheritance tax as being the most unpopular tax. A government survey found 56% of Britons want the tax to be abolished, despite the fact that only the wealthiest 4% of estates ever result in inheritance tax being paid.
Why should the majority of British people want to abolish a tax that only affects the wealthiest?
Because the media is owned by the wealthiest members of society and they use their media channels to persuade the people to oppose inheritance tax in the hope that the tax will be abolished and they will get to pass on all of their wealth.
The real truth is that hardly anyone pays inheritance tax, but the media presents a truth that inheritance tax is a bad tax that everyone should oppose.
This is why Truss and other politicians want to defund state media. Without it, their lies will be shared unchallenged. Presenting them with the power to convince the people to support things that are against their best interest. We see just such an example in No-one Really Cares About Immigration where we’re reminded of how the British people voted for something they were told would make them richer when just 4% of economists believed that was true and 88% actually said it would make the British people poorer.
So clearly restricting media channels to only those who share views from one side of the political spectrum is bad, but politicians like Truss know they have a powerful tool to persuade us support such a move anyway.
Money.
State-funded media is paid for by the people. Sometimes through taxes or, in the case of the BBC, through the licence fee. Though in practice that’s just another direct tax.
That’s why private media takes every opportunity to attack state-funded media, because they and politicians can then remind us how we’re the ones paying for it and our money is being used to pay for things that we should be angry about.
Make us angry enough and hopefully enough of us will support calls to abolish the media that we pay for without any choice.
Clearly, it’s tempting to be able to save a chunk of money, but the cost in lost freedoms in the future may be much greater.