Federal Appeals Court Senior Judge Laurence Silberman issued a blistering dissent in a libel case Friday warning about the biased media. His focus was on conservatives’ treatment by the media, but more importantly, he called for the Supreme Court to overturn legal protections for news outlets from lawsuits. Judge Silberman’s rant comes at the perfect time because Senators Thune and Schatz just rolled out a bill that would increase “accountability” for Big Tech companies and enhance transparency regarding content moderation for users, in an effort to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The judge warned in his dissent about the “increased power of the press”:
“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions. Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s….One-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”
The New York Post reports that Judge Silberman specifically called out the New York Times and the Washington Post as tools of the Democratic Party. He also called out Twitter for filtering out “news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party.” He used the Hunter Biden blackout on Twitter as an example.
Continuing his attack on social media censorship, the judge said, “Repression of political speech by large institutions with market power…is—I say this advisedly—fundamentally un-American. As one who lived through the McCarthy era, it is hard to fathom how honorable men and women can support such actions.”
Republicans like Josh Hawley have been actively trying to get Section 230 revoked to drop the immunity for “website platforms”:
Section 230 is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States, passed into law as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, formally codified as Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 at 47 U.S.C. § 230. Section 230 generally provides immunity for website platforms from third-party content.
