By: Bella Varghese
Since the dawn of civilization, the freethinker’s greatest threat has always been censorship. Whether it be Socrates’s execution, the Alien and Sedition Acts, Parental Advisory labels (though that can be easily debated), or book bans, censorship is both a common and controversial topic.
Today, more than before, censorship is affecting Americans, as well as individuals across the globe, who previously did not expect it.
“If you’re a student and you publish an op-ed in your campus publication, that somehow puts a target on you…that’s not something that ten years ago people would have thought would have been a consequence of a college student expressing their opinion in a newspaper,” said podcast producer and showrunner Michael Martinez.
Martinez previously worked for Crooked Media as an executive producer for Pod Save America’s news and politics content, The Athletic on sports podcasts, and on the NPR affiliate station in Washington, D.C. Today, Martinez operates independently.
In many recent instances, media companies and their staff faced lawsuits and forced resignations for public content that may shed a more negative light on President Trump and his allies. “There’s censorship in the sense that action is taken against people for publishing things or expressing things,” Martinez said. “Lawsuits have been filed against news organizations. Some of them have been settled like [those against] CBS and ABC.”
Though taking on a lawsuit seems like a serious issue, Martinez, like others in news and entertainment, thinks some were filed as warnings. “When Donald Trump sued the newspaper in Iowa that publishes polls, the Des Moines Register…that suit on its face didn’t really have much merit, but the intention was to chill the waters,” he said.
Today, censorship is not the only threat those in news and entertainment face. Cancel Culture quickly became a popular means of silencing and invalidating the credibility of those with public voices. Most recently, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended indefinitely after he made negatively perceived comments on the death of right-winged speaker Charlie Kirk. The suspension has since ended.
“Somebody trying to strip your legal right of saying anything and taking action to take that away from you is different than somebody being shamed into suffering consequences, however extreme those consequences might be,” Martinez said, noting the major differences between censorship and cancel culture despite their common goal.
Censorship requires more outright legal action, making it much more difficult to achieve. On the other hand, in the age of social media, cancelling someone is not as difficult. With the majority of our population’s presence on social media, civilians, lawmakers, and celebrities alike are able to share their opinions with individuals in the masses. The retaliation cancelled individuals face is typically a result of some social obligation to rectify the situation by diminishing any support towards said individuals.
Regulating what users can and cannot say on social media is often difficult, though. There is a moral duty to protect users from harm done by other users, but there is also the legal need to protect people’s freedom of speech.
“All those things are things that people are wrestling with in real time, and it’s something that companies have clearly struggled with,” Martinez said. “Whether it’s Facebook and how they’ve operated at a global level, [or how] Elon Musk took over Twitter a couple of years ago and said, ‘all right, now I’m going to turn this platform into what it should be, which is maximum free-speech, whatever the consequences [may be].’”
“It’s an all-encompassing environment right now that people are confronting under this second experience with Trump in office,” he said.