Some parts of our broadcasting media are dangerously and deliberately unhinged and are responsible for emphasizing the differences between people who mostly share the same values and for creating what is described as “polarization”. Like the disgracefully divisive words I’ve heard coming out of the mouth of Ann Coulter and similar spreaders of hate — like “liberals are not to be trusted. They are destroying our country. They are traitors.”
In addition to being greatly angered and disturbed by hate speech, I’m sick of having news filtered by ideologues like Rupert Murdoch. And now we have Elon Musk positioning himself to take over Twitter, and possibly allowing dangerous psychopaths like Donald Trump freedom to spread false information and encourage persecution of certain groups, such as immigrants.
“Freedom of speech” should apply to communication between individual people and not to broadcasting that vilifies a particular group of people. And even communications between individuals should strongly discourage hate speech, that should be regarded as a form of physical assault.
At best, news media should follow the example of the British “The Guardian” newspaper and be owned by a foundation that insulates the staff of the paper from political influence or diktats from owners or major shareholders.
Alternatively, media should be owned by publicly traded companies that limit ownership of shares to sufficiently small amounts to prevent juntos from controlling information flow. It’s very important to realize that you can make true statements that nevertheless are biased because they present just one side of the story — you can influence people by omitting relevant facts while emphasizing others. For example you can bias people against trade unions by reporting excesses, while failing to report excesses on the part of employers.
The Federal Communications Commission needs to re-introduce a fairness doctrine that strongly restrains bad and biased broadcasting. Total suppression is not possible. But strong restraint is.