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CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

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Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#211

Post by tialaramex »

ishouldstayaway wrote: post #197
tialaramex wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically doesn't Trump also spend a lot of time golfing, and attending events where people praise Trump - admittedly for broadcast on TV but not necessarily while watching TV? I see that it's become harder to track because the White House doesn't disclose what he's doing as much, but yeah, lots of golf still.

HN's penchant for pedantic literalism will never cease to amaze (and dismay) me.

It's a joke man, Colbert isn't the only one allowed to make jokes, so don't be dismayed.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#212

Post by nitwit005 »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #115
sega_sai wrote: post #90

It is a great illustration of how transition to the authoritarianism happens (I've seen it happen in Russia in 2000s). At first you don't even need censorship, you just need to scare owners of channels/newspapers enough, so that they self-censor.

Indeed. Mark Zuckerberg has long said the administration pressured Facebook to censor COVID-related content, including satire and humor. And now the administration has ended public funding for NPR and PBS. Chilling effect It goes back even further, just see the 1941 FCC “Mayflower Decision” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower_doctrine

Pressured, as in asked them to do something, which they ignored. Possibly problematic, but the elephant in the room is Trump directly threatening to put Mark Zuckerberg in prison for life: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-el...

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#213

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

claytongulick wrote: post #210
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst case scenario for a broadcaster is that the FCC commissioner will fabricate an excuse to illegally yank their license, which both he and his boss have explicitly threatened to do to any broadcaster which won't agree to stop criticizing Donald Trump. I agree that one could imagine a reasonable system of broadcast regulation where opinionated talk shows don't host political candidates, but that's not what's g…

> but that's not what's going on here. How? Everything I've seen is that is specifically what's going on, do you have different information? The only threat to pulling a license would be if they didn't comply with the FCC rule change, that we've both agreed is reasonable, correct? Do you have specific examples of the administration threatening to pull a license due to criticism? If that's the case, I'd certainly be v…

When the FCC chair originally announced he was pursuing this (https://time.com/7318743/abc-kimmel-the-view-brendan-carr-fc...), he was pretty clear that he was doing so in pursuit of the President's directive to punish broadcast channels that say things he doesn't like. Trump himself was pretty explicit that the ultimate goal is pulling their broadcast licenses and his subordinates should fabricate an excuse.

As you say, the FCC has declined to pursue talk radio programs over this issue, even though they're clearly subject to the rule in principle. That's not a mistake, it's because those programs push viewpoints the President favors so he doesn't want to punish them.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#214

Post by mrandish »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #205
aftbit wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's the straw-man version of the argument. During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Satire, comedy, and truly live questions (like the weak version of the lab leak hypothesis, that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab into human population) were censored alongside the obviously false, harmful, and misleading takes abo…

> During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Not by the government. This was by companies that wanted their customers not to die, so they could make money.

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to 'censor' some COVID-19 content during the pandemic: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#215

Post by unethical_ban »

JackFr wrote: post #95

It's a terrible look for CBS. At the same time, I find it unbelievable that they don't fire Colbert. This is obvious gross insubordination, and he is an employee. His final show is coming in May, and I'm sure that they can expect Colbert to continue to embarrass them (as the spineless sycophants they are) every week until then. It's a tremendous self own.

Firing satirists is moral now?

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#216

Post by mrandish »

dsl wrote: post #162
mrandish wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "the administration", it's worth noting you're describing actions by two different administrations. Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views through soft censorship.

Censoring an interview with a political opponent is a far cry from spreading disinformation that is counter to broadly accepted medical advice during a pandemic with the intent of harming the general population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Unfortunately, reasonable views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed. Kulldorff only responded to a question saying: "COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children." Which is correct, mainstream epidemiology and was the government guidance in the most countries at the time.

https://undark.org/2024/01/08/covid-misinformation-censorshi...

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#217

Post by davidw »

renegade-otter wrote: post #209
davidw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is doomerism, and I get the pull of it, but I have been trying to avoid it lately, because at the end of the day, it is doing the work of the fascists for them. It is "complying in advance" to prematurely admit defeat. We are not Russia.

People will be accusing others of TDS even when Trump is well into his 3rd term. If I listed half the things that happened in the last year, you would have called me "hysterical". The US government is telling a comedian who he can and cannot interview. Russia has a pretty professional riot police that does not pop off cannons for funzies. Russian corruption has to be exposed. It's not out in the open - Putin is not e…

I'm not saying things are fine. Not at all. It's a really tough line to navigate and I struggle with it myself. If you go around telling everyone we're doomed - DOOMED! Then it's not really helping, just as if you go around saying things are fine and everything will be back to normal in a few years.

What was normal is gone and it'll take the rest of my life to fix things if we're lucky because the damage they've done is generational.

But fix it we can and must, and they aren't actually all that popular. They're even underwater in polling on immigration.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#218

Post by Centigonal »

mcs5280 wrote: post #9

Weird how Larry Ellison manages to do this to everything he touches

“They were careless people, David, Megan, and Larry- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#219

Post by Hikikomori »

gz5 wrote: post #15

we'll need more facts but if there is substance to this then the reaction from Bari Weiss (now cbs news editor-in-chief and a long-time public advocate of free speech) and team will be interesting.

So she'll allow criticism of Israel then?

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#220

Post by hn_acker »

jajuuka wrote: post #204
lesuorac wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hes not. He's describing the same administration in two different terms. Mark has no problems lying to people that Biden administration sued Meta (it was Trump's [1]) and individuals like Joe Rogan have no problems not calling him out on it. Trump was president in 2019, 2020. Covid starts in 2019. It's his administration that the twitter files is talking about when they mention censorship. It's his administration…

This seems like a tenuous connection at best. The Biden admin were actually sued for their relationship with social media companies. The suit failed but the conclusion was still that the administration was involved in pushing social media companies to take specific actions. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/murthy-v-... There are also correspondence about moderation right after Biden was elected from…

> The Biden admin were actually sued for their relationship with social media companies. The suit failed but the conclusion was still that the administration was involved in pushing social media companies to take specific actions. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/murthy-v-...

That's an misleading description of the "conclusion" (and incorrect if by "involvement" or "pushing" you meant unconstitutional behavior). The conclusion of Murthy v. Missouri is that the plaintiffs lacked standing to seek a preliminary injunction against the federal government's (under the Biden administration) requests/"demands" to social media companies to remove users' speech [1]. Why was there no standing? Because the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the Biden administration had coerced or threatened social media companies to censor users' speech [1]:

> To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.

Or rather, the plaintiffs did not demonstrate sufficient evidence that, in the period leading up to the original lawsuits, the social media companies' decisions to remove the relevant speech mentioned by the Biden administration had been anything other than the social media companies' voluntary choices.

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/603/23-411/#tab-...

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