One week after being trapped inside the United States Capitol as thousands of pro-Donald Trump marauders attempted to forcibly "Stop the steal" of the presidential election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested one possible federal government response: convening a national commission on media literacy.
Shocked at the sight of a violent mob lending street muscle to a lame-duck president's conspiracy theory, journalists, academics, and social media companies seemed at once to agree on a two-pronged strategy: using the most maximally negative adjectives to describe the country's still sizable Trump rump and banishing that bloc's most deplorable figures from every platform within reach.
The Hutchins Commission, featuring more than a dozen academics and revolving-door government employees including Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger, and Archibald MacLeish, produced in 1947 one of the most enduringly influential documents in the history of modern media theory, titled A Free and Responsible Press.
As the media scholar Stephen Bates dryly noted in a 2018 paper, "Although it might seem difficult to take the new out of news, the commission tried."
At the heart of the project was a paternalistic disgust that consumers were choosing media wrong, that press barons were building fortunes by pandering to base tastes, and that, as a result, the American experiment of self-government was being undermined from within.
The media "Can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed when they enshrined the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution," the report's authors lamented.
"'A Free Press' Sought for U.S.," ran the unsubtle headline in Col.
https://reason.com/2021/03/16/the-war-on-free-speech-is-about-to-get-a-lot-uglier/
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