Former president Bill Clinton is agitating once again for what amounts to a Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s 1984.
If Bill Clinton had his way, there would be an Internet agency created by the U.S. government or United Nations to debunk malicious rumors that originate and spread online.
–Fox News, clinton muses creating internet agency, FoxNews.com, May 2011
[pullquote]How dare an American president, current or former, propose to arbitrate truth?[/pullquote]
This is remarkable for a number of reasons. First of course is the horrifying vision of a totalitarian state which finds this sort of thing necessary, as opposed to free nations, which do not. I think that is the obvious part, which I will not belabor. I’ll belabor the second reason a little though, in schadenfraude.
You may recall a quote from then-First-Lady Hillary Clinton from 1998 in which she admits that yes, there should be some sort of “gatekeeping function” on the internet.
As exciting as these new developments are…. there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function. What does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?
There used to be this old saying that the lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Well, today, the lie can be twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed to find its boots. I mean, it is just beyond imagination what can be disseminated.
Please keep in mind that she spoke these words in rising to the defense of her husband, who was accused of having fooled around with Monica Lewinsky. Her objection was to the fact that Matt Drudge at drudgereport.com had broken the story a month earlier.
*What?*
The story had been spiked by NBC, deemed “not newsworthy” by the mandarins of the mainstream media. The full-time media, with its “multiple layers of checks and balances” was refusing to cover a story critical of a Democrat President, but the pajama crowd of internet folks got it right.
And that’s the third reason. This agency would of course become an instrument not to combat falsehood, but to massage or flat-out erase truth.
The President and Mrs. Clinton have endured a lot of falsehood on the Net. I don’t remember either of them calling for Net regulation because of Usenet postings or Web pages claiming that the military shot down flight 800, or that Ron Brown or Vincent Foster were assassinated. It took the truth, not a lie, to make Hillary Clinton say the Net is dangerous.
–Jonathan Wallace, “No Gatekeepers”, spectacle.org, March 1998
This is not an argument about facts–this is fundamentally about free speech. How dare an American president, current or former, propose to arbitrate truth?
“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors,” he [Clinton] said.
We already have a government institution with the responsibility to determine facts; the courts, in a case with specific charges, brought by a party with sufficient standing to engage the machinery of government. This is as far as it should go, as the inevitable result of a government-endorsed version of truth in popular discourse will be a requirement not to stray too far from it in our speech. And that is tyranny.
