Professor Sam Lebovic in Journal of Free Speech Law, April 2024, writes that it is unproductive to think of “fake news as an illegitimate cancerous growth…[and] seek to cut it out of the body politic.” Lebovic argues that “the key task is a broader politics of democratic revitalization, which will include new efforts to improve the “stream of news” by encouraging the production of information in new institutions devoted to that task. Such reform efforts should be contrasted to efforts to deal with lies by seeking to eradicate or counter them directly in the discourse, whether by censorship, civic education, or mandated counter speech. By focusing on the politics of opinion rather than information, reform efforts centered on speech law and speech acts risk exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, the crises of American democracy.”
Professor John Fabian Witt in Journal of Free Speech Law, April 2024, argues that the current crisis over false information in the public sphere was fed by the decline of unions and disintegration of faith in government. In the past, unions performed invaluably to inform the public in a fair way. “Labor unions are not above the fray, they are in it,” writes Witt. ‘They are on their members’ side. They pass along information that working-class citizens in a mass society can trust because it is in their interest to do so. At the same time, labor organizations’ role constrains them from certain kinds of distortions. Unions’ institutional interest in preserving the firms with which they bargain tethers them to reality. Labor, in other worlds, is dependent on and invested in rival institutions in a given community.”