I suspect that by “in the last few years,” Adair means something like “since Donald Trump was elected.” After all, countless journalists have decided since then that they need to be a little bit more “assertive” about what they do — that they cannot merely “inform democracy.”
As I’ve argued before, from a certain perspective it all sounds well and good — until you dig down into the specifics, into how journalists actually execute on their new supposed imperative. In this case, it’s telling that a journalism professor would speak this breezily about “suppress[ing] misinformation” without any critical inquiry into what that might mean.
This article fits neatly into a recent obsession, in some liberal circles, with the idea that the United States can fact-check its way out of various social ills and political crises. This has brought with it some fairly ominous-seeming ideas about what a “fact” is and who gets to “check” it. In this case, Adair offers no hint as to how we should determine what crosses so far into “misinformation” that it should be suppressed. Not “corrected,” not “contextualized via a note from an editor” — suppressed!
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