The US Constitution is a barrier to ending “disinformation,” claims the former Obama administration official
John Kerry, former presidential climate envoy, argued that the freedom for individuals to select their information sources hinders the formation of consensus and, consequently, effective governance.
During a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on Green Energy last week, the former Secretary of State under President Barack Obama criticized the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which safeguards freedom of speech and the press, among other rights.
Kerry highlighted the challenges posed by social media in building consensus within democracies. “It’s really hard to govern today,” he remarked.
“The referees we used to have to determine what is fact and what isn’t have kind of been eviscerated,” he observed, adding that individuals now have the autonomy to choose their news sources.
“If people go to only one source… and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to simply hammering it out of existence,” he asserted.
As long as Democrats can “win ground” and “win the right to govern,” they would be “free to implement change,” the former Democratic senator stated.
“I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to address the challenges we face. To me, that is part of what this race, this election, is all about,” he added.
At another WEF event earlier this year, Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker expressed concern about the erosion of corporate media’s dominance over information dissemination.
“We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” she remarked, acknowledging that consumers now have access to a wider range of information sources.
Amidst increasingly divisive election rhetoric, research suggests that Americans have a lower level of trust in the media than they are willing to publicly admit. While 24 percent of Americans claim to trust the media to present the truth, only 7 percent hold this belief privately, according to a study conducted in June by the think tank Populace, in collaboration with Gradient and YouGov.