Censorship makes you dumber*

It's a self-own for whoever does it.

The Pentagon is the latest federal agency seeking to suppress speech. As my colleague Tom Bowman confirmed, the Department of Defense, restyled the Department of War, wants reporters to sign a pledge not to gather any information that hasn’t been authorized for release. Journalists, in essence, are told only to write up government press releases, or be punished. Even unclassified information is to be restricted, and anyone who fails to obey will have their press credentials revoked.

Tom says this new policy is one of many; the administration promises “transparency” but mainly talks to friendly media, clamping down on information for anyone else.

Secretary Pete Hegseth defended the new policy on X: “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon—the people do.”

This statement confuses the press and the people. They are not separate entities.

A journalist covering the military is one of the people, a private citizen taking part in self-government. If I am covering the military, it means that I, as a citizen, have questions about the military that acts in my name, while spending my tax dollars and subject to my country’s laws.

Not only do citizens have a right to ask questions of the government that works for them, the military has a general obligation to keep citizens informed, as well as a specific legal duty to do so in some cases. Free citizens, having sought information, have a right to publish what they like. I try to publish accurately, responsibly and fairly. But the decision is mine.

The military will reasonably resist sharing classified information—and information about forthcoming attacks, such as the information Sec. Hegseth mistakenly shared with a reporter on a Signal thread this year. But reporters generally understand such limitations. That’s not the issue here. The issue is stories the administration doesn’t like.

In most situations, government censorship is illegal and unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment freedom of the press. Prior restraint is especially dubious, and it would be unsurprising to see a legal challenge to this new policy. I don’t know how courts might rule.

It’s my judgment, however, that the law is not the only issue. Experience tells me that the government restriction of information is self-destructive. Even when non-government actors try to restrict debate it can backfire, as I propose to show.

I have covered the U.S. military, on and off, across almost 30 years. When the military has given me free access to its personnel, my fellow Americans in uniform have nearly always impressed me with their skill, smarts, courage and cheerful dedication. And I was able to show my fellow citizens what their tax dollars were paying for.

Early in the Iraq war, the Pentagon welcomed reporters to travel with troops. Because it was a war zone, reporters were required to withhold advance details of operations, and so forth. But we were there to see what we could see and to tell the public afterward. When I was “embedded” with a Marine unit, no censor reviewed my reports.

This openness was so successful that critics of the war attacked it, assuming that reporters had been captured by their sources.

But we also reported independently, outside of military units (as I mostly did in Iraq, and always in Afghanistan), so we heard many perspectives, including those of civilians in the war zone.

When the war started going wrong, the media reported that too. Yet the American military continued sharing facts with us, including facts about misguided strategies and mistakes. This was good for the military, as it allowed them to give feedback to the people back home, their ultimate boss. Americans saw the war was going wrong and demanded course corrections, which civilian leaders eventually ordered.

The worst abuses of the war came when openness wasn’t employed. Torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, for example, was developed out of sight before it was eventually exposed.

In similar ways, free citizens can usefully interact with all parts of their government. Many leaders have understood this. President Theodore Roosevelt did. According to historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, TR invited reporters to go into federal agencies and report what they found. In Goodwin’s words, here is what happened when Roosevelt met a reporter investigating government corruption:

Roosevelt gave him a piece of paper that gave him access to talk to people within the federal government and they would reveal to him what was going on. He trusted that if you studied something and you investigated it wherever the corruption may lay, you're better off finding it yourself and then dealing with it.

Roosevelt realized that people who worked directly for him might be reluctant to tell him everything he needed to know.

He also had the self-confidence to let the reporter find what he might, rather than fearing bias or a conspiracy.

Ultimately, government transparency is a matter of my rights, which I will insist upon. But I also hope to persuade public officials that openness is in the public interest and in their interest. It makes our government smarter, while a lack of openness makes it dumber.*

The Pentagon policy has emerged amid a broader administration effort to suppress speech it doesn’t like. The suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show by ABC, under government pressure about his remarks relating to the murder of Charlie Kirk, is another aspect of this. The president’s $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times is yet another, as are lawsuits against ABC, and another against CBS that was strategically supported by the broadcast regulator, Brendan Carr, head of the FCC.

These are some of the reasons that the conservative writer David French says in his newsletter: “It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the emerging threat to free speech in the United States.”

After Kirk’s assassination, he notes, “the Trump administration is using Kirk’s death as a pretext to threaten a sweeping crackdown on President Trump’s political and cultural opponents.” The attorney general has made “wildly wrong” claims about prosecuting what she called “hate speech” before walking some of them back.

Democrats have almost universally decried what they see as unconstitutional government overreach. Even a few Republicans—Ted Cruz among them—have warned against weaponizing the government to silence critics, because conservatives will be targeted by some future administration.

David French argues that free speech benefits the country right now. He contends that open debate is “indispensable to justice and reform.” He quotes Frederick Douglass to this effect: Antislavery advocates had to fight for the right to object to slavery, a subject that early Americans were told never to discuss. And just as Americans had a right to speak, they had a right to hear what was happening.

In short, open debate makes us all smarter, while stifling it makes us dumber.*

French’s column may annoy some progressives, because he says their side also missed this message in recent years. He says college administrators and others made a well-intentioned mistake that “it is somehow necessary to stifle ‘offensive’ or ‘hateful speech’ to achieve positive social change.”

In the media, too, progressives argued not to “platform” certain conservatives. My regular readers in this space know my longstanding objection to this idea.

Granted, limitations on debate were not First Amendment violations if they did not involve the government. And progressives said they had their reasons. They said Republicans were not arguing in good faith—trolling, muddying the waters, lying, hiding their true intentions. I suppose progressives may claim vindication now that the free speech party has won power and shifted to a campaign against speech it dislikes!

Then again, working to “deplatform” them did not keep them out of power.

It may be that refusing to platform certain ideas made it harder for critics to expose and argue against them. It definitely became harder for people in the center or on the left to build political coalitions, and a political majority, that included people who did not agree with them on every single issue.

In 2024, Trump proved to be better at building political coalitions, and he is in power even though many of his policies are broadly unpopular. It’s reasonable to think that some of the speech limitations that David French criticizes were a political self-own, which left Trump’s opponents unprepared to do some of the hard work of politics. As was widely noted, many didn’t have the language to speak to a broad majority of voters.

I can think of a Democrat who is speaking clearly now, and it’s one who engages daily with people who disagree, on unequal terms. Jessica Tarlov is a regular on a Fox News program where the other panelists outnumber her and are all big Fox News personalities. Under that pressure, she has made clear and cogent arguments for her side. Such was the case this past week, as Republicans used Charlie Kirk’s murder to tar all their opponents, saying that “they” killed Charlie Kirk. Here is some of what Tarlov said on TV:

The premise that Democrats are more concerned about Jimmy Kimmel than they were about the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk is completely unfounded. Democrats said all the right things that all of us felt, that political violence has no place in our society, and we were met with: “This is your fault, and we are at war”… I understand now we don’t live in cancel culture, it’s just consequence culture. And you think an eye for an eye is a good solution, that’s what I’ve seen pelted at me about this. “Well, you did this, you did this”… That is not a way to run a free society. You can’t just trample on the First Amendment because something tragic and horrible happened.

Even her fellow panelists, who sometimes interrupt or mock Tarlov, fell silent for close to two minutes as she laid this out. Tarlov made a compelling defense of free speech, which was all the better because she had accepted the challenge of free speech. I don’t know Tarlov, but it seems likely to me that her exposure to her critics has made her smarter.

*Footnote: One of my kids looked over my shoulder as I began this article, and objected to my use of the word “dumber,” saying it was impolite. I conceded the point, but said I had my reasons in this case. The kid went on to volunteer support for free speech: “All people deserve to read all books.”