Village of Great Neck Mayor Pedram Bral took Blank Slate Media to task two weeks ago for its policy of not fact-checking letters to the editor.
“All too often your paper goes to print with an inaccuracy that is ‘too late to correct in print, but if someone in the village would like to clarify this, I will run in the next edition,’ “ Bral said in a letter published last week.
Bral then cited as an example a letter from a resident of a neighboring village criticizing him for blocking her Facebook posts.
“To clarify, the Facebook page cited is my personal page, not an official village page. Second, the letter writer is not a resident of the village,” he said.
Bral’s response is interesting in so many ways.
The letter writer, Nina Gordon, has helpfully pointed out that Bral often discussed village business on his Facebook page. So it was in effect a village page.
In this case, she said, Bral was urging his supporters to stay home from a planned Black Lives Matter protest in Great Neck, “insinuating that there would be ‘outside agitators’ coming to ‘cause trouble’ in Great Neck.” The march was later held without incident.
Bral also urged people to vote in person, Gordon said, and posted “falsehoods” about mail-voting being the “source of voter fraud” – a claim that has been widely disproved.
Gordon then said that after she suggested a public official should fact-check his or her own work before posting on Facebook, he blocked her from any further Facebook posts.
This alone entitles Bral to some sort of Olympic medal for hypocrisy. But there is more.
Specifically, Bral’s use of Facebook.
This was the same week that some of Facebook’s largest advertisers announced they were pulling their advertising from Facebook and other social media because of its willingness to allow hate speech posted unaltered and accessible on its site.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, had initially resisted taking the action called for by the anti-Defamation League and the NACCP.
Zuckerberg agreed to make changes when the critics’ campaign gained the support of more than 750 companies as well as politicians, supermodels, actors and Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan. Having your ads appear next to the posts of white supremacists is apparently bad for business. Who knew?
Zuckerberg later announced a series of new policies that included a ban on hateful content that targets immigrants and further restrictions on posts making false claims about – brace yourself, Mayor Bral – false claims about voting.
Facebook also removed hundreds of accounts and groups associated with a violent network of the far-right “boogaloo” movement “whose followers have been linked to violence that disrupted mostly peaceful protest in the United States,” the Washington Post reported.
This included the murder of a security officer at a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., and a plot to use explosives at a demonstration in Las Vegas, Nev., protesting the killing of George Floyd,” the Post story said.
But Facebook’s large advertisers are still not satisfied. Perhaps they will insist on Facebook addressing how in 2015 it made an exemption for President Trump to its own policy for “political discourse” that has continued to this day.
This exemption was recently on display when Trump responded to protests by posting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a phrase with a racist history.
But Facebook’s sins don’t absolve Blank Slate Media of responsibility or responding to Bral’s complaint about us.
Even if we have not allowed Russia to meddle in the country’s national elections, right-wing groups to promote hate or personal data to fall into the hands of shady organizations, including Russian spy agencies, as Facebook has.
So we plead guilty to not fact-checking our letters and instead relying on our readers to correct the record.
This is based on several practical considerations. The first is that we as a weekly newspaper do not have the resources to fact-check all our letters and still permit the robust debate that takes place in our pages on any topic.
The second is the difficultly of determining what is a fact and what is not.
Do we think that climate science is a hoax? No, we think it is a settled fact. But are we to refuse to print the letter of someone who does?
What about the claim that there will not be a second wave of the coronavirus? The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece last week by Vice President Mike Pence saying that very thing – notwithstanding the opinions of health officials within his own administration. And notwithstanding the fact that the claim will probably cost people’s lives.
We believe we are better served knowing what people are saying in Washington and in our own communities. As it is said, know thy enemy. So we try to provide a forum for all sides to express their opinions and read the opinions of others.
Perhaps we give people too much credit, but we would like to think that most people are capable of making their own decisions about the merits of an argument. If the facts or arguments or both are wrong, readers are free to correct them. If a public official wrote the letter, they are free to vote him or her out of office.
This is the idea of a marketplace of ideas that inspired the First Amendment.
So we have developed a policy in which all letters we receive are published with three exceptions – libel, purely personal attacks and hate speech.
We were taken to task last week by Conor O’Byrne of Great Neck on the basis of one of those exceptions. O’Byrne said a letter headlined “Dems responsible for plight of blacks in U.S.” promoted racism.
The issue of hate speech is, as we have witnessed in recent months, a sometimes difficult line to define, given to changes in our understanding of the facts and people’s response to it.
In this case, the letter writer, Joan Swirsky, claimed that “Marxist-inspired radicals – Antifa and Black Lives Matter” – had eclipsed the legitimate outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd. She went on to paint an apocalyptic picture of the United States filled with anarchists-cum-terrorists.
She also blamed the plight of blacks in the United States on the welfare system and “public schools run by “Democrat-controlled unions and benefits-infatuated teachers and administrators.”
Were Swirsky’s comments about Black Lives Matter and Antifa nonsense? Yes. But it is nonsense believed by many of the Americans who currently support Trump, including some of our neighbors. And unlike Trump’s recent comments is at least not explicitly racist.
As for blaming the welfare system and unions on the horrendous disparity in income disparity between blacks and whites, that has been part of the Republican playbook since Nixon’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s.
O’Byrne said by publishing Swirsky’s letter Blank Slate Media validated these opinions and would “only stoke discord and further erode our already vulnerable democracy.”
Perhaps. Perhaps after the construction of Confederate statutes, the naming of military bases after traitors who attacked the United States government to protect slavery and decades of race-baiting politicians a letter in our papers would make a difference in the promotion of racism.
But we don’t think censoring bad ideas serves democracy best. We believe that responding to bad ideas with good ideas and the facts to support them does – as the Black Lives Matter movement has. That is what these papers offer.
That, we believe, is the best way to promote democracy.
