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A basic tenet of libertarianism is that less state power is always good because it reduces the potential for tyranny. All power corrupts, so the saying goes, and it would be easy for someone to abuse the levers of governmental authority for their own selfish ends. Operating under this logic (and its correlate, that the private sector can do everything the state does better), politicians have spent the past thirty years shrinking the state’s role in everything from how much it can help the poor, to what it’s allowed to regulate — a process that’s been backed up and urged on by an army of right-wing intellectuals, writers, think-tanks, and activists. For instance, when Ronald Reagan’s FCC set about abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 — facilitating both the rise of right-wing talk radio and the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s current hijinks — it argued that the rule, through its “ affirmative use of government power to expand broadcast debate,” presented a “striking paradox,” because “freedom of speech has traditionally implied an absence of governmental supervision or control.” “Throughout most of our history, the principal function of the First Amendment has been to protect the free marketplace of ideas by precluding government intrusion,” its 1985 report stated. The Obama-era FCC made a similar point in 2011, when it struck the rule off the books for good. “The Fairness Doctrine holds the potential to chill free speech and the free flow of ideas and was properly abandoned over two decades ago,” its chairman at the time declared . In other words, the oppressive tendencies of the state mean that any time it intervenes, even to secure greater freedom of speech by making sure all views are publicly aired, it is an unacceptable intrusion. Freedom of speech, is purely defined as freedom from government censorship. Better, instead, to leave it to the free market, where viewpoints and ideas live and die on their own merits. A recent episode in Denver shows why this theory doesn’t work out in practice.

Rebellion at the Denver Post The trouble with libertarian theory is that while it has a lot to say about concentration of power and repression when these concern the government, it has little to nothing to say about them when carried out by anyone else. Take the case of the Denver Post’s ongoing rebellion against its hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Since buying the MediaNews Group Inc. newspaper empire in 2010 (and renaming it Digital First Media, or DFM), Alden has slowly dismantled the newspapers under its control, slashing staff numbers to to the bone, and has ridden the cuts to a massive profit that it has then re-routed to its other investments. Naturally, the people who worked at those newspapers weren’t very happy about this. After seeing its staff slashed from a high of 250 to a mere sixty, the Denver Post revolted against its owner in April this year, publishing a series of op-eds criticizing Alden and outlining the paper’s plight, and attempting to convince other DFM-owned papers to do the same. DFM executives reportedly considered firing the paper’s editorial page editor, Chuck Plunkett, and pulling the offending sections, before being talked out of it by the top editor. At least one other editor of a DFM-owned paper told the Columbia Journalism Review (anonymously) that he feared reprisal from the company and that he wouldn’t cover the issue. Weeks later, the editor of the Kingston Daily-Freeman, another DFM-owned paper, ordered his staff to “NOT post to the web or publish in print any story touching on Digital First Media / Alden Global Capital without my prior approval,” and to “carefully scan” any story about the plight of modern journalism for references to the companies. “This directive comes from above,” he wrote. Around the same time, Dave Krieger, editorial page editor for Boulder’s Daily Camera, submitted an op-ed to the paper’s editorial board critical of Alden. It was rejected by the publisher, who was nervous about crossing the company. So Krieger instead self-published the piece on the Boulder Free Press Blog , shortly after which he was fired for, as Krieger tells it, disparaging “the company” and supposedly publishing a piece written on company time on a different platform. (Krieger says he had written the piece at home around midnight). When Plunkett tried to publish another op-ed in the Denver Post earlier this month calling attention to both this incident and to the massive windfall Alden has received from stripping its newspapers bare, its publication was blocked by a DFM executive. Plunkett resigned, and the Post newsroom signed an open letter decrying what they called “unconscionable censorship.” Alden owns close to one hundred daily and weekly papers, including, according to the Washington Post, nearly every major newspaper around Los Angeles and the Bay area. That’s a wide net of influence in which it can engage in similar shenanigans. There’s a lesson in here about the increasing presence of hedge funds and private equity firms in the media landscape, which has seen local newspapers get decimated through the same kind of “vulture capitalist” strategies as Alden’s. But it’s also a stark, real-world example of the way that private censorship by profit-seeking entities functions in exactly the same kind of Orwellian way that libertarians and conservatives fear exclusively about government.