I do agree with Umair on this one. It is time for the media to man up and say “hate” has no place in journalism. Bias has no place in journalism. Paranoia has no place in journalism. Journalism has two purposes in a “free” world.

First, honestly cover stories and present the facts and both sides of a story. Second, where facts are confusing, they can serve the public by explaining them in more detail and why they are important. Democracies depend on informed voters knowing both sides of an issue. It is important to help them make wise decisions over who will lead them. Instead, the media seems to want to make those decisions for voters and so slant their “news” to influence how voters vote. In other words, the media does not trust “the people”.

But when journalists attempt to insert their point of view or opinion without clearly expressing it as an opinion and without offering the opposing view, then they have failed the American people and their profession. When journalists select things to cover and ignore things that cast a better light on those they oppose they fail the American people. When journalists present as facts things that are unproven, they fail the American people.

And where social networks and search engines begin to use their power over their platforms to impact how Americans think and their ability to research facts, they have failed the American people.

I am not a big “regulatory” advocate, except where “free markets” fail to provide adequate competition. There are good reasons why social networks should “police” hate by not allowing their platforms to disseminate hate. But they must have an editorial board independent of the ownership of the company, that is responsible to the “people” if they are going to “police” ideas.

I think we should regulate social network platforms and search engines by requiring them to establish “editorial boards” that can control the policing of content and must approve any algorithms that do so. These boards should be selected by Americans in a similar manner as Boards of Directors. Except Boards of Directors are chosen by owners and these Editorial Boards would be elected by the people at large using on line voting which will require voters to submit some form of ID to avoid duplicate voting. Since these platforms extend to other countries, they could extend voting to citizens of those countries. The Boards would be comprised of the top 15 vote getters with each person getting one vote. Like the Supreme Court the decisions of these boards would be published with their logic attached as well as the dissenting opinions of those on the boards so we can see the issues and how they were perceived both by the majority and minority.

Capitalism, free markets, freedom of the press, and democracy are all linked since they all depend on the free flow of accurate information.