On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Staff Writer for The New Yorker, MSNBC Political Contributor, and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb responded to a question on how the Biden administration pressuring social media platforms to suppress certain speech on coronavirus differs from what happened with Jimmy Kimmel by saying that “there’s always been a kind of public health exception.”
Host Stephanie Ruhle asked, “I’m dying to know, in journalism classrooms, right? The students who are saying to you, but what about during COVID, what about when, Mark Zuckerberg has said that the Biden administration pressured them on what they could have on their platforms regarding COVID and what people were allowed to say? Is there a — when they say that, when your students say that to you, what is the response?”
Cobb answered, “So, we haven’t talked about that specifically, but I will say that there’s always been a kind of public health exception. When we go back across time, there [are] all kinds of ideas, even where we have restrictions on what people can advertise and you can’t have the kind of infamous quack cure that we say, if we give you this, it’ll make you grow hair back. … We have regulations on what you can and can’t say in those regards. I don’t think that that is this. In this regard, what we’re hearing is blatantly political. It’s saying that we don’t like what you said. It’s not that it presents some sort of risk to the public, that there’s some sort of compelling interest in Jimmy Kimmel not being able to make a statement — which is actually a lead-in for a joke — or any of the other things. And the more damning thing is the statement from Carr that there will be more, that this is not the end of this.”
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