A History of Compliance

Long, long ago, news was actually delivered on large, folded sheets of paper. “Newspapers” we called them. It may seem fanciful or even made up, but I assure you this was a tradition that many still remember. While many newspapers have come and gone (mostly gone) in the era of social media, one might assume that the advent of such technology came at the detriment of paper media. But rest assured, social media actually removed quite a burden from the newspapers as you're about to see.

For insight on what it was like working in newspapers in the 1930s and 40s, we spoke to Sofia Evans, whose father was editor-in-chief for the now defunct Empire City Tribune.

“I remember dad would get so stressed out about it sometimes,” says Evans. “Some months the paper would barely turn a profit and other times the demands of contributors or complaints from readers would take a visible emotional toll on him. It wasn't an easy time to be in the media industry.”

Evans tells us that the time leading up to World War II, in particular the rise of the Nazi party, was especially hard for her father to manage.

“Dad said that in their days, people would mail stuff in or just show up with articles they wanted to run,” says Evans, “a lot of them sympathetic to the Nazi Party, and the paper had no choice but to run them.”

Yes, because of The First Amendment to The United States Constitution, newspapers were required to run any story, at their expense, that someone wanted printed, regardless of whether or not the piece’s politics aligned with that of the paper.

“Some days he said the paper was so heavy with pro-Nazi stuff that the newsboys would pull muscles or collapse from exhaustion just trying to deliver them,” explains Evans, “and the added expense of the ink and paper nearly bankrupted the Tribune several times.”

“Don't get me wrong,” adds Evans. “Dad hated the Nazis and their propaganda, but his hands were tied.”

Unfortunately for Evans’s father and The Empire City Tribune’s staff, the paper went under shortly after being bought by Henry Ford, who pushed the paper's content so far right that it alienated the mosty anti-Nazi reader base and drove away advertisers who didn't want their ads for children's cigarettes or blackface makeup kits shown adjacent to such trash.

While, historically at least, what happened to The Empire City Tribune can be considered pretty recent, this is a phenomenon that can be seen all throughout American history.

Take, for example, that during The Civil War northern newspapers were required to run stories written or commissioned by southern landowners advocating for the continuation of chattel slavery. These papers, many owned and operated by staunch abolitionists, didn't survive the war because the cost of materials and loss of readership took too high a toll.

This practice actually goes all the way back to the founding of our nation when Benjamin Franklin believed in the idea of free speech so much that his own publication, The Pennsylvania Gazette, frequently ran articles that sympathized with The British and often licked the buckle shoe of King George himself.

“If you want free speech,” Franklin would often quip, “you're going to have to deal with a few Nazis.”

It seems today that newspapers have been alleviated of this blight (although you wouldn't know it looking at The New York Times op-ed section), but really the onus of protecting the free speech of everyone, including Nazis, has fallen to new technologies like the internet and social media. This is especially true of blog sites such as SubStack, who find themself today facing opposition from their own users who'd like the platform to stop letting actual Nazis from using it to further their message of hate and make money.

It needs to be known though that when our forefathers wrote The First Amendment, it guaranteed both freedom of speech AND freedom of reach, and that means every media has to extend their privately-owned platform to everyone, no matter if they agree with them or not.

So when media companies platform Nazis it's because they're bound by The First Amendment to do so. I mean, they'd have to be because what kind of despicable, unscrupulous bastards would platform Nazis just to turn a little more profit!?

Right?