Free speech makes US ‘hard to govern’ – John Kerry

The freedom for individuals to choose their sources of information makes it difficult to reach consensus and, consequently, to govern effectively, former presidential climate envoy John Kerry stated.

At a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on Green Energy last week, the former Secretary of State under President Barack Obama criticized the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and the press, among other things.

Kerry pointed out that social media poses challenges for building consensus in democracies. “It’s really hard to govern today,” he remarked.

“The referees we used to have to determine what is fact and what isn’t have kind of been eviscerated,” he noted, adding that individuals now decide where to get their news.

“If people go to only one source… and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to simply hammering it out of existence,” he asserted.

As long as Democrats can “win ground” and “win the right to govern,” they would be “free to implement change,” the former Democratic senator stated.

“I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to address the challenges we face. To me, that is part of what this race, this election, is all about,” he added.

At another WEF event earlier this year, Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker lamented the loss of corporate media’s monopoly on information.

“We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” she said, noting that customers now have access to a broader array of sources.

Amid increasingly divisive election rhetoric, research suggests that Americans trust the media even less than they are willing to publicly admit. While 24 percent of Americans claim to trust the media to tell the truth, only 7 percent believe it privately, according to a study completed in June by the think tank Populace, in cooperation with Gradient and YouGov.