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Malicious, scandalous and defamatory lies undermining popular trust in public institutions...I'm not talking about the former President. This was what the State of Minnesota said about editor and publisher Jay M. Near when the state acted to shut down his newspaper, the Saturday Press, in Minneapolis. Yet, despite the fact that nobody ever said Near's conduct was anything less than reprehensible , the U. S. Supreme Court sided with Near and against the state officials of Minnesota. Why? Because, as wrote Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, for the tree of liberty to flourish, "it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits (Near v. Minnesota, June 1, 1931).

Nearly a century ago, the highest court in the land understood that the only effective weapon against speech is more speech. Censorship and prior restraint is never a solution, and while those mechanisms aimed at silencing President Trump and his more extreme supporters may not be, technically, government censorship, it is no less odious for coming from private media companies operating under broad public immunity.

While it is dismaying that nearly half of Americans challenge the honesty of the media, the solution is not using the mechanisms of these quasi-public institutions of social media to silence critics. The only solution is acknowledge the validity of our fellow citizens' objections and seek to redress those failings of the media which have contributed to this groundswell of distrust.