NBC's Chuck Todd shutters the marketplace

Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press, recently announced that no one posing challenges to climate change claims would henceforth appear on his program.

What Todd meant, essentially, was that to him, open debate and the free exchange of informed arguments with intellectual enrichment and resolution the goals were negatives to be banished, not intrinsically rewarding phenomena from which all within earshot might benefit.

I suppose nearly any argument can seem plausible, when it stands alone on the battlefield.

With its 1919 Abrams v United States, 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court maintained a prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917 did not violate free speech rights.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an historic dissent. He argued, in part, that: 

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market...

Now, it is so that a privately-owned television network's program is not the public square. NBC and Todd have the right to establish guest-list standards, even when such reveal contempt for healthy intellectualism.

But respect for thought liberty that is not already within, that exists only when a law says it must, is meaningless.

Coming soon, perhaps, will be Meet the Press prohibitions of any ideas not in line with show producers' personal prejudices. That's not to say observable parameters aren't already in place.

When intolerant partisans like Todd strangle dissenting voices, it is not because they are assured that their own ideas are strong and can withstand challenge. Quite the opposite. It is because they sense the vulnerability of their asserted perspective, and intuit it would crumble in critical contest.

And, perhaps, because they despise Holmes' 'marketplace of ideas' concept, as surely must all despots.