by Brad Slager
While my daily VIP column covers the rampant examples of the press in this country abandoning journalism standards, truth-telling, and ethics, I had to pull this particular piece from The New York Times and dissect the content.
This article by Michael D. Shear and David McCabe, in the Politics section of the paper, is so astoundingly off-kilter that it begs for attention. Written in response to the recent court ruling in Missouri v. Biden, it concerns the mandate in the ruling that the Biden Administration needs to curtail its practice of compelling social media companies to silence accounts that it deems to be dangerous or delivering what it considers to be misinformation. This decision has had many in the press upset, with numerous outlets, including The Times, voicing displeasure that the First Amendment was used to keep the government from silencing citizens – “a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues,” as was written on the day of the ruling.
First, let’s just step back and digest this reality: The press – who love to announce they are charged through the First Amendment to hold the leaders of this country accountable – are decrying the fact that the government is being told to stop trampling on the First Amendment rights of citizens. As bad of a position as this is for some to take, McCabe and Shear went even deeper into this rabbit hole the next day.
In their analysis of the court ruling, the duo repeatedly call out Judge Terry Doughty, his primary slight being that he was appointed by Donald Trump in 2017 (ignore his being elevated by bipartisan Louisiana senators and was approved with a unanimous vote.) Throughout the coverage of the ruling, we get served comments from the decision as being what Doughty wrote or ruled, all while they are not declared to be factually accurate, despite being so. The journalists do not see the need to determine what are facts.
This lengthy assessment is primarily a defense of Biden, a condemnation of the muzzling of the government, and a presentation that the basis of all of this is nothing more than conservative claims. This agitprop screed needs to be picked apart in order to display the breadth of journalism malpractice throughout.
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The Autopsy
It does not take long to get a sense of the approach from McCabe and Shear. In describing the case, early in the piece, the pair cite the ‘fury” from conservatives, due to claims of being silenced on a number of topics on platforms.
The case is a flashpoint in the broader effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy by Democrats and tech company executives to silence their views.
We are only four paragraphs in, and already, the writers discredited themselves. They try to tell us that this is merely a contention by conservatives. Except: In the opening passages, they stated clearly that the administration began doing so in just its second month, that the CDC held regular meetings with Facebook on limiting content, and that the Surgeon General was urging social platforms to work on its behalf.
The final outcome could…alter how far the government can go in trying to prevent the spread of potentially dangerous information, particularly in an election or during emergencies like a pandemic.
Note the lack of any concern or criticism of this reality. As always, this designation of what is “dangerous” is completely interpretational. It appears they are presenting the concept of the government being prevented from limiting speech as a negative.
Tuesday’s order instead viewed the issue through the filter of partisan culture wars — asking whether the government violated the First Amendment by unlawfully threatening the social media companies to censor speech that Mr. Biden’s administration found distasteful and potentially harmful to the public.
Asking if the White House violated free speech protections is now the culture war. They offer this twisted premise while at the same time displaying the very disqualifier. This was all based on what Biden declares “distasteful.” That is a broad and pernicious standard to operate from for these acts.
Judge Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, has previously expressed little skepticism about debunked claims from vaccine skeptics. In one previous case, Judge Doughty accepted as fact the claim that “Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease.”
This is an utterly amazing passage. That case was initially filed on November 30, 2021, after it had long been established that vaccinated people can transmit Covid-19. Their own paper attested to this fact, and The Times questioned if it was possible as far back as April 2021. The paper even reported on the post-inoculation outbreak in Provincetown, MA, where the vaccinated were contracting and passing the virus. This is The Times dealing out misinformation in a piece defending the silencing of misinformation. You cannot make up something this daft and have it believed by people, yet The Times puts this out with a straight face.
Once again the NYTs, proves why no one should bother reading this leftists rag and just Boycott it totally
I wonder if the NYT remembers that time they promoted a story they KNEW (or should have known) was totally, 100% false (aka “disinformation) for 4 years? I’m still interested in hearing what “disinformation” the government and social media suppressed that DIDN’T turn out to be 100% true. Furthermore, since they replace what they suppress with total lies, I really don’t think the government and leftist social media operators should be in the business of defining “truth”. Only the left suppresses the truth while spreading THEIR lies.
Oh, it was totally voluntary, as the FBI could hardly afford for one of the censorship partners to file a lawsuit because the government was violating their 1st Amendment rights. It just so happened that these leftists are more than willing and happy to censor speech if it might damage the leftist agenda.