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.
Recommended
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.
_____________
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.
The judge’s preliminary injunction is already having an impact. A previously scheduled meeting on threat identification on Thursday between State Department officials and social media executives was abruptly canceled by officials.
Now, we get told that the alleged conservative conspiracies about administration officials working with social media were not only accurate but were spot-on – all the way up to this week.
“The court’s order, which prevents the government from even speaking with tech companies about their content moderation policies, deals a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation,” Leah Litman and Laurence H. Tribe wrote in the Just Security blog on Wednesday.
The quoting of a partisan hysteric like Laurence Tribe aside, it becomes notable here that some misinformation is actually approved. Clearly, the misinformation served up here by Shear and McCabe is not to be considered a threat, and therefore, it is acceptable misinformation.
And the line between the two could be blurry, said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, who called the judge’s rulings “pretty significant departures from precedent. The result is this incredibly broad injunction that seems to prevent huge swaths of the executive branch from communicating with the platforms about speech,” she said.
The Constitution establishing that the government cannot impact free expression is not to be regarded as precedent, we have to assume here.
In his order, Judge Doughty described what he called a campaign by officials in the White House and at government agencies to pressure social media companies.
Here is the wan attempt at deflection of known facts. They write Doughty "described" this campaign taking place, implying it is not established. Yet, throughout their article, these reporters have established the administration was in constant contact with platforms to do this very thing. The desperation to defend the administration has become pathetic.
After Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, urged social media companies to “take action against misinformation superspreaders” in July 2021, the companies took down information posted by 17 accounts linked to the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group of people who frequently distributed false anti-vaccination claims.
Once again, The Times' writers provide tangible evidence of these wild claims made by Judge Doughty.
For several pages, Judge Doughty refers to the F.B.I.’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, suggesting a link between the government’s contacts with social media companies and the decision by some of the platforms to remove information about the story.
"Suggesting." No, guys, this is not a wild, unproven claim made by the judge. We know that the FBI worked to stifle the Hunter Biden laptop story. None other than Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted the FBI contacted him about the story being fraudulent, and he took down accounts and blocked the New York Post story as a result. All this happened while the FBI was in possession of the actual laptop for more than half a year. Source: The NY Times.
Conservatives have already begun to seize on that kind of language to fuel their broader political allegations against Mr. Biden and Democrats.
Seriously, with the pouncing and seizing routine?! This is all a charade, presented as "conservatives claim," while ignoring that "the facts prove" is also applicable.
But they are charges that the president and his aides reject as wrong and misleading. And they say — backed up by evidence from several of the social media companies — that the platforms have made independent decisions about what information to promote or delete, without any government control.
This is after the pair provided numerous examples of when the administration made contact and deletions took place, or at least the examples were made in the ruling and never disproven by the paper or the administration.
Internal files released by Twitter last year document instances when the company rejected requests from the government.
The key word there: "instances." Sure, there were times when the government requested takedown orders and they were not followed through. But there were far more examples in The Twitter Files showing compliance took place. Suggesting that since Twitter did not honor 100% of the requests it means the administration never forced the issue is laughably sophomoric. We refer you to the above passage showing compliance with the Surgeon General's requests.
_____________
This article needs to be held up as the preeminent example of the operations of the press complex, in general, these days. So much is contained in this solitary piece it needs to be curated, archived, framed, and placed on display in the Bias Wing at The Museum of Journalistic Ineptitude.
We get the knee-jerk defense of Biden, default blame of conservative viewpoints, offsetting actions as simply claims made by a judge, abject incurious reporting regarding the facts, swallowing of administration explanations without challenges, and the always enjoyable practice of journalists pushing for censorship.
This would be an embarrassing display if it had been printed in the youth newspaper Grit. To see this published by The New York Times inspires laughter…otherwise, you would be left weeping over the state of journalism in this country.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member