The Most Embarrassing "Facebook Files" Revelation? The Press, Exposed as Censors
The "Facebook Files" show the press is part of the censhorship establishment, but that's not the worst part
The most embarrassing revelation of the “Facebook Files” released by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan yesterday (described in more detail here) involves the news media:
In one damning email, an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg
and Cheryl Sandberg:
We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White
House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content.
We see repeatedly in internal communications not only in the email above, but in
the Twitter Files, in the exhibits of the Missouri v Biden lawsuit, and even in the
Freedom
of Information request results beginning to trickle in here at Racket, that the news
media has for some time been working in concert with civil society organizations, government, and tech platforms, as part of the censorship apparatus.
In the summer of 2021, the White House and Joe Biden were in the middle of a
major factual faceplant. They were not only telling people the Covid-19 vaccine
was a sure bet — “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations” is
how Biden put it — but that those who questioned its efficacy were “killing people.”
But the shot didn’t work as advertised. It didn’t prevent contraction or transmission, something Biden himself continued to be wrong about as late as December of that
year.
If you go back and give a careful read to corporate media content from that time
describing the administration’s war against “disinformation,” you’ll see outlets were themselves not confident the vaccine worked. Take the New York Times effort from
July 16th, 2021, “They’re Killing People: Biden Denounces Social Media for Virus Disinformation.” You can see the Times tiptoeing around what they meant, when
they used the word “disinformation.” In this and other pieces they used phrases
like,
“the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation,” “how to track misinformation,” “the
prevalence of misinformation,” even “Biden’s forceful statement capped weeks of
anger in the White House over the dissemination of vaccine disinformation,” but
they repeatedly hesitated to say what the misinformation was.
Any editor will tell you this language is a giveaway. Journalists wrote expansively
about “disinformation,” but rarely got into specifics. They knew that they couldn’t
state with certainty that the vaccine worked, that there weren’t side effects, etc.,
yet still denounced people who asked those questions. This is because they
agreed
with the concept of “malinformation,” i.e. there are things that may be true factually,
but which may produce political results considered adverse. “Hestiancy” was one
such bugbear. Note the language from the unnamed Facebook executive above,
which describes the press lashing out “Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content,”
not “disinformation.”
This is total corruption of the news. We’re supposed to be in the business of
questioning officials, even if the questions are unpopular. That’s our entire role! If
we
don’t do that, we serve no purpose, maybe even a negative purpose. Moreover,
think
of the implications. News outlets wail about “disinformation” when they’re aware
the
public has tuned them out. When people don’t listen to reporters, it’s usually
because
they suck. You can do the math, as to why the current crop embraces censorship.
A
more embarrassing outcome for our business would be hard to imagine.
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