This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Charlie Tidmarsh
Really transparent thread
This week’s curation on the RealClear Public Affairs Censorship page began with Frank Miele’s column “Suddenly The News Gatekeepers ARE the News” in our Politics vertical, a takedown of MSNBC’s decision not to air Donald’s victory speech Trump after a resounding victory in the Iowa Republican primary. When the race was called, Rachel Maddow announced that the network, without spite, would not address Trump’s speech to avoid broadcasting “things that are not true.” Miele catalogs a number of instances in which MSNBC and other mainstream networks were far less tactful with their editorial scruples, including a CNN segment in which a Democratic representative was allowed to falsely claim that Donald Trump had ordered the country to “ inject bleach” to fight Covid. -19.
To her list I might add one more: Maddow’s credulous portrayal of the now-disgraced Steele Dossier in 2017. [of the dossier’s elements] they remain neither verified nor proven false,” he said, live, “but none so far have been publicly proven wrong.” Buzzfeed, when it initially published the documents, warned that most of them were unsubstantiated. Steele’s report has since been revealed to be almost completely discredited opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. I tend to prefer publishing over not publishing – publish everything and keep us posted on updates as they come. Unfortunately, such glaring asymmetries in how and where these editorial judgments are made will only make the public sense-making process more difficult.
Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner has produced consistently strong journalism on the nature of the government’s relationship with the disinformation industry. Exactly one year ago he reported on the U.S. State Department’s funding of the Global Disinformation Index, a revelation that now informs an entire subfield of journalistic inquiry into the private sector’s role in the federal government’s censorship strategies. This week, Kaminsky reported that GDI, in documents provided to the Examiner, redacted key aspects of its 2022 tax returns “such as its board members and who prepared the filings.” One of the criteria by which the GDI judges and subsequently blacklists news outlets is “opaque ownership structures.”
The Global Disinformation Index is currently the subject of a congressional investigation and is also cited in a lawsuit filed against the Global Engagement Center (the entity that directly provided $100,000 to GDI) by the state of Texas, as well as media outlets conservative information Daily Wire and the Federalist. The three plaintiffs accuse Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other State Department officials of engaging in “one of the most shameful government operations to censor the American press in the nation’s history.”
Perhaps the most dramatic news event this week was the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Big Tech and the online child sexual exploitation crisis. Executives from Meta, TikTok, X and Snap were present for questioning, along with dozens of families of children who had suffered abuse or harm as a result of their social media activity. The atmosphere was combative; Senator Josh Hawley at one point forced Mark Zuckerberg to make an embarrassing apology to the parents behind him.
Writing in Reason, Robby Soave makes the crucial distinction, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, between the platform and the user. In this country we do not hold media platforms responsible for the content they host. There is no doubt that social media platforms breed a toxicity in our culture and politics, and there is no doubt that people have suffered because of it. “But,” Soave writes, “the agenda of the Senate Judiciary Committee is not the protection of children, but greater control over dissident speech.”
Emily Jashinsky and Krystal Ball commented on the hearing during a segment for Breaking Points that we republished on Thursday. Jashinsky points out that these hearings were largely “stunt creations for the sake of power grabs” and she intended only to lay the groundwork for legislation that would empower the government to hold these platforms legally accountable for the speech they publish. Indeed, politicians from both parties – including Josh Hawley, Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz and former President Trump – have proposed amending or even repealing Section 230 in recent years.
More than anything, the episode served as a chilling reminder that censorship efforts in the federal government are uniquely bipartisan. As Ball said on Breaking Points, “from a whole range of directions… from the left, the right, the center, they’re pushing for more censorship.” The left tends to blame these platforms for not doing enough “content moderation,” while the right tends to complain about heavy-handed and biased moderation. Both claims found common cause in a campaign against the free speech protections we afford media publishers. Changing this situation would seriously damage press freedom in this country.
In the courts this week, a long-running defamation case between conservative pundit Mark Steyn and climate scientist Michael Mann has reached a minor milestone. Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sued Steyn in 2012 over a post on the National Review website, in which Steyn called Mann’s research “fraudulent” and blamed him for popularizing the so-called hockey stick”. of the increase in global temperature. Mann had initially filed suit against Steyn, National Review and two other parties; National Review argued that Steyn’s comments were protected by the First Amendment, and the outlet dropped the lawsuit in 2021. This week the plaintiff, Mann, filed his lawsuit against Steyn.
Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian provided expert commentary on the developments. Mann appears to have overestimated his damages to the court in 2020, then changed them with additional documentation in 2023. Surprisingly, an estimate of a lost grant had changed from $9 million to $100,000 — “extremely strange,” according to Menton. Steyn’s defense also called their first witness, a Wharton statistician who called Mann’s climate temperature reconstruction methodologies “manipulative” and his conclusions “misleading.” National Review also provided its own coverage of the trial this week, noting that Mann had expressed hopes of “ruining this pathetic excuse for a human being,” referring to Steyn, in a 2012 email.
Other articles on the page this week include an addition to our new FOIA section, which, in the future, will serve as an index of important documents obtained from public records or Freedom of Information Act requests. Jimmy Tobias received a new tranche of emails heavily redacted by the NIH on the last day of January. An interesting finding was a series of questions posed by David P. Cleary, then staff director of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) at NIH, one of which noted that a ” Fourth Year Progress Report” from EcoHealth Alliance had been amended before the committee received it. This is notable because the fourth year report would have included information relevant to EcoHealth’s (an NIH-funded nonprofit) work on gain-of-function coronavirology at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Tobias has been a tireless FOIA gadfly for the NIH since his groundbreaking report last year on the agency’s attempts to stifle opinion on a potential SARS-CoV-2 lab origin.
In the coming weeks, we can hope to see more attention to the current Supreme Court docket, which includes at least two cases pertaining to social media, censorship, and the First Amendment. NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton will consider whether the First Amendment prohibits laws that restrict websites from “engaging in editorial choices about whether and how to publish and disseminate speech.” The case will be heard on February 26. Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) will consider whether the federal government’s communication with social media companies about content moderation constitutes a violation of the First Amendment. Arguments will be heard in March, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford epidemiologist censored on Twitter for expressing skepticism about pandemic lockdown policies, is one of many plaintiffs.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.