By David Harsanyi
Thursday, October 15, 2020
On the rare occasion a hapless editor at the New York
Times accidentally affixes a straightforward headline to a story that
reflects poorly on Democrats, the entire left-wing media infrastructure — from
big social-media accounts to the “media reporters” to the journalism
“professors” — screech until the newspaper alters it to it something more
accommodating.
You can imagine, then, the seismic outrage that would be
generated if Twitter or Facebook banned a URL of a major news organization
offering a story that hurt Donald Trump.
Yet less than three weeks from a presidential election,
perhaps the most vital platform for political news and debate has locked down
the accounts of a presidential candidate’s press secretary, and of his official
campaign, among others, at the behest of activists pretending to be
journalists.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been paying
attention. The press has spent four years pressuring social-media outlets to
censor speech and limit access with scaremongering over the alleged nefarious
influence of foreign accounts, “fake news,” and hate speech — all of which are
preferable to authoritarian technocrats shutting down open discourse. Well, at
least until such time that people lose their agency and free will.
Of course, as far as we know, the New York Post
piece on Hunter Biden’s shady
foreign dealings, in which we learn that Democratic Party presidential
candidate Joe Biden may have met with a Burisma executive at the behest of his
son, was written using the same journalistic ethics and standards that have
been in place for decades.
Even Twitter’s ostensible justification — crafted in
conjunction with its media “partners” — for banning the Post story make zero
sense. Twitter says:
The policy, established in 2018,
prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without
authorization. We don’t want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be
used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials.
If the press were asked to follow these evolving
standards, there would no useful journalism on Twitter. Certainly the vast
majority of un-useful Russian-collusion rumormongering that was pumped
out by the Washington Post, CNN, and New York Times would be
censored, as it relied heavily on faulty sourcing and foreign disinformation.
As would all the uncorroborated rape allegations that were made against Brett
Kavanaugh and amplified by virtually every major media organization.
Indeed, if journalists were forbidden from distributing
“content obtained without authorization,” the majority of the biggest news
stories of the past century would be off-limits. Donald Trump’s tax-return
story. The Pentagon Papers. Watergate. The Iran-Contra scandal. All the
revelations of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. The most vital charge of
journalism is to procure information the powerful hide.
Twitter claims it doesn’t want to incentivize hacking by
allowing its platform to be used as distribution for possibly “illegally
obtained materials.” Yet when a Daily Caller reporter offered
evidence that Hunter’s laptop was obtained by a repair shop legally,
Twitter suspended his account as well.
Even as Twitter was banning reporters from sharing the Post’s
investigation, or even providing evidence of its veracity, it was allowing
left-wing outlets such as the New York Times and Daily Beast to
purportedly contextualize it.
The very notion that the establishment media wouldn’t run
with hacked Donald Trump emails, if they pointed to possible misconduct,
strains credulity. Just a few weeks ago, nearly every reporter on social media
was sharing a recording “obtained without authorization” of the First Lady
complaining about Christmas decorating — a story that had almost no news value.
By the way, as of yet, no one has really disputed the
veracity of the Post’s reporting. Hunter has not claimed that those
aren’t his pictures or his emails. Joe Biden hasn’t claimed that he didn’t meet
Burisma execs who were using his son. Politico reports
that “Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP
had some kind of informal interaction” with the Burisma executive. One assumes
that, if the vice president met with a shady oil executive who put his incompetent
son on its board, it would not be on the official docket. In a healthy media
environment, journalists wouldn’t be dismissing the story; they would be trying
to verify it in the same way they try to verify dirt on the president.
Instead, the Biden campaign uses the Twitter ban as proof
of the inauthenticity of the story. “Twitter’s response to the actual article
itself makes clear that these purported allegations are false and are not
true,” says one creative Biden campaign spokesperson.
Even that fact check — which relies on Twitter’s
“partners” at the Washington Post — is simply a lie. Twitter maintains,
for instance that, “then-Vice President Biden played no role in pressuring
Ukraine officials into firing the prosecutor, who also was not investigating
the energy firm.” Biden is on
video bragging about pressuring Ukrainian government to fire Viktor
Shokin. Whether the prosecutor was investigating Burisma is still opaque —
which is why it’s a good idea to let outlets hash it out. If we relied solely on
the establishment press, notorious Bush-era fabulist Dan Rather would still
have his old job at CBS.
Of course, it is because the story has news value that
it’s being censored. The mounting evidence that Hunter leveraged his name, and perhaps
more, to make millions is pretty clear.
I see many libertarians claiming that being critical of
giant tech companies that control information is by default a broadside against
free expression. Yet marketplace decisions by powerful, cronyistic companies
can also be fundamentally illiberal, and it’s completely reasonable to object
to them.
I still don’t support removing liability protections for
Big Tech for both ideological and practical reasons. At this point, the only
way to change things is to build your own outlets and platforms.
Yet if every major institution in the country — from
academia to tech to big woke companies to media — does the work of one party,
there will probably be repercussions one day that hurt liberty. Because that
kind of arrangement looks a lot more like fascism than anything liberals are
usually whining about.
Just this week, during the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation
hearings, Senator Amy Klobuchar, echoing four years of grousing from
journalists, declared that Trump had leveled “unprecedented” attacked on the
free press (it must have slipped her mind that the Obama administration spied
on and prosecuted journalists.) Yet now we have some of the most powerful
gatekeepers of political speech simply shutting down inconvenient stories while
journalists cheer it on. It’s an authoritarian position, no matter who does it.
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