What’s the point of a press corps that’s uninterested in the freedom of the press?
What’s the point of a press corps that’s uninterested in the freedom of the press?
F ew things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.
There’s a lot of this going around these days.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
You’d think that journalists would be all over this story — that, of all industries, the press would be the most outraged by Zuckerberg’s allegations, demanding answers and explanations from the relevant government authorities. But you’d be wrong.
“In 2021,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
Zuckerberg added, “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Even more damning, the Silicon Valley CEO alleged that the FBI told Facebook in 2020 that the New York Post’s exclusive election-year reporting on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was a “potential Russian disinformation operation.” Prompted by this warning, Facebook sent the “story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Zuckerberg said.
It would be outrageous for the FBI to claim this, considering it had taken possession of the laptop and its contents nearly a year before the New York Post broke the story. It was thus in a position to verify the laptop’s authenticity and say whether the reporting was false.
So, yes, the federal government pressured a social-media company into censoring political speech, including even jokes, according to Zuckerberg. The same thing happened to Twitter, by the way. It’s an established fact that the federal government intervened during the 2020 election and the Covid crisis to “correct” Twitter’s content. We know this thanks to the “Twitter Files.”
As Joe Biden would say, this Zuckerberg letter is a “big f***ing deal.”
Yet the media’s reaction last week was anything but ferocious. It consisted mainly of antipathy, with a dash of outright contempt for good measure.
“This sounds bad,” Vox seemingly conceded before adding, “but none of this information is new.” To drive home the point, the article insisted later, “This is not news.”
Business Insider’s Peter Kafka likewise claimed that Zuckerberg’s allegations about the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop were old news.
That Facebook buried the story “wasn’t a secret,” he said during an appearance on ABC News. “Facebook had mentioned they were doing that in real-time in October 2020, and they have subsequently apologized for it multiple times. So there’s nothing new there.”
But the issue here isn’t that Facebook blocked the laptop story. The social-media group did indeed announce its actions and decisions as they happened in 2020. The issue is what federal officials did. And they did the same when it came to Covid-related content. Hearing it alleged by Meta’s CEO in such certain and clear language is at least a teensy bit newsworthy, no?
“Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives,” complained TechDirt.
“It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices,” the article claimed, leaning precariously on an ever-preposterous pile of euphemisms. “The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.”
Declared the Daily Beast, “Mark Zuckerberg Rolls Over for MAGA in Groveling Letter.”
At MSNBC, “Don’t fall for Mark Zuckerberg’s Trump-friendly suck-up.”
Remember, the crime is not the crime; it’s anything that might help conservatives. This is where we are.
We have a federal government filled with bureaucrats who believe it’s within their remit to silence “troublesome” speech. We have social-media companies smart enough to know when a “request” by the feds is actually a demand. We have an FBI willing to abuse its authority to cover up news coverage if it’s unfavorable to certain politicians. And we have a press corps too stupid or partisan to realize how dangerous this all is.
If federal censorship doesn’t clear the bar for “newsworthy,” what does?