Journalists for Censorship: Because it's good for you

Michael Schellenberger in Public:

In its attack on the Twitter Files, Politico repeats the party line of the EU, the Democratic Party, and the broader censorship industry. “What is worrying here is how efforts to stop foreign interference, hate speech, and other malign influences on U.S. democracy are being weaponized in ways to serve a political agenda,” Politico writes. “...this work is about holding platforms to account for their own terms of services and policies on combating harmful speech online.”

As such, the Politico attack on the Twitter Files is part of Wokeism, or victimhood ideology, which is the organic substructure to the superstructure of the Censorship Industrial Complex. All offensive speech, from saying that natural disasters are declining to natal males aren’t women, is, prima facia, “harmful,” and thus must be censored.

After making its sweeping claim that social media favors right-wing over left-wing voices, Politico writes, “Caveat: That article was done in collaboration with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank specializing in tracking online extremists that has been accused of being part of this ‘complex.’”

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue is indeed one of the 50 top censorship organizations in the world, as identified by Matt Taibbi’s Racket, and one of the main propaganda arms of the US and UK governments, receiving funding from the U.S. State Department. It is currently lying and spreading disinformation about my views towards climate change. And we at Public recently caught it lying about “hate speech,” misclassifying Tweets criticizing George Soros and the World Economic Forum as “anti-Semitism,” allowing it to spread the Big Lie that “hate speech” is increasing, particularly on Twitter.

For Politico to wholly adopt the ISD message results from political alignment and, perhaps, money. Axios was receiving advertising money from Pfizer, including creating a video defending Big Pharma’s monopoly power and pricing, when its reporter, Ashley Gold, emailed Twitter to ask why it hadn’t de-platformed Berenson. We emailed Politico and Axios for comment but did not hear back.

Unfortunately, such financial motivations appear to be the rule, not the exception. The Guardian is, at this moment, preparing a hit piece on whale conservation organizations for opposing industrial wind energy development off the East Coast while taking money from the wind energy companies that stand to benefit. Pfizer poured money into news media organizations to promote not just its vaccine but also the crackdown on disfavored speech, like that of Berenson. And groups like ISD have vast US taxpayer funding to crank out “studies” that reporters at BBC, Politico, and other news media organizations don’t scrutinize.

Why are journalists attacking journalists and demanding censorship? It’s clear that there are both organic cultural and ideological reasons, as well as partisan political motivations. But there are also financial ones. Consider the mass media attacks on Joe Rogan, whose podcasting model has drawn viewers away from traditional media and up-ended the economics of the news industry. In other words, it’s not just that independent Substack journalists like Berenson threatens establishment orthodoxies. It’s also that we threaten the media’s credibility and viability.