{"id":17296,"date":"2022-05-09T13:18:11","date_gmt":"2022-05-09T17:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=17296"},"modified":"2022-05-09T13:18:11","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T17:18:11","slug":"the-latest-media-assault-on-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/09\/the-latest-media-assault-on-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Latest Media Assault on Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Latest Media Assault on Freedom\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><\/h1>\n

b \"\"<\/a>y James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Prominent journalists are calling for the media to champion a \u201cpro-democracy\u201d bias in how they portray politicians and government agencies. But tub-thumping for democracy \u2014 or at least for politicians who claim to be pro-democracy \u2014 is a poor substitute for exposing the proliferation of government abuses. Freedom will be the victim if journalists grasp a new pretext to portray government as a trustworthy savior.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In January, Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon called for a \u201cpro-democracy media,\u201d vigorously describing \u201clong-standing Republican tactics such as aggressive gerrymandering as \u2026 dangers to democracy.\u201d Bacon frets because \u201cgun-shy editors\u201d fail to denounce Republican \u201cradicalism\u201d in banner headlines.\u00a0 Washington Post<\/i> media columnist Margaret Sullivan declared, \u201cThat American democracy is teetering is unquestionable\u201d due to pro-Trump Republicans, requiring a \u201cnew pro-democracy emphasis\u201d to be \u201carticulated clearly \u2014 and fearlessly \u2014 to readers and viewers.\u201d Post<\/i> columnist Brian Klaas admits that \u201cthe media adopting a pro-democracy bias \u2026 effectively means being pro-Democratic [Party],\u201d but there is no alternative except to \u201cunequivocally and unapologetically condemn\u201d Republicans.<\/p>\n

What could possibly go wrong from journalists pretending that only one political party threatens Americans\u2019 rights and liberties? Demonizing one political party tacitly saints their opponents. But both Republicans and Democrats have a long record of unleashing federal agencies and ignoring the subsequent constitutional carnage.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Urging the media to become \u201cpro-democracy\u201d is reminiscent of a corporation that is almost bankrupt and gambles everything on a desperate \u201cHail Mary\u201d pass. A June 2021 survey by the Reuters Institute reported that only 29 percent of Americans trusted the news media \u2014 the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll last year revealed that \u201c86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.\u201d Practically the only folks who don\u2019t recognize the bias are the people who share the media\u2019s slant.<\/p>\n

The media-Democrat alliance<\/b><\/h2>\n

How does \u201cpro-democracy\u201d reporting work in practice? Journalists provide readers with a catechism specifying correct beliefs rather than providing facts by which citizens can reach their own conclusions. But the Washington press corps was aptly described decades ago as \u201cstenographers with amnesia.\u201d The political \u201cphilosophy\u201d of most reporters does not go beyond \u201cOrange Man Bad.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many journalists love to slap a halo over politicians and then bask in the reflective glow.<\/strong> In 2020 and 2021, many of the top media outlets hailed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for being far more repressive with his COVID policies than President Donald Trump advocated. A laudatory New Yorker<\/i> profile, entitled \u201cAndrew Cuomo, King of New York,\u201d explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over COVID policy as \u201cbetween people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.\u201d For many liberals and much of the nation\u2019s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, bankrupting business, and causing two million people to lose their jobs vindicated government as \u201ca force for good.\u201d<\/p>\n

MSNBC\u2019s Nicolle Wallace declared that Cuomo is \u201ceverything Trump isn\u2019t: honest, direct, brave.\u201d Entertainment Weekly<\/i> hailed Cuomo as \u201cthe hero that America never realized it needed until he was on our television screens every night.\u201d As National Review<\/i> noted, local reporters failed to ask questions on his nursing home edict (which forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients) \u201cfor months, as the governor held his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where not a single question was asked about nursing homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The docile media paved the way to Cuomo winning an Emmy award for his \u201cmasterful use of television\u201d during the pandemic. The media\u2019s valorization of Cuomo helped make his self-tribute book (for which he received a $5 million advance), American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic<\/i>, a bestseller. Cuomo\u2019s reign ended in a swirl of criminal investigations and outrage over his coverup of thousands of nursing home deaths caused by his policies.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s coverage of the 2020 election would qualify as \u201cpro-democracy\u201d reporting at its best.<\/strong> Time<\/i> magazine national political correspondent Molly Ball boasted early last year of the \u201cwell-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.\u201d And how do we know it was \u201cfortified,\u201d not \u201crigged\u201d? Because Biden won.<\/p>\n

After the 2016 presidential election, the Post\u2019<\/i>s Sullivan bewailed the media\u2019s \u201cridiculous emphasis put on every development about Hillary Clinton\u2019s [illegal] email practices.\u201d For the 2020 election campaign, liberal media found a \u201cpro-democracy\u201d solution for one of the potential bombshells. After damning revelations of criminal conduct and corruption began pouring out in September 2020 from the laptop that Hunter Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop, Twitter and Facebook banned reposts of the New York Post<\/i> expos\u00e9s on the laptop\u2019s contents. National Public Radio and many other outlets derided the laptop excerpts as a Russian disinformation campaign. The mainstream media succeeded in minimizing the story\u2019s impact on the election, regardless of subsequent revelations confirming the laptop\u2019s authenticity. The media\u2019s pretense that the laptop was a Russian ploy shielded Biden family corruption controversies from voters. Perhaps such selectivity helped inspire Sullivan\u2019s triumphal column just after Biden\u2019s victory on how the media \u201csaved democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, much of the media nowadays prefer to trumpet official lies instead of fighting them<\/strong>. It would be criminally naive to trust media outlets that championed Biden\u2019s candidacy last year to police his presidency \u2014 especially when it comes to any wars or bombing campaigns he launches. The Pentagon Papers<\/i> proved that politicians and bureaucrats will brazenly con the American public into unnecessary wars. But that lesson vanished into the D.C. memory hole.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The state media and COVID coverage<\/b><\/h2>\n

The docility of the Washington press corps has profoundly tainted their coverage of the pandemic. In a March 11 speech last year on COVID, Biden promised, \u201cI\u2019m using every power I have as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing.\u201d But who was Biden going to war against?<\/p>\n

\u201cWar footing\u201d should have sounded an alarm bell, but media bigwigs were too busy whooping up COVID Czar Tony Fauci\u2019s latest fear-mongering. Journalists applauded rather than vigorously scrutinized whether the new powers Biden claimed actually protected public health. When Biden announced that he would impose a vaccine mandate on all private companies with more than 100 employees, most of the press coverage was laudatory. When the Supreme Court struck down that mandate, much of the press corps was shocked that the justices did not defer to Biden\u2019s proclaimed good intentions, like the media did.<\/p>\n

How can journalists tell \u201cwho is serving democracy?\u201d Many Washington journalists reflexively presume that being pro-government is the same as being pro-democracy. The New York Times<\/i> reporter covering the Justice Department, Katie Benner, evinced this mindset when she denounced Trump supporters as \u201cenemies of the state\u201d in a 2021 tweet. Benner believes journalists must take action \u201cif a politician seems to threaten the state.\u201d (Prior to joining the Times,<\/i> Benner wrote for the Beijing Review,<\/i> owned by the Chinese Communist Party.)<\/p>\n

When the Chinese government arrested journalists in Hong Kong in early 2022, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken issued a clarion call: \u201cA confident government that is unafraid of the truth embraces a free press.\u201d Blinken received plenty of accolades from pundits for his declaration. But no one in the mainstream media called out the U.S. government hypocrisy. While detained Hong Kong journalists are supposedly an outrage, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains jailed in Britain at the behest of the U.S. government, which is seeking to extradite him for the crime of exposing U.S. government secrets. The Washington Post<\/i> and other top media outlets that happily used Assange\u2019s leaks more than a decade ago have effectively forgotten about his plight.<\/p>\n

All hail the Deep State<\/b><\/h2>\n

Most Washington press poohbahs show more affection for Leviathan than for freedom. The Washington Post<\/i> devotes far more newshole to publishing leaks from FBI officials than to exposing FBI abuses<\/strong>. Washington Post<\/i> columnist Eugene Robinson whooped \u201cGod Bless the \u2018Deep State,\u201d \u2014 touting his blind trust in federal agencies with vast secretive powers.<\/p>\n

Nothing could be more perilous to the truth than encouraging journalists to pirouette as saviors when they grovel to The Powers That Be.<\/strong> \u201cPro-democracy\u201d media is a threat to liberty because it will ignore or downplay abuses committed by purportedly pro-democracy rulers. Rather than rigorously scrutinizing Biden\u2019s proposals, the media presumes his pursuit of vast power is simply proof of his benevolence.<\/p>\n

\u201cPro-democracy\u201d reporting will be uplift at its worst<\/strong>. It is no harmless error to portray politicians (or at least Democrats) as more honest and honorable than they are. The Biden administration has signaled plans to make both the FBI and IRS far more intrusive. Will \u201cpro-democracy\u201d media outlets refrain from mentioning past constitutional debacles by those agencies? Will it be \u201cpro-democracy\u201d to pretend new scandals don\u2019t actually exist? (That recipe worked for the media and Obama.)<\/p>\n

\u201cPro-democracy\u201d cheerleading by the media is especially perilous nowadays thanks to the rising support for official censorship.<\/strong> Of course, it is not labeled \u201ccensorship\u201d; instead, it is portrayed as public service crackdowns on alleged \u201cdisinformation\u201d or \u201cmisinformation\u201d (which sometimes simply means data that expose federal falsehoods and abuses). In a recent report, the Aspen Institute, one of Washington\u2019s most revered think tanks, called for the Biden administration to \u201cestablish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation, including a centralized national response strategy, defining roles and responsibilities across the Executive Branch.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Aspen report portrayed objectivity as an enemy of truth, and its commissioners \u201cdiscussed the need to adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of \u2018both sides\u2019 and \u2018objectivity,\u2019 particularly in areas of public health, civil rights, or election outcomes.\u201d The report called for creation of a \u201cPublic Restoration Fund \u2026 with a mandate to develop systemic misinformation countermeasures through education, research, and investment in local institutions.\u201d The Aspen Institute also urged government officials to impose \u201cSuperspreader Accountability,\u201d to \u201chold superspreaders of mis- and disinformation to account with clear, transparent, and consistently applied policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how will citizens be able to recognize \u201csuperspreaders?\u201d The government will tell them so. Law professor Jonathan Turley condemned the report\u2019s \u201cfull-throated endorsement of systems of censorship\u201d by government. Turley castigated the Aspen Institute\u2019s recommendations as \u201cthe latest evidence of a building anti-free speech movement in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Washington Post<\/i> loved the call for crackdowns, endorsing the Aspen report with an editorial headlined: \u201cAmerica is sick with information disorder. Time for a cure.\u201d And how do we know Americans are \u201csick?\u201d Because they distrust Joe Biden and the feds. And the cure is more federal power and more censorship.<\/p>\n

Which federal agencies are qualified to lead the fight against \u201cdisinformation?\u201d Should the Pentagon be in the lead \u2014 despite its profound deceit of Americans and members of Congress regarding the pending collapse of the Afghan army in the summer of 2021? Should the Centers for Disease Control be in charge \u2014 despite deceiving and endangering Americans by refusing to count so-called \u201cbreakthrough infections\u201d resulting from the snowballing failure of Pfizer vaccines to protect people from contracting COVID?<\/p>\n

In 2002, Bush administration Solicitor General Theodore Olson informed the Supreme Court that the federal government had the right \u201cto give out false information\u201d whenever it deemed necessary. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information,\u201d Olson proclaimed. How can intelligent citizens permit the feds to crack down on \u201csuperspreader accountability\u201d when Uncle Sam is the most dangerous superspreader? Or is the government entitled to a monopoly on lies in order to better serve the public?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When did Washington reporters became qualified to serve as Grand Inquisitors for Democracy, casting judgment on every politician and proposal? Most reporters have the same level of intellectual curiosity as the average lottery ticket buyer. Reporters react to the word \u201cbipartisan\u201d like cocaine addicts desperate for another political virtue signal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The \u201cHunter Biden Laptop Recipe for Saving Democracy\u201d is the latest crock from the media elite. Journalists can provide an invaluable service to self-government by providing citizens with sufficient information that they can pass their own judgment on government policies and aspiring tinhorn dictators. The press should vigorously investigate and expose federal crimes regardless of who is president.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the April 2022 edition of<\/em> Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Latest Media Assault on Freedom\u00a0\u00a0 b y James Bovard Prominent journalists are calling for the media to champion a \u201cpro-democracy\u201d bias in how they portray politicians and government agencies. But tub-thumping for democracy \u2014 or at least for politicians who claim to be pro-democracy \u2014 is a poor substitute for exposing the proliferation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3216,3147,2952,391,2349,2370,47,45,3217,3146,428,1807,1056,164,2953,946,2313,3134,833],"class_list":["post-17296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anthony-blinken","tag-aspen-institute","tag-bias","tag-censorship","tag-covid","tag-cuomo","tag-fbi","tag-freedom","tag-grand-inquisitors","tag-hunter-biden-laptop","tag-joe-biden","tag-jonathan-turley","tag-julian-assange","tag-leviathan","tag-margaret-sullivan","tag-media","tag-pandemic","tag-tony-fauci","tag-washington-post"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Latest Media Assault on Freedom - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Pundits are calling for reporters to show a "pro-democracy" bias. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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