The whole essay may not be worth reading for most, but I wanted to call out these bits where he gives some of the more amusing and/or troubling recent excesses of the journalistic consensus given in NYT, WaPo, etc:
Consider, for example, a Washington Post story about a New York University report calling claims of conservative censorship on social media “a form of disinformation.” The report says:
The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it. No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons.
What I find troubling about that one is that it demonstrates how the term “disinformation” is being stretched lately to cover way too much.
I’m posting this next section specifically for the links:
As The Narrative gets more things wrong, the enforcement has become increasingly Kafkaesque. Today, you’ll get banned on social media for sharing statements by the WHO from a few months ago, or unedited vaccine trial results, on grounds of contradicting the WHO. This week’s front-page news was last week’s cancel-worthy conspiracy.
In the face of the public’s revolt, there is a growing inclination in the media to jettison objectivity in favor of antagonism. As a Times staffer said: “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?” According to The Narrative, there are only two sides: for or against The Narrative. Everyone on the other side is the same. When Elon Musk tweeted a meme about rejecting The Narrative, the Times responded with an article that consisted of his name and a salad of loosely connected words with negative associations like “incel,” “Trump,” and “racist.”
A number of the links are to Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter feed — she’s been great recently about calling out these sorts of developments (her Substack is also terrific).