There is so much wrong with this NYT piece on censorship

The MSM is all-in on censoring others, even or especially when what they term “misinformation” is true but inconvenient to the Narrative.

What is a bit surprising, though, is that they often buy their own BS so thoroughly that they are willing to spew their own misinformation–actual lies–in order to slander those with whom they disagree.

Both of these truths were evident in a story the New York Times published yesterday on Judge Terry A. Doughty’s restraining order that enjoined the federal government from pushing social media companies to censor speech that it doesn’t like.

The story has all the elements you would expect: references to Donald Trump, dark warnings about “misinformation,” justification of censorship in the name of the public good, tons of Republicans “seizing, and a healthy dose of outright lies used to justify plainly illegal behavior by the government.

I am not even going to waste time giving you the low-down of how biased the story is; why bother? You could write it yourself by now. A bit of “seizing,” some Republican bashing, a dash of Trump, and censorship saving lives.

This is an absolutely extraordinary passage in a NYT article from yesterday about the court ruling against the govt’s right to suppress speech on social media

It cites a correct statement as evidence of a judge referring to a “debunked claim”https://t.co/DgDiCEFEPT pic.twitter.com/mfWVD6n2yb

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) July 6, 2023

Much of what the Times pushed at us in what is ostensibly a “news” story is the same old tired BS we have been subjected to and by now can recite by heart. But one thing stood out, both because by now everybody knows that the claim the story is making is demonstrably false, and because this falsehood is being pushed out by a reporter who proudly notes in his bio that he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of COVID.

A Pulitzer Prize winner who is supposedly an expert on COVID claimed this:

The case was brought by two Republican attorneys general and five individuals who campaigned against masks, argued that vaccines did not work, opposed lockdowns and pushed drugs that medical experts denounced as ineffective, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

And it is being overseen by Judge Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump and has previously expressed little skepticism about debunked claims from vaccine skeptics. In one previous case, Judge Doughty accepted as fact the claim that “Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease.”

Dude: the COVID vaccine does NOT prevent transmission of the disease. It simply doesn’t. We know that for a fact, and even Dr. Fauci admits that. It was not even TESTED to find out if it could. The claims were simply an invention of the government in order to justify mandates.

Here is Fauci on why vaccines for respiratory viruses can’t prevent transmission:

non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods (Table 1) and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. SARS-CoV-2 “RNAemia” (circulation of viral RNA in the bloodstream, as is seen with most mucosal respiratory virus infections, as distinct from viremia, in which infectious viruses can be cultured from the blood), has been reported, and RT-PCR levels of viral RNA have been linked to severe disease,23,24 similar to studies of influenza RNAemia.25,26 As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2,13,14,15 tend to repeatedly re-infect people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable protection.27

…Attempting to control mucosal respiratory viruses with systemically administered non-replicating vaccines has thus far been largely unsuccessful, indicating that new approaches are needed.

So, either a guy who got a Pulitzer Prize for covering COVID is utterly ignorant about what COVID vaccines can and cannot do, or he is simply lying. There is no way that such a claim could be accidental because unlike many papers these days the Times still has a few editors and fact-checkers.

So the Times here is either proving the Judge’s point: that there is a public/private censorship and misinformation complex, or Michael Shear is proving that his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting leaves him less ignorant that a judge.

I suspect it is a combination of both, although you need to mix in a healthy dose of hubris born of decades of never being challenged due to his lofty credentials.

In any case, you can see why even on a practical level–preventing “misinformation”–censorship is damaging. The government and the MSM are left to spread falsehoods knowingly or not because they are protected from being challenged when they are either wrong or lying.

I am certain that if I tried I could prove that the incidence of “misinformation” spread by government officials during the pandemic exceeds that of “misinformation” spread by non-governmental actors. And that the damage done due to that “misinformation” is far worse than any done by private citizens who happened to be wrong.

Consider the freakout about Ivermectin, about which the government and media warned us in dire terms. Assume it does nothing for COVID. The government put enormous effort into debunking this and warning people not to use it, suggesting it was dangerous “horse paste.”

The government misinformation is much worse in this instance than anybody taking Ivermectin, which at worst was simply ineffective. It is not a particularly dangerous drug–Tylenol is arguably more dangerous–and by smearing it as “horse paste” and dangerous the government and the MSM scared people off one of the most useful and important drugs in human history.

The inventor of the drug won a Nobel Prize because it has saved so many lives and prevented enormous suffering. There is more evidence of severe side effects from the COVID vaccine, including death, than from Ivermectin.

So even if you believed, as I do not, that “misinformation” is a crisis and justifies censorship, the biggest spreader of misinformation during COVID was the US government, and certainly the one that had the most impact.

Censorship is almost never justified, and the MSM is in favor of it because it never applies to them, only their critics.

I can assure you that Facebook and YouTube, which both still freely censor, will do nothing to limit the reach of the New York Times’ misinformation in this story, as they never did during the Steele Dossier fiasco, the Hunter Biden fiasco (where they also censored TRUE information) or at any time.

Censorship is used exclusively to protect the narrative, not the truth. That is how it always works, and that is why the MSM is all for it.