NBC disinformation reporter is actually a partisan opinion writer
Stephen L. Miller
Ben Collins has made a name for himself around the media cool kids table as NBC News’s disinformation reporter. Except that Collins is actually an opinion writer.
His work doesn’t focus on breaking news stories nearly so much as it does on spreading naive disinformation. Collins’s intent appears to rest with scoring cheap Twitter hits and accruing the associated endorphin release gained when his sympathetic colleagues then praise his hot takes. Take what happened on Thursday when the SpaceX Starship rocket lifted off and shortly thereafter exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. This was a result predicted by SpaceX founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk and by engineers on the massive project. Still, Collins couldn’t help but weigh in on his Twitter feed, saying, “The kid gloves we in the press give this man is unbelievable.”
To be sure, Musk isn’t perfect. His commitment to free speech is flexible, for example. But again, Collins’s rhetoric isn’t exactly reporter-style rhetoric. It’s clearly a statement of loaded opinion. Of course, this isn’t the first time Collins has prioritized scoring cheap points against Elon Musk. Indeed, he was reportedly suspended by NBC News for a brief period for his rabid hyperventilating surrounding Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Just a day prior to Collins’s foray into rocket science, he reacted after Twitter suspended a journalist from Wired for soliciting hacked information pertaining to conservative commentator Matt Walsh. That solicitation was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. But Collins instead offered his familiar hyper-partisan glibness, tweeting, “Fun fact: This is the very same rule that was used to block distribution of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the greatest First Amendment violation in American history.”
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Anyone with even passing knowledge of the New York Post’s blockbuster story about Hunter Biden’s laptop understands the difference between a direct violation of Twitter’s terms of service and a published news story from a legacy media outlet. That story did not contain any hacked information.
These are examples from just this week alone. The larger problem for NBC and Collins, beyond that his comments are very seldom factually founded, is that he is a supposed “senior reporter.” He says so in his Twitter bio. Why NBC News tolerates this skewing of opinion is unclear. Surely actual NBC reporters must grate at it? But it’s clear that for Collins, scoring personal branding clout comes before representing his industry as a credible journalist.
For Collins, it’s all personal, such as when he made the ridiculous claim that a joke about him was libel. Or consider what happened when Collins led an exodus to the online platform Mastodon when Musk took over Twitter. Mastodon enjoyed a brief injection of traffic but has since died out. Yet, when FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver pointed out the hall monitor nature of Mastodon, Collins fired a shot at him, asking, “Don’t you have some elections to be wrong about?” Was Collins speaking on behalf of NBC News? Is this reporting or opinion?
Collins should clearly be rebranded as an opinion writer. At the moment, he’s just embarrassing himself and his news organization.
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Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) has written for National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News and hosts the Versus Media podcast.