The age of state-approved media in the West
Hudson Crozier
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A report from the Telegraph, a British newspaper, revealed the extent to which the United Kingdom’s government sought to regulate online speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A shadowy agency called the Counter Disinformation Unit helped major social media platforms target certain “narratives,” mainly on vaccines and lockdowns, in order to have related posts removed. The relationship ran so deep that the CDU made “hourly contact” with tech companies, according to its leader, Sarah Connolly. The companies suppressed more than 90% of content the state considered false.
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In the context of social media, this public-private partnership for political censorship purposes is, unfortunately, nothing new. But what is equally troubling about the Telegraph’s report is how journalism was affected.
The U.K.’s biggest news network, the BBC, belonged to a so-called Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum chaired by Connolly, which held meetings on how to better control public thought on the government’s pandemic response. Now we know why the BBC’s coverage earned it the accusation of being “consistently pro-lockdown,” which it denies to this day.
Moreover, current and former staff said there was a “climate of fear” for employees who thought the network wasn’t scrutinizing the government’s claims enough. Managers ignored their concerns, they said, and made them too afraid of losing their jobs to mount any meaningful resistance.
We in the West, especially in America, think we’re so far above undemocratic countries such as China, Russia, or Iran, where the government has fully seized the media and citizens only hear from propaganda outlets that are a sad parody of what we regard as the free press. But as long as entities like the BBC are so eager to surrender their journalistic integrity to an agenda or official that they like, we are in similar danger.
Last year, President Joe Biden brought the United States into a recession, which has long been defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The White House quickly worked to redefine what a recession is to claim that it wasn’t happening.
“The textbook definition of a recession … is not two negative quarters of GDP growth,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
Like clockwork, outlets such as NPR and the Associated Press later published pretentious articles claiming that it’s “not an official definition,” using strikingly similar wording to gaslight the public. Regardless, polling showed that most of us knew a recession had occurred.
American media have gotten so comfortable with the government that they even help it punish journalists for doing their jobs.
Investigative reporting recently showed that the State Department has poured funds into the Global Disinformation Index, a powerful British organization that provides online advertisers with a list of “risky” sources, effectively working to defund and deplatform them. The most disfavored sources are overwhelmingly right-leaning, including the website on which you are reading this article, while the opposite is true of the GDI’s favorites.
The advisory panel behind this blacklist is composed of, you guessed it, journalists. One of them has claimed that the scandalous information found on Hunter Biden’s laptop doesn’t implicate his father in any meaningful way. It’s a blatantly false belief, but the Biden administration sure doesn’t mind.
During World War I, former President Woodrow Wilson became infamous for initiating the largest crackdown on the freedom of the press in America in the 20th century. His sweeping restrictions on “seditious” statements put dozens of newspapers and magazines out of business and reporters in jail.
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Wilson attempted to accomplish his censorial goals rapidly and with brute force, and history hates him for it. What’s happening to journalism in the West today is worse. Influential outlets are gradually, voluntarily aligning themselves with the goals of the state on a disturbing level. When their integrity is all but dead, the government only has to come in and cement the relationship for good.
This danger is why the role of contrarian, anti-establishment journalists and commentators, from Matt Taibbi to Tucker Carlson, is crucial. They deserve support to prevent the total homogenization of public thought.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.