The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign

NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny wrote:

After over a year, the House committee investigating researchers and their work on disinformation… has yet to produce tangible results. Public hearings have not yielded actionable evidence that the federal government has been weaponized… There have been no legal wins and no legislation has been passed.

Zadrozny in the same article said that “until recently,” people like Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Elon Musk and I have been “extraordinarily successful” in fighting what we call the “censorship machine,” adding, “in the past two years, government efforts to respond to disinformation have been shuttered.” Yet the same efforts, in the same time period, yielded “no tangible results.” This is NBC News. Who edits these people?

Regarding “no legal wins and no legislation”: as Jordan’s Committee noted Monday, the House passed “The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act” last year, and the Censorship Accountability Act recently passed in Committee. If you want to argue a bill not yet signed into law doesn’t count as “passed” legislation, fine, but “no legal wins”? The Murthy v. Missouri censorship lawsuit before the Supreme Court is there because four federal judges already ruled government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are likely in violation of the First Amendment.

Does NBC mean “no legal wins,” except the ones that sent the issue to the Supreme Court?

Those cases came in addition to a long list of developments, like the NIHfreezing a $150 million content-flagging program, the shutdown of “Singing Censor” Nina Jankowicz’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board idea, even cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) budget, all of which are at the center of innumerable mawkish media freakouts over the recent slowing of state censorship programs. Such pieces often feature a photo of a “disinformation researcher” looking sad (theWashington Post has done at least three). Even Zadrozny’s new effort is headlined “The disinformation war has taken a toll, but researchers feel a shift.” But apparently not a tangible toll.

The New York Times, 60 Minutes, and NBC now have all rushed out hit jobs against “Republicans and their allies” who’ve exposed government censorship programs, denouncing “right-wing efforts” by “conservative activists” to halt “critical investigative work.” Apparently, I’m part of those efforts. I’ve never voted Republican or donated to conservative causes, and hold no “right wing” views. Why not just add a half-line like “as well as traditional free speech liberals,” to be more accurate? No good: this would threaten the central thesis of all these pieces, that only conspiracy-mongering “Republican allies” could oppose these beneficent moderation programs.

As with the absurd Times piece, similarly intended to influence the Supreme Court and help re-ignite state censorship programs during an election year, Zadrozny tried to re-frame the Twitter Files reports as a conspiracy tale spun by former Trump official Mike Benz:

Architects of the “censorship industrial complex” theory, including Taibbi and culture-war journalist Michael Shellenberger, were influenced and informed by Mike Benz, a former alt-right vlogger, who turned a two-month stint in the State Department in 2020 into a claimed expertise in cybersecurity.

Zadrozny wrote to me before publication, but I didn’t see the query. Noting NBC extended a post-publication correction to fellow dingbat censorship advocate Kate Starbird, I told her I’d begun publishing my thesis months before meeting Benz, that it was false to suggest any of my ideas were his, and NBC should include my denial. Among other things, why not? Who would it hurt, to be more accurate? Her response: “We feel confident in the… reporting.” In other words, fuck you.