NBC News continued its streak of lacking journalistic integrity, principles, or basic values of civility and truth on Tuesday, working with a far-left group to lobby Google to demonetize The Federalist and Zero Hedge from their ad platform. Despite having been called out and ratioed to the moon, NBCNews.com cowardly engaged in stealth-editing after Google publicly chimed in.
While it received no attention on the flagship broadcast network evening newscasts, the Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson spent much of his A-block on this egregious attempt by NBC to destroy news outlets that they disagreed with. The Federalist’s Sean Davis was also along, teeing off on “the unholy union of corrupt media and monopolistic tech oligarchs.”
Carlson started with a refresher for the uninitiated that “Google controls 70 percent of all online advertising, so if you're in the news business, you obey Google” seeing as how they have the power to “bankrupt you.”
In that spirit, he noted that “NBC News decided to use some of Google's power to shut down a couple of its competitors” as the conservative-hating, pro-Jeremy Corbyn NBC News reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser tag-teamed with the U.K.-based Stop Funding Fake News to inquire with Google about why the two “racist” websites could be monetized.
The complaint? Federalist political editor John Daniel Davidson had the gall to call out the liberal media for “lying to you about everything, including the riots.” And yes, NBC News was an outlet Davidson mentioned.
With that, Fraser and her authoritarian friends were triggered.
As Carlson explained, Google more or less acquiesced (click “expand”):
The company threatened to ban both organizations from Google's ad platform. In other words, cut off their revenue. Adele-Momoko Fraser was thrilled by this. She immediately fired off a victory tweet, boasting about censorship she had inspired. She called the two sites far-right. That’s a term that has no meaning but does suggest some kind of immoral behavior that Adele-Momoko Fraser disapproves of. At the end of her tweet, she thanked the activists who helped her to silence competing views “for their hard work and collaboration! #BlackLivesMatter” with three raised fists at the end. Adele-Momoko Fraser seemed very satisfied with herself. She had done her part for the revolution today.
So what did Zero Hedge and The Federalist do to deserve this? To be demonetized? Well, we asked Google and they told us that the sites maintain “unmoderated comment sections.” In other words, readers get to say what they want. Google finds this intolerable. Faced with destruction, The Federalist had no choice but to submit to Google. The site deleted its comment section entirely. No more saying what you think about articles on The Federalist. Google has banned that now. Zero Hedge does still have comments so it has been demonetized. We’ll see if they can continue operating.
After Fraser’s original story went up, Adweek’s Scott Nover reached out to Google and, sure enough, he muddied waters that made it seem as though Google didn’t demonetize The Federalist, but merely warned them.
Once things were (supposedly) cleared up and Google offered a thread of its own insisting they never actually demonetized The Federalist, Fraser’s article was repeatedly stealth-edited with no official corrections, editor’s notes, or updates.
Nover apologized for the confusion, tweeting: “In journalism, we make mistakes. It happens. It's not the end of the world. We make corrections.” Yeah, right.
And as Davidson later noted to Laura Ingraham on FNC, there wasn’t exactly a collective uproar from the press writ-large over NBC’s draconian tattle-tale.
Back on FNC, Davis explained that they never received “any formal notice from Google” but rather first learned of the news from Fraser “email[ing] a general info account at The Federalist.”
It was only then that The Federalist contacted Google to confirm that they’d be demonetized if they didn’t remove their comments section.
Along with the fact that tech censorship exists (ahem, check out MRC TechWatch here), Davis sounded off on NBC’s complicity in this and the lack of consequences for such blatant disregard for the First Amendment and the broader issue of free speech (click “expand”):
DAVIS: In fact, it looks like NBC, the network that coddled Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer, by the way, had partnered with a foreign left-wing group in Europe to go after us and to use Google to go after us and as of now, since we have temporarily removed our comments sections, I can assure you they will be back, we are back in Google's good graces but this is a pretty terrifying example of the power that you have between the unholy union of corrupt media and monopolistic tech oligarchs.
CARLSON: Well, that's it right there and I think all of us have gotten over our shock at watching so-called journalists promote censorship, which they relentlessly do. The Daily Beast, CNN, NBC, all have pushed censorship and gotten it.
(....)
DAVIS: We were subjected to all these demands in 2016 and after to get rid of foreign interference in our elections and here we have a foreign unit at NBC with the Orwellian name, the NBC News Verification Unit — the irony there is enough to make ya laugh — seeking with another left-wing foreign group to deplatform in American media organization that's supposed to be defended and made sacrosanct under the First Amendment in trying to get us deplatformed by going to their left-wing friends at Google so I think there are a lot of questions that need to be answered[.]
To see the relevant FNC transcript from June 16, click “expand.”
FNC’s Tucker Carlson Tonight
June 16, 2020
8:02 p.m. EasternTUCKER CARLSON: Most media companies are dependent on Google. Google controls 70 percent of all online advertising, so if you're in the news business, you obey Google. When Google tells you to do something, you do it. You have no choice. They can bankrupt you in a minute and they will. In all of human history, no single entity has ever had more control over information than Google does right now, so if you’re worried about the concentration of power in the hands of a few unaccountable actors and you very much should be, nobody has more unchecked power than Google does. This afternoon, NBC News decided to use some of Google's power to shut down a couple of its competitors. Power is useful for that. An NBC employee called Adele-Momoko Fraser forwarded Google executives a screen from a left-wing activist group in England denouncing two sites, Zero Hedge and Federalist, as “racist.” Google immediately took the bait, of course. The company threatened to ban both organizations from Google's ad platform. In other words, cut off their revenue. Adele-Momoko Fraser was thrilled by this. She immediately fired off a victory tweet, boasting about censorship she had inspired. She called the two sites far-right. That’s a term that has no meaning but does suggest some kind of immoral behavior that Adele-Momoko Fraser disapproves of. At the end of her tweet, she thanked the activists who helped her to silence competing views “for their hard work and collaboration! #BlackLivesMatter” with three raised fists at the end. Adele-Momoko Fraser seemed very satisfied with herself. She had done her part for the revolution today. So what did Zero Hedge and The Federalist do to deserve this? To be demonetized? Well, we asked Google and they told us that the sites maintain “unmoderated comment sections.” In other words, readers get to say what they want. Google finds this intolerable. Faced with destruction, The Federalist had no choice but to submit to Google. The site deleted its comment section entirely. No more saying what you think about articles on The Federalist. Google has banned that now. Zero Hedge does still have comments so it has been demonetized. We’ll see if they can continue operating. All of this raises an interesting question, though. Google says it now holds conservative websites responsible for the comments of their readers and yet, irony of ironies, thanks to a special carve out Google has received from the United States Congress, something they call section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — remember that — Google itself is not responsible for content on its platform because of Congress as it doesn't have to be. So if you’re slandered by someone, for example, and that slander passes through Google servers, you cannot sue Google over it. Google is immune from the consequences, immunity is a nice thing to have if you’re a big company. Fox News doesn't have it. But again, thanks to Congress, Google does have immunity and that's one of the main reasons that Google's founders are some of the most rich and powerful people in the world, because Congress allows them to be. Senator Josh Hawley pointed this out today. Let's hope he and his colleagues act soon to revoke this privilege. If Google will not extend 230 protections to others, Google should not enjoy those protections itself, obviously. Google should have faced these consequences a long time ago, Congress should have done this years ago. It's been clear for a very long time that the big tech monopolies have now surpassed the federal government as the chief threat to our liberties.
CARLSON [on 08/14/17]: Google is the most powerful company in the history of the world, the portal through which the bulk of our information flows. That means that if Google isn't on the level, neither is our understanding of the world. To an unprecedented extent, Google controls reality. Now, Google has already shown a disturbing willingness to distort reality for ideological ends.
CARLSON: And now it is happening, Google is acting directly to shape what people can say and what they are allowed to speak . It’s a direct effort to stifle free speech made all of that is even truer today.
(....)
8:08 p.m. Eastern
CARLSON: Sean Davis knows that feeling well. He co-founded The Federalist. We’re happy to have him on tonight. Sean, thanks so much for coming on the show tonight. Just — did — tell us the obvious thing, did you know this was coming?
SEAN DAVIS: No, we didn't and it's actually really interesting how this came about. We never got any formal notice from Google. We never got any notice from their ad team. We learned about this from NBC News, from the reporter Ms. Fraser, who e-mailed a general info account at The Federalist. She didn't email me or my partners or my founders, saying hey, we heard that Google demonetized you, what do you think about that? And it’s at that point where we started reaching out to connections that we have at Google and found out that it turns out yeah, something was going on there but it wasn't what NBC or Ms. Fraser had said. In fact, it looks like NBC, the network that coddled Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer, by the way, had partnered with a foreign left-wing group in Europe to go after us and to use Google to go after us and as of now, since we have temporarily removed our comments sections, I can assure you they will be back, we are back in Google's good graces but this is a pretty terrifying example of the power that you have between the unholy union of corrupt media and monopolistic tech oligarchs.
CARLSON: Well, that's it right there and I think all of us have gotten over our shock at watching so-called journalists promote censorship, which they relentlessly do. The Daily Beast, CNN, NBC, all have pushed censorship and gotten it.
(....)
8:10 p.m. Eastern
DAVIS: We were subjected to all these demands in 2016 and after to get rid of foreign interference in our elections and here we have a foreign unit at NBC with the Orwellian name, the NBC News Verification Unit — the irony there is enough to make ya laugh — seeking with another left-wing foreign group to deplatform in American media organization that's supposed to be defended and made sacrosanct under the First Amendment in trying to get us deplatformed by going to their left-wing friends at Google so I think there are a lot of questions that need to be answered, especially by those involved at CNN who put forward a completely false and maliciously so article attacking us, slurring us, and slamming us and defaming us with things that had no basis in reality whatsoever and if this were a just world, there would be accountability for that. There would be accountability for fake journalists who go around trying to destroy their competition for the crime of criticizing them.
CARLSON: Once again — and especially siding with the most powerful company on Earth. Google has a — has a monopoly on search. The Justice Department is looking into that, let's hope they break up Google but in the meantime, and Don — Donald Trump Jr. actually today tweeted about this. I thought made a really good point, this is intentional interference in a presidential election, no? I mean, what else could it be? That's what it is.
DAVIS: That is absolutely what it is and it's being done by people who claim to be journalists, who claim to believe in — in free speech and freedom of expression and it's not just that somebody came after us and tried to deplatform us. The — the whiny cry bullies of the left to do this all the time to their enemies. They can’t win arguments, so they try and shut them down, but to see this come from actual journalists who claim to believe in the First Amendment, that was remarkable. And the other thing is, you know, we’re a pretty big organization, we’re influential, we have a big audience and we have a lot of influence, we were able to stop this. Now, most people, 99.99 percent of people who get canceled or deplatform by these little Marxist cry bullies, they don't have any recourse and it's what's happening to them that is the real crime. It’s not what's happening to us.
