Left-leaning TV news networks have been making some alarmingly anti-free speech proclamations, despite their own livelihoods depending on the protection of that right. Over the past week, journalists on these networks have compared conservative social media circles to ISIS terror cells, demanded a reckoning for right-leaning news sources like Fox News and OANN, and even called for the “deprogramming” of anyone who voted for Donald Trump in the most recent election.
CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy on Sunday’s Reliable Sources was particularly adamant that conservatives ought to have their speech curtailed:
There are a lot of people profiting off of lies and conspiracy theories, and I don’t really see how things get better, how we move on as a country, until this informational environment is cleaned up.
Food for thought: when Twitter banned the New York Post for breaking the now-verified story about Hunter Biden's laptop, were they just cleaning up the informational environment?
It's probably hard to imagine that journalists, of all people, would be advocating for censorship. Fortunately, readers need not imagine; watch the video below, and let the media explain it themselves:
On NBC’s Sunday Today, host Willie Geist remarked that according to “some,” the recent banning of conservatives for posting dubious information on Twitter was “too little too late.” ABC’s Rebecca Jarvis repeated that characterization in a report on Tuesday, adding: “Many have been calling on the tech titans to do more.”
Also on Tuesday, CNN Newsroom co-host Jim Sciutto and media reporter Brian Stelter compared the move to banning radical Islamist groups. “ISIS is the only parallel,” Stelter stated with exaggerated concern.
After Amazon suspended Parler — a pro-free speech alternative to Twitter — from its web hosting service, CNN business reporter Donie O’Sullivan gave a series of alarmist reports about the site, in which he framed Amazon’s move as a step in the right direction. In one such segment, he complained that sites like Parler “have no rules at all, and they are just rabbit holes of misinformation and hate speech.”
At long last, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said explicitly what his colleagues only had dared to imply: conservatives needed to be re-educated. On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Robinson opined with a smile: “There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.” Robinson then asked of 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Do you have any idea how we start that process, much less complete it?”
Members of the leftwing media have always swapped between playing reporters and activists. But now their own political advocacy is aimed at eroding the free speech that they depend on as reporters. Perhaps they figure it won’t be an issue as long as only the conservatives are silenced.
