As the in-house ‘misinformation’ expert at NBC, Ben Collins peddles enough falsehoods to kill a fully grown African bull elephant. On Thursday when Ben took to X (formerly Twitter) to whine that some media outlets were actually covering the plagiarism scandal plaguing Harvard president Claudine Gay, commentators from across the political spectrum united to rake him over the coals.
Collins’s objection to the plagiarism allegations against Gay was not that they were factually inaccurate, but rather that they had originated from anti-Marxism activist Chris Rufo. On Thursday, Collins tweeted, without a hint of irony:
If you’re a mainstream outlet and you’re being gamed this easily by a guy [Chris Rufo] who is laying out his playbook days or months in advance, maybe the problem isn’t the right-wing grifters. Maybe the problem is you.
In other words, NBC’s supposed expert on disinformation, misinformation, malformation, and all of the other made-up idiot synonyms for “inconvenient truths” that leftists use, believes news outlets ought to suppress the Claudine Gay scandal because otherwise, they’d be handing a win to someone he disagrees with politically.
Robby Soave of Reason magazine savaged Collins that same day in a scathing piece, titled “If You Ignore Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism, Shame on You,”:
That declaration—"maybe the problem is you"—is fairly telling. Collins evidently thinks that mainstream outlets should not report on the president of Harvard’s well-documented plagiarism because he loathes the politics of the people who first identified it. This a journalist whose specialty is correcting misinformation, mind you.
Soave added: “Media outlets are being told to ignore true information because the information is inconvenient. One cannot find a stronger cautionary tale than that.”
He's right, of course. Ben was attempting to shame media outlets for reporting on a story because he disliked it, not because of any factual error.
Then came Nate Silver of 538, who was apparently shocked by Collins’s cynical stance: “It’s just kinda crazy to me how obviously and self-evidently partisan some of these ‘misinformation reporters’ are, in ways that cause tangible harm to journalism.”
Independent left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald, a frequent critic of Collins and the rest of the censorship-industrial complex, threw his hat into the ring as well:
If Ben is so eager to grow up and one day become a real journalist who is actually regarded by people as uniquely "dangerous" -- to the point they try to take action against him -- he'll have to try to do reporting that actually challenges, rather than serves, those in power.
And that’s really the crux of all of Ben’s nonsense. Anytime he and his remarkably stupid ilk call a story “misinformation,” that determination conveys next to nothing about how true or false the story actually is. All it means is that Ben wants people not to believe or discuss it.
What a clown show the “fact-checking” beat has become. Truly embarrassing.
