The year has hardly begun, and the pro-Biden media are already in a full-blown panic. They’re upset many polls show Donald Trump ahead of President Joe Biden. When Democrats are losing, they warn that democracy is dying and disinformation is thriving.
In this spirit of dread, NBCNews.com posted a story with the headline “Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat in 2024—and the U.S. is less ready than ever.”
The reporter is Brandy Zadrozny, whose specialty is “misinformation, extremism and the internet.” Reader beware, since every reporter who professes to expose “misinformation” and “extremism” is a dedicated warrior against those “far-right” Republicans.
Here’s the problem for the “misinformation” reporters: Are they willing to acknowledge that the Democrats are guilty of it? Are they willing to admit that the media elites can get the facts wrong? Or is there an automatic assumption that every argument Trump and his “MAGA media” forward against the Democrats has to be false?
At the base of leftist panic over “misinformation” is a long-simmering anger that partisan Democratic journalists are not trusted by the Republican half of the country. Journalists cannot stand that Trump remains popular despite all their attempts to destroy him as a political figure.
Parker Thayer of the conservative Capital Research Center posted an informative thread on X (formerly Twitter) noting how Zadrozny’s stable of experts turned out to be misinformation deniers whenever the Republicans had a factual point to press.
He started with Claire Wardle, founder of First Draft News and researcher at Brown University. She lamented that after a pandemic, an “insurrection” and congressional investigations into leftists working to censor conservative speech, 2024 is worse than 2020. Thayer pointed out Wardle’s First Draft News disparaged both the Hunter Biden laptop (Russian disinformation) and the COVID-19 lab leak theory (racist). Arguments that turned out to be real didn’t cause any media introspection.
Zadrozny also turned to A.J. Bauer, assistant journalism professor at the University of Alabama, who studies conservative media. “Right-wing media see a demand for content that is pro-Trump and leaning into conspiracy theories,” he pronounced. Bauer dismissed the Hunter laptop as irrelevant after it was verified by pro-Biden media outlets. He also shared the fake story of Israel bombing al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.
Doesn’t this shake his credibility as an “expert?” Not at NBC News.
Naturally, the list also included Joan Donovan, a “misinformation” scholar at Boston University honored in all the leftist outlets. Thayer noted Donovan called Hunter’s laptop one of Steve Bannon’s “three biggest disinfo campaigns of 2020.” After the liberal papers acknowledged the laptop was real, Donovan still tweeted the laptop was “the most popular straw man question at #Disinfo2022,” a conference hosted by The Atlantic magazine, which has endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton and Biden for president.
Thayer closed by noting Zadrozny herself wrote a “gem of an article claiming that Boston Children’s Hospital doesn’t perform ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries on minors. (BCH openly admitted they do.)”
Other experts in the NBC story were presented as nonideological. Christina Baal-Owens works for the “nonpartisan voting rights organization” Public Wise, but her LinkedIn page is titled “Social Justice Warrior” and lists her time in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Until recently, Laura Edelson was the “chief technologist” for Biden’s Justice Department.
So, what we’ve learned from NBC is that it assembled a unanimous cast of Democrats who share the opinion that Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to use information they identify as highly unfavorable to their hold on power. Looking back at the COVID-19 lab leak or the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandals? NBC calls that an “unprecedented threat.” Apparently, democracy can’t survive these topics.
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