New York Times Lies About City's Murder Rate, NYPD's Clearance Rate To Sell Fear To Its Readers

from the don't-be-shitty dept

There's no reason for the New York Times to be this bad at reporting. It has plenty of resources and a slew of editors, and yet we get headlines like this one, which says something completely false:

If you can't read/see the screenshot, this is the original headline attached to an article that says nothing of the sort:

After Murders ‘Doubled Overnight,’ the N.Y.P.D. Is Solving Fewer Cases

Murders did not "double overnight." The murder rate in New York City hasn't doubled at all. Here's what the murder rate looks like according to the NYPD's own stats:

Want another look at the "doubling" the NYT falsely asserts in its headline? This comes via David Menschel, one of dozens challenging the Times' embrace of "bleeds/leads" rather than the truth:

So, where does this "murders doubled" quote come from? Who knows. The article doesn't provide a source for this supposed direct quote (remember, there are quotes around "Doubled Overnight"). At best, one can extrapolate the statement in the headline from a very different statement provided by a former Baltimore PD officer who is now the director of, um, something called the "John Jay College's NYPD Executive Master's Program."

Here's the NYT pull quote:

“The increase in shootings, that’s got to have a negative impact on clearance rates,” said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Their caseload literally doubled overnight. The odds are never great. That’s the unfortunate truth.”

The first part ("that's got to have...") is pure speculation. So is the rest of it. Someone asked a cop to offer a statement on cop stuff and received something exonerative from someone who used to be a cop but now teaches a masters program aimed at NYPD officers.

At best, it's maybe "caseloads doubled overnight." But it's unlikely this has happened either. And, if we're going to examine year-to-year crime rates, whatever increases officers in the Bronx (the article occasionally focuses on the family of a Bronx murder victim) have seen in caseloads and reported crimes still cruises along at historic lows for the city that never sleeps.

The headline and the article to a disservice to the purported subject: the survivors of an unsolved murder. Cops have never been great at solving murders and the NYPD is no exception. Unfortunately, the article also lies about clearance rates, which have historically been nowhere near what is claimed by the reporter.

In the years before the pandemic, the New York Police Department was solving nearly 90 percent of the murder cases in the city. But in 2020, as shootings and homicides increased, the percentage of homicides the police solved, a statistic known as the clearance rate, plummeted to around 60 percent, according to the department’s records.

This is just inexcusable. Anyone can pull up these records. The article is (deliberately?) vague about how many "years before the pandemic" it's talking about, but nothing in the NYPD's own records suggests it has maintained a 90% clearance rate for murders.

People cherry-picking data may find a quarter from the last three years that shows something approaching 90% clearance, but the NYPD as a whole has never consistently approached the number stated in this article. And the published numbers have their own problems. Every so often, precincts report clearance rates above 100%, which suggests these are rolling averages that simply add solved cases to the total, no matter how long it has been since the crime was reported.

I would normally use the phrase "to its credit" before reporting that the NYT altered its headline less than a day later to have at least one less lie in it. Instead of "murders doubled," it simply says "murders increased." But "credit where it's due" applies, and the NYT is so far in arrears in the credibility department that no credit will be issued. The NYT added quotation marks to quote something no one actually said and turned a NYPD-oriented professor's speculation into an eye-grabbing "fact."

Its extremely casual relationship with the truth does no favors for the purported subjects of its article: a tortured family hoping for some justice and closure following the senseless murder of their son in a local bodega. Instead of focusing attention on historically low clearance rates, the paper decided to sell fear to its readers. It irresponsibly claimed readers were surrounded by murderers and the police were powerless to stop them.

What the NYT should have asked is why clearance rates were so low, given the NYPD's considerable resources. And it should have asked why it takes a pretty white woman dying to motivate law enforcement to put those considerable resources to use. In the grand scheme of all things policing, nothing means less than the death of a young black man. And that's the real story -- one that the Times chose to ignore in favor of misrepresentations and law enforcement-friendly extrapolation.

Filed Under: journalism, murder rate, nyc, nypd
Companies: ny times

Public Fallout Over Take-Two Playing IP Troll Begins

from the is-this-worth-it? dept

Take-Two Interactive continues to find itself in the news for all the wrong reasons. The game publisher and parent company of Rockstar Games, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, had a reputation built for itself for making great AAA video game titles. More recently, its reputation centers more on its aggressive actions on all things intellectual property. The company has gone after its own modding community, seeing it as a threat to its release of a shitty anthology of past GTA games. The company has also found itself going after companies in totally unrelated industries over the silliest of trademark concerns. And, most recently, there was speculation that there was a threatened opposition to the trademark application filed by Hazelight Studios for its indie hit game It Takes Two, as though anyone were going to take that common phrase and confuse it with the much larger game publisher.

That was left to speculation because Hazelight abandoned the application without explanation, though now we find that it was at least partially done due to the threat from Take-Two.

Hazelight confirmed the news to Eurogamer today, after it was spotted that it had abandoned its efforts to trademark It Takes Two in late March. The team did not dispute that the abandonment came as a result of Take-Two's actions, but didn't comment on whether or not this affected sales or a possible sequel.

Which sucks because, again, there's no real public confusion to be had here and therefore no trademark concerns. And many in the public saw that non-response as to whether the dispute is preventing a sequel or hurt sales as confirmation that it likely did both.

And many in the public are not happy about that.

Take-Two Interactive is back in the news for a trademark dispute and fans are fuming about it. For the past few months, Take-Two Interactive has been the talk of the town for trying to take down the modders community. But now, the parent company of the Rockstar Games is issuing trademark claims even more liberally. They’re targeting anyone who uses words or logos that are similar to any property of Take-Two Interactive. This news has shaken the entire gaming community and fans are absolutely not happy about it.

That Essentially Sports post goes on to list a bunch of Twitter responses to the news, all of which are quite critical of Take-Two. And, sure, it's Twitter, where you can find people complaining angrily about every last silly thing, but the comments themselves are probably not the type of public reception that Take-Two would want. Some examples include:

• Take-Two are truly a very miserable company for going after Hazelight Games over them using a name “It Takes Two” for a bloody game. Get a grip for goodness sake. I swear your legal tactics are way over the top. Not even Nintendo pulls this shit off.

• Take-Two is almost impressively evil. Are they doing their best to become the most morally bankrupt incompetent entity in order to give Rockstar inspiration for a potential villian in GTA 6?

• ''it takes two'' is literally a song by Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston lol, they should sue Take Two for using their name instead

• Wooow, that's actually pathetic. A new studio doing new things, and you got a multi billion dollar company being an actual bitch.

There are plenty more. Whatever Take-Two thinks they're getting out of this type of aggressive action campaign, I sure hope it factored in the downside of a public backlash, however big or small it may be. Because people don't like to support a company they view as a bully, generally speaking. And, yes, Nintendo still has its fans, but it also takes regular PR hits for its bullying.

Is that really where Take-Two wants to go?

Filed Under: ip trolling, it takes two, take two, trademark, trademark trolling, trolling
Companies: hazelight games, take two interactive

Devin Nunes Retires From Congress To Spend More Time Banning Satirical Cows From Trump's New Social Network

from the we-have-to-do-content-moderation? dept

In a bit of a Monday afternoon surprise, Rep. Devin Nunes has announced that he's retiring from Congress this month to become the CEO of Trump's new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group -- a company which apparently now has tons of money in the bank (even if from sketchy sources) but also is facing a newly revealed SEC investigation that might require someone who actually understands this stuff, rather than a very thin-skinned politician who sues people who criticize him.

Note to Devin: you can't sue the SEC for defamation.

There's all sorts of speculation about why Nunes would do this now. He's actually a pretty powerful Congressional representative, and in line to be in charge of some very powerful committees if, as is widely expected, the Republicans retake control over the House next year. But, he might also see the writing on the wall. Earlier in his career he was winning elections by a pretty wide margin, but the last two elections have actually been pretty tight. And, with California going through its redistricting process, he may have realized there was a high likelihood he'd lose next time around. Also, we know that watchdog groups have asked for an investigation into some of Nunes' activities.

And, then, of course, there are all the many, many frivolous lawsuits he's filed over the last few years, with the first one remaining the most notable and the most ridiculous: suing a satirical cow that made fun of Devin Nunes online. The fact that he'd sue a satirist for making fun of him does not suggest someone who believes very strongly in free speech.

So it should be extra interesting to see just how Devin Nunes handles content moderation questions for Truth Social now that he's in charge. Will he allow @DevinCow to have an account there? Or will he prove himself to be a hypocrite -- complaining about "censorship" on other sites, but actively engaging in the same (or more selective and biased) moderation on his own site? The press release from TMTG with quotes from Nunes reads as quite laughable when you realize he's suing satirical accounts on Twitter that made fun of him:

Congressman Devin Nunes added, “The time has come to reopen the Internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship. The United States of America made the dream of the Internet a reality and it will be an American company that restores the dream. I’m humbled and honored President Trump has asked me to lead the mission and the world class team that will deliver on this promise.”

For someone who is literally suing a bunch of reporters and critics, the claim of allowing for "the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship" doesn't just ring hollow, it rings of being a total hypocrite.

Either way, as we've seen with every wannabe Trumpist social media site promising to "bring back" free speech, it doesn't take long for them to realize that content moderation is not about "censorship," it is simply necessary to run a modern website.

How long will it take Nunes to recognize this simple fact? And will it happen before or after Trump fires him and stabs him in the back?

Filed Under: 1st amendment, congress, content moderation, defamation, devin nunes, donald trump, free speech, nune's cow, retirement, social media
Companies: tmtg, truth social

Clearview's Facial Recognition AI One Of The Best In The Business, Says NIST

from the man-but-what-a-business dept

Some good news for Clearview, the bottom dweller of the facial recognition field. The prodigious scraper of web content has finally submitted its algorithm (the one it actually sells to government agencies) to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and has obtained a score that justifies its frequent blustering about how accurate its AI is. Here's Kashmir Hill with the details for the New York Times.

In results announced on Monday, Clearview, which is based in New York, placed among the top 10 out of nearly 100 facial recognition vendors in a federal test intended to reveal which tools are best at finding the right face while looking through photos of millions of people. Clearview performed less well in another version of the test, which simulates using facial recognition for providing access to buildings, such as verifying that someone is an employee.

This vindicates CEO Hoan Ton-That's heretofore unproven claims that Clearview's AI is one of the best in the business. Prior to this, the only data backing Ton-That's assertions came from an internal test performed by a non-independent entity. Now, Ton-That can add the NIST results to his company's sales pitches, which may make it a bit more palatable to government agencies on the fence about shelling out tax dollars for a sordid little product with an unproven AI. Its previous submission to NIST tested its one-to-one AI (something used to unlock phones, for instance) -- a feature Clearview does not use and does not market to customers.

But this is hardly a vindication of Clearview as a whole, much less its business model. Scraping the open web for images is a really shady way to generate a database -- one that now holds more than 10 billion images. The more hay you put in the haystack, the greater the chances of confusing hay for needles. And these results don't change what's already wrong with all facial recognition tech: the fact that it's always worse when it comes to correctly identifying anyone other than white males.

It also won't make Clearview's web-scraping ways any more acceptable or legal. It has been evicted from two countries (Canada and Australia) for violating national privacy laws. It is being sued in two US states for the same reason. And it has become a pariah in an industry full of morally-suspect tech purveyors -- a company so unseemly even other bottom feeders marketing biased tech to cop shops refuse to have anything to do with it.

And it won't make CEO Hoan Ton-That any less full of shit. This test may have proven Clearview has the AI chops to run with the big boys, but it doesn't change the fact that his claims about helping law enforcement clear cases have been continually rebutted by the law enforcement agencies he says relied on his tech to find dangerous criminals. As long as Clearview remains solvent, it is a threat to people's freedoms and safety. If the NIST test results in more customers for Clearview, it will increase the chance someone will be misidentified and put at the mercy of people with a whole lot of guns and power.

Filed Under: facial recognition, nist
Companies: clearview

NSO Spyware Used To Snoop On US State Department Employees Stationed In Uganda

from the just-another-day-at-work-for-NSO-Group dept

Israeli exploit seller NSO Group has long past reached the limits of its non-denials and deflection attempts. There's only bad news on the horizon for the tech company, which would be a lot less disheartening for the company if it hadn't been preceded by months of bad news.

Already considered morally suspect due to its decision to sell powerful phone hacking tools to human rights violators, NSO has since proven to be pretty much amoral. Investigations uncovering abuse of its spyware to hack phones of journalists and activists began to surface three years ago before a leaked database of alleged spyware targets was given to investigators and journalists. Since then, NSO has waged a losing battle with a seemingly endless onslaught of revelations that put its hacking tools in the hands of bad actors and its powerful spyware (Pegasus) in the phones of journalists, activists, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and religious leaders.

NSO was sued by WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019 for using the messaging app to send malware to targets. It was sued by Apple just a couple of weeks ago for targeting iPhone users. It is facing investigations in a handful of countries, including its home base. It has been blacklisted by the US Commerce Department and its list of governments it can sell to has been drastically trimmed by the Israeli government, from 102 to 37.

The question now is: does NSO Group even feel it when news breaks about additional misuse of its spyware? Or does it just prompt an exasperated "what now?!" from its execs as it tries to figure out how to remain viable in the future? Whatever the case is, this latest revelation isn't going to get its Commerce Department blacklisting lifted any time soon.

iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit U.S. officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of U.S. officials through NSO technology.

The Reuters report says the source of the hacking hasn't been identified. But one can assume it was entities opposed to whatever aims the US State Department hopes to achieve in Uganda, which apparently includes simply trying to meet with opposition leaders. People don't spy on people whose aims are allied with theirs. And attribution has limited worth. Entities willing to abuse spyware to hack the phones of political opponents -- especially those operating under diplomatic immunity -- aren't really going to care if their wrongdoing is exposed.

And NSO only has to care now because it has spent years claiming it does everything it can to prevent misuse of its powerful malware -- only to have that assertion exposed as a lie with six months of uninterrupted news releases showing its hacking tools have been misused multiple times by multiple entities. Accompanying this steady drip of news reports has been zero evidence of NSO's asserted oversight or willingness to terminate contracts with entities who've abused its malware.

NSO's response to this report is no different than its response to several others: it will do something about this now that it has made international headlines.

"If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO's tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place..."

That's meaningless. NSO claims it has no visibility into its customers' actions and, if this is true, it has no way of investigating these claims. It's all just noise, something almost less substantial than a "no comment." The State Department's response means more: it simply pointed to NSO's blacklisting by the federal government. And that's pretty much all that needs to be said by witnesses and victims of these hacking attempts. NSO is running out of bridges to burn. There will always be a market for easily abused malware. But it's becoming much more difficult to keep these abuses secret and that's what has harmed NSO the most.

Filed Under: malware, pegasus, spyware, state department, surveillance
Companies: nso group

Twitter Admits It Messed Up In Suspending Accounts Under Its New Policy, But Policies Like This Will ALWAYS Lead To Overblocking

from the who-didn't-see-that-coming dept

Last week, we called out a questionable move by Twitter to put in place a new policy that banned images or videos that included someone without their permission. The company claimed that this was to prevent harassment and also (for reasons I still don't understand) buried the fact that this was not supposed to apply to public figures or newsworthy media. However, as we pointed out at the time, the standard here was incredibly subjective, and wide open to abuse. Indeed, we pointed out examples in that article of the policy clearly being abused. And even as Fox News talking heads insisted the policy would only be used against conservatives, in actuality, a bunch of alt right/white nationalists/white supremacists immediately saw this as the perfect way to get back at activists who had been calling out their behavior, leading to a mass brigading effort to "report" those activists for taking pictures and videos at white nationalist rallies and events.

In other words, exactly what we and tons of others expected.

And, a few days later, Twitter admitted it messed up the implementation of the policy -- though it doesn't appear to be rolling back the policy itself.

Twitter said Friday that it had mistakenly suspended accounts under a new policy following a flood of “coordinated and malicious reports” targeting anti-extremism researchers and journalists first reported Thursday by The Washington Post.

The company said it had corrected the errors and launched an internal review to ensure that its new rule — which allows someone whose photo or video was tweeted without their consent to request its removal — was “used as intended.”

[....]

In a statement Friday, Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said that the company had been overwhelmed with a “significant amount” of malicious reports and that its “enforcement teams made several errors” in the aftermath.

What I am perplexed about, however, is that I know for a fact that Twitter has a bunch of smart and thoughtful people who work on trust and safety issues and who clearly would know how this policy would play out in practice, and yet for whatever reason the policy was still rolled out the way it was. I don't know if this is because people underestimated how quickly and wildly it would be abused, or if others at the company simply overruled concerns raised by experts, or if it was something else entirely. Either way... it's a weird and surprising misstep for Twitter.

That said, it's also illustrative of a really important point that we've been trying to raise for ages, going back to the DMCA takedown process, and covering all sorts of other policy debates regarding content moderation: if you give people tools to take down some content, they will be abused. Always. That's not to say you should never moderate or never take down content, because that's impossible. There is always going to be some content that sites need to take down, whether for legal purposes or because it's harming the integrity of the site (things like spam or harassment).

But any such policy always opens itself up to abuse and dishonest reporting. And any company that has such policies (i.e., every company with third party content) needs to have a plan in place not just to deal with the abusive/problematic content on the site, but also the abuse of the moderation process to silence voices that shouldn't actually be silenced.

Again, from my interactions with Twitter trust & safety people, I know they know this. And this is part of why I find the rollout of this policy so perplexing.

However, it's also an important lesson for policymakers in various state legislatures, in DC, and around the globe. There is so much effort these days to pressure (or require!) internet companies to remove "bad" content, but almost none of those policy plans take into account the ways in which those policies will be abused to silence reporting, silence marginalized voices, and silence those calling out abuses of power. Twitter's rollout of this policy has been a disaster (and one that could have been prevented) but at the very least it should be a warning to policymakers who seem to think that they can design policy requirements to moderate certain content, without bothering to explore the likelihood that those mandates will be abused to silence important speech.

Filed Under: content moderation, overblocking, photos, private information, private media, videos
Companies: twitter

Daily Deal: The Web Development Crash Course Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Web Development Crash Course Bundle has 6 courses to help you become a master programmer. You'll learn about C++, Bootstrap, Modern OpenGL, HTML, and more. The courses will teach you how to create websites, how to program for virtual reality, how to create your own games, and how to create your own apps. The bundle is on sale for $25.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Chinese Government Is Building A Surveillance System That Will Target, Track Foreign Journalists, Students

from the if-you-can't-beat-'em,-maybe-it's-time-to-start-physically-beating-t dept

The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people.

China has embraced its own version of capitalism to create the leverage it now wields against those who offend it, no matter where else in the world they might be located. It sees even more opportunity in ultra-lucrative Hong Kong and has taken direct control of the region. It refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's existence as a separate country and demands apologies from world leaders and professional athletes when they make the "mistake" of acknowledging yet another lucrative region China wishes to directly control.

It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.

Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?

Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?

It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.

Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people", documents reviewed by Reuters showed.

A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government’s procurement website - reported in the media for the first time - details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases.

The surveillance apparatus is already in place. The county has millions of surveillance cameras everywhere. All these cameras need are a certain form of "smarts" -- one that lets the government identify and track undesirables. The government has already asked Chinese tech companies to give it AI capable of seeking out Uighur Muslims. Now, it wants a system that can see past facemasks and eyewear to positively identify journalists and foreigners it wants to keep track of. And it wants the system to be responsive and fast, capable of performing searches of recorded footage for images matching uploaded images or biometric attributes.

It's going to throw a lot of money and personnel at this "problem," grading targets on a scale that will easily indicate how much the Chinese government wants journalists or international students deported, disappeared, silenced, or otherwise punished.

The system will be operated by at least 2,000 officials and policemen, and specifies that journalists will be divided into three categories: red, yellow, green, in decreasing order of risk, according to the tender.

Different police forces covering all of Henan, whose 99 million inhabitants makes it China's third-largest province by population, will be connected to the platform in order to spring into action in the event of a warning being set off, the tender explains.

Warnings will be set off if a journalist while in Henan registers into a hotel, buys a ticket, or crosses the provincial border, according to the tender.

"Suspicious persons must be tailed and controlled, dynamic research analyses and risk assessments made, and the journalists dealt with according to their category," the tender reads.

All of this will be perfectly legal when it finally goes into use. The Chinese government has spent the last several years rewriting and expanding its national security laws to justify actions it takes against critics, activists, journalists, and dissidents. It has thrown "fake news" into the mix to grease the wheels for direct targeting of press outlets.

And it's not just for locals. The Chinese government was unhappy with foreign news coverage of flooding in the country earlier this year and engaged in harassment of reporters covering the disaster. Not coincidentally at all, the proposal paper also lists "foreign journalists" as targets of this surveillance, which suggests the government wants to be able to eject members of the press from other countries the moment their reporting starts contradicting the government's narrative.

This is ugly and it's right out there in the open. The tender documents were perhaps never meant to be seen by outsiders, but the details show the government is seeking ways to destroy everything but the party line. No one really needs any more evidence the Chinese government is evil. But somehow, entities that should want to have nothing to do with it play by its rules and apologize publicly when they break them. Maybe China can't be stopped. But the deference shown to it with alarming frequency certainly needs to.

Filed Under: china, journalists, students, surveillance

GOP Claim That Biden FCC Nom Gigi Sohn Wants To 'Censor Conservatives' Is AT&T & Rupert Murdoch Backed Gibberish

from the fluff-and-nonsense dept

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is not only a genuine reformer, she's broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation, which enjoyed no limit of ass kissing during the Trump era, are working overtime to come up with some feeble talking points loyal politicians can use to oppose her nomination. It's not going well.

About the best they could come up with was the entirely false claim that Sohn wants to "censor Conservatives." Anybody who actually knows Sohn knows the claim isn't true, and she's historically gone well out of her way to embrace policies that encourage diversity in media and speech, even when she doesn't agree with the speaker. Despite being a nonsense claim, it has been broadly peppered across the right wing echo chamber, including the usual columns at Breitbart, editorials by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Tucker Carlson, and elsewhere.

The claim popped up again at last week's nomination hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee courtesy of Senators Ted Cruz and Dan Sullivan:

"Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn faced off against Republican senators at a nomination hearing yesterday, disputing the senators' shaky claims that she would use a post at the FCC to censor conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) repeated arguments previously made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which mostly boil down to complaints about Sohn's tweets criticizing Fox News and her criticism of Sinclair Broadcast Group."

As we've long noted, the claims that Conservatives are being "censored" in general (either on the internet or on traditional television) aren't remotely true. In fact Conservatives have not only built a massive right wing infotainment universe with a violent disdain for factual reality (OAN, NewsMax, Fox News, Breitbart, Facebook, YouTube, Blaze), they've mastered the art of trolling for outrage engagement, which generally involves saying inflammatory gibberish, then enjoying the added exposure from left-wing outrage retweets and ad-engagement obsessed clickbait coverage. Pretty much the exact opposite of "censorship."

What's usually deemed "censorship" is usually just fairly flimsy and short-lived accountability for spewing false or bigoted nonsense. And while the Trump GOP pretends to be mad at "big tech" for "censorship," what they're actually mad about is the fact that social media belatedly and inconsistently started reining in GOP race-baiting propaganda, a cornerstone of party power in the face of an unfavorable shift in demographics and a sagging electorate. The GOP has zero interest in genuine antitrust reform (see: forty straight years of U.S. history), but the pretense that they do provides handy cover for an agenda that's exclusively self-serving.

The new Trump GOP is currently a party of performative gibberish, entirely untethered from reality, propped up largely thanks to propaganda shoveled into the brains of low-information voters, tricked into rooting against their best self interests via a massive, well-funded coalition of traditional cable and online companies (again, quite the opposite of "censorship"). And outside of perhaps reining in media consolidation and encouraging more competition, there's not a whole lot the FCC can do about it from a policy perspective, given inevitable 1A challenges and a rightward-lurching Supreme Court. Even if Sohn wanted to "censor Conservatives" (which again, she doesn't) she'd find it an impossible task within the confines of the FCC and legal reality.

The great irony in the GOP/News Corp/AT&T alliance's effort to smear Sohn as somebody looking to "censor Conservatives?" Right wing news outlets like Newsmax and AT&T-funded OAN actually support her nomination because she's historically worked to encourage diversity in media viewpoints and healthy competition in media markets. Sohn highlighted as much at the hearing:

"I would say, look at my record. Look at the conservative cable channels that I worked with for years to get them carriage on cable systems when those systems would not carry them. I have long worked with organizations and companies with whom I vigorously disagree on their point of view—fervent Republicans, fervent supporters of the previous president—and I worked with them to get their views online. I believe that I have been characterized very unfairly as being anti-conservative speech. I think my record says otherwise."

It's kind of hard to smear somebody as a fan of "conservative censorship" when outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which routinely traffic in truly repugnant garbage, say she's always been even-handed when dealing with them. Check out this statement supporting Sohn by OAN President Charles Herring:

"She believes in the First Amendment and the advantages of a strong and open media for the benefit of our democracy. She is one of the most knowledgeable persons I know on FCC issues and has the common sense and desire to work with people on both sides of the aisle."

As usual with the broader Trump GOP, this isn't about policy, it's about money and power. AT&T and News Corporation don't want Sohn appointed because she'd not only break a 2-2 partisan gridlock in voting at the FCC, she actively supports holding telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior. That's in pretty stark contrast to the last four years of the Trump FCC, which basically involved coddling entrenched telecom and media giants at every conceivable opportunity, even if that required a whole lot of lying and legally dubious behavior.

If you're a Trump-allied GOP lawmaker you can't just come out and say you're opposing Sohn's nomination because you're lodged up AT&T and Rupert Murdoch's ass and the only thing you care about is protecting their revenues so campaign contributions keep flowing. So instead you glom on to the Trump GOP's perpetual victimization complex to not only change the subject (away from the fact you're an enabler of anti-competitive monopolists and have been for decades), but distract and agitate the base with false outrage and victimization porn. Sohn can be approved to the post without GOP support, so in the end most of this is little more than a delay tactic and empty calorie performative gibberish, much like the lion's share of the modern Trump GOP policy platform.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, fcc, gigi sohn, grandstanding, politics, ted cruz
Companies: newsmax, oan