Media Research Center writer Tom Olohan was just filled with bad takes last October. We already caught him insisting that it was “unpatriotic” and “radical” to honor indigenous Americans instead of Christopher Columbus (who was not an American). He also uncritically peddled his employer’s whining that anyone who corrects right-wing lies is engaging in “censorship,” as he did in an Oct. 21 post:
Just weeks away from the 2024 Presidential Election, CNN launched an absurd attack on some elected Republicans: They are willing to fight for free speech.
CNN Technology Reporter Brian Fung wrote a wildly anti-free speech article on Oct. 21, unbelievably complaining that Big Tech doesn’t censor enough. Fung pointed to X-owner Elon Musk’s moves against rampant censorship on X, as well as some social media companies stepping away from prior outrageous acts like banning former President Donald Trump or colluding with the federal government to silence speech.
The CNN journalist wrote that a shift away from censorship “took place against the backdrop of a yearslong intimidation campaign led by Republican attorneys general and state and federal lawmakers.” Fung claimed that the free speech movement was “aimed at forcing social media companies to platform falsehoods and hate speech and thwarting those working to study or limit the spread of that destabilizing content.” Hate speech and falsehoods are often buzzwords used to refer to information that the left disagrees with.
A great free Speech Week to you too, Fung.
Olohan won’t tell you that Fung is actually correct — right-wingers like himself and his employer have, in facdt, waged a years-long campaign against social media websites who want to make sure their users promote and consume factual information instead of right-wing conspiracy theories. And he’s still in denial about his fellow-right-wingers spreading hate speech and falsehoods — which are a real, tangible thing and not “buzzwords used to refer to information that the left disagrees with.” He doesn’t explain why right-wingers don’t agree with stopping lies and misinformation.
He continued:
Fung would go on to minimize social media censorship as “conservative politicians” complaining about “what they claimed was censorship of right-wing views on social media.” He also repeatedly lamented that Big Tech was not doing more to silence the right.
Apparently, censorship isn’t happening, but there isn’t enough of it. MRC’s exclusive CensorTrack database has 7,242 documented cases of censorship that shows otherwise. Censorship is happening, and it’s happening all too often.
Nobody’s trying to “silence the right,” Tom — unless you believe that lies and misinformation are exclusively the province of the right. And that “exclusive CensorTrack database” has curiously refused to catalog Elon Musk’s campaign of censorship at X, such as suspending Ken Klippenstein’s account for sharing the Republicans’ dossier on J.D. Vance. Olohan’s whining continued:
Instead, Fung whined that Big Tech censors, leftist fact-checkers, misinformation and disinformation researchers, and colluding government agencies had been frustrated by free speech advocates in Congress. Fung said that “other House Republicans have hauled tech leaders before Congress for uncomfortable hearings, further sending the message that well-intentioned efforts to protect America’s information spaces would be interpreted as bad-faith censorship.”
Fung claimed that Republicans only “alleged” that companies like Google and Meta were “discriminating against right-wing viewpoints,” while simultaneously mourning Trump’s return to social media and calling for more censorship. He also complained that Republicans calling out Big Tech for “platforms of violating their own self-professed neutrality” has had a “devastating effect.”
There’s nothing inherently “leftist’ about fact-checking — unless Olohan is saying that he and his fellow right-wingers don’t want their lies to be called out. And he offered no proof that Google and Meta are “discriminating against right-wing viewpoints, — unless he’s saying that lies and misinformation are exclusively right-wing.
Olohan continued to deliberately conflate fact-checking with “censorship”:
By contrast, the technology reporter admitted that Democrats lobbied for censorship: “Democrats put their own pressure on social media too, but for the opposite reason: They wanted platforms to moderate more, not less.”
To bolster his call for more censorship, Fung cited George Washington University (GW) School of Media and Public Affairs Associate Professor David Karpf, who held up the censorship-prone European Union as a positive example for American social media regulation.
Olohan then raged that Karpf and another commenter as “connected with leftist billionaire George Soros” due to having received funding from his related groups. Olohan, by contrast, won’t tell us how much of his salary is paid by right-wing activists like the Mercers.
Olohan repeated his employer’s dumb narrative that media literacy is “censorship” in an Oct. 25 post:
In a shocking move, the official page dedicated to Free Speech Week promoted an event devoted to a new and pernicious type of censorship: media literacy.
Free Speech Week was founded in 2005 by The Media Institute and the National Association of Broadcasters “to raise public awareness of the importance of free speech in our democracy – and to celebrate that freedom.” However, Free Speech Week’s official X account reposted an event at the University of Wisconsin La-Crosse dedicated to “Media Literacy.”
Free Speech Week reposted Wisconsin Watch Board Member Richard Brown’s post on X: “Had an amazing time at #FreeSpeechWeek at @UWLaCrosse discussing the importance of #MediaLiteracy! Grateful to the Center for Transformative Justice and the Joint Committee on Civil Discourse for hosting. Special thanks to Ashley Nowak, Caleb Colon-Rivera, and Taylor Cole Miller!”
MRC Free Speech Vice President Dan Schneider blasted Free Speech Week for highlighting the event. “The left has two terms that mean censorship, one is content moderation and the other is media literacy,” Schneider said. “It is shocking that the fakers who organize Free Speech Week would be promoting censorship. The left believes that to protect democracy, you have to first end it. They think that to protect free speech you have to censor speech.”
Organizations purporting to promote “media literacy” such as NewsGuard and Ad Fontes routinely work to demonize right-leaning media outlets.
Nobody’s demonizing “right-leaning media outlets” for merely being right-wing — they’re being (rightfully) demonized for spreading falsehoods and misinformation. And for all of Olohan’s ranting about the purported “rampant bias” of NewsGuard, the MRC has never proven NewsGuard to be wrong about anything in years of dishonest and partisan warfare against the website-ratings company — it’s simply had that the shoddiness of right-wing websites was exposed and quantified.