Yet another major news organization has exposed itself as a hive of petty partisanship and professional incompetence. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
This time, the culprit was NBC News, or, more specifically, the “NBC News Verification Unit.” On Tuesday, NBC ran a hit piece against two websites, ZeroHedge and the Federalist, written by Adele-Momoko Fraser, a London-based producer with the News Verification Unit. In the piece, Fraser and NBC claimed that Google had demonetized the two websites, meaning they were prevented from earning money through Google ads. According to Fraser, the decision was made after the Verification Unit itself, collaborating with a U.K.-based activist group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and its “Stop Funding Fake News” project, had complained to Google that articles on the sites violated the company’s policies that “explicitly prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing.”
To recap: A foreign-based division of an American news conglomerate worked with a British activist group to push an American company into stripping revenue from two American websites.
This, on its own, would be bad enough. As Luke Thompson noted, this is an egregious case of “a news entity making news in order to cover it.” And it is a sad reality of our times that a self-appointed arbiter of truth can use its corporate power to brand competitors’ commentary as “fake news” and have a third party strip it of revenue.
But it gets even worse, because the actual fake news was coming from inside NBC’s house. Fraser’s story claimed that ZeroHedge and the Federalist had been demonetized and quoted a “Google spokesperson” as saying, “When a page or site violates our policies, we take action. In this case, we’ve removed both sites’ ability to monetize with Google.”
Yet a few hours later, Google said this was untrue. “The Federalist was never demonetized,” Google Communications wrote on Twitter. In a now-deleted tweet, it explained that the Federalist had been notified that its comment section violated company policies, and the conservative site had three days to fix the problem. Later that evening, Google Communications announced that “as the comment section has now been removed, we consider this matter resolved and no action will be taken.”
Google’s pronouncements directly contradicted several of Fraser’s central claims, particularly the one in her original headline: “Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles.” Rather than run a correction or retraction and apology, NBC merely updated the piece (several times) without notifying readers. The result is a jumble of incompetent writing and active contradictions.
The headline was to changed to “Google bans website ZeroHedge from its ad platform over comments on protests,” but a tweet from NBC’s account plugging the article still declares that the Federalist has been defunded. As the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams highlighted last week, NBC “rewrote the lede and the bridge of the piece to remove its initial premise. And, again, there are no editor’s notes or clarifications drawing attention to the fact that the report’s original claims have disappeared down the memory hole.”
More malevolently, NBC has also removed any mention of the News Verification Unit’s involvement in starting this clown show. In the original version, the NBC outfit’s participation is proudly proclaimed: “Google blocked The Federalist from its advertising platform after the NBC News Verification Unit brought the project to its attention.” This sentence has been excised online, although it remains accessible via the internet’s Wayback Machine. Now, one is supposed to believe, Google was made aware of the conservative sites’ purported violations as if by magic. Like the common euphemism “resurfaced,” which journalists employ to avoid confessing that they or others are the ones spitefully digging up old posts or opinions they dislike, this passive-voice rewrite of history is just another way to avoid personal accountability.
There are several reasons to be concerned. First, it’s yet another example of activist journalism. Fraser’s hit piece included the same blind spots, unconcealed biases, and disregard for open discussion that have become common in journalism. Fraser’s first tweet pushing out the article included the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter,” declaring her premises from the outset. Both the Federalist and ZeroHedge are referred to as “far-right.” I have little knowledge of ZeroHedge, but the Federalist is well within the pale of sensible and acceptable conservative commentary. I do not agree with much of what it publishes, but to call it “far-right,” as if it were a neo-Nazi hate blog, is hogwash. (Full disclosure: I have written one article for the Federalist.)
Reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the lines around acceptable political discourse. Yet instead of making a case with facts and evidence, Fraser’s “reporting” contained only declarations. Her piece, National Review’s Kyle Smith pointed out, “does not contain a single quote from the 2 sites that supposedly published such extreme content that they deserved to be demonetized.” Nor did it include links to the contentious articles. The clear implication is that we are simply to trust, without evidence, the claims of an openly biased reporter: No need to see the offending opinions; they are racist and fake news because I say so.
We are beginning to see this sort of thing week in and week out from young journalist-activists. As I wrote last week, the new type of journalism being practiced by my generation, which expresses not the truth but their truth, has abandoned hoary notions of objectivity and viewpoint diversity in favor of moral certitude and woke millenarian “justice.” As I also warned in reference to the New York Times’s ouster of James Bennet, these young, illiberal staffers are being abetted by their older bosses. Someone above the junior producer at NBC presumably allowed this hit piece to go forward, and worse, then let it be stealthily rewritten without correction or editorial acknowledgment.
This episode further reveals the extent to which the media are collapsing upon themselves. Hacks used at least to rely on activists at Media Matters to dredge up attacks on conservatives. Now, reporters take this role themselves. Whether it is CNN doxxing a random Twitter user because the president used his meme, or the Washington Post attacking Nick Sandmann, a child, for respectfully staying calm and smiling while a grown man banged a drum in his face, or a foreign arm of NBC trying to stanch the flow of revenue to a competitor, the operating ideology is the same. Press freedom only matters when President Trump is the one lobbing calumnies, apparently.
“Rights for me but not for thee” has long been a calling card in political journalism. Speech rights are cherished when it is the New York Times expressing its opinion, but such rights are deemed dangerous when it comes to, say, spending money to get your opinions out to the public square during election season. In a 2012 editorial once again condemning Citizens United, the New York Times candidly argued that the only corporations deserving of speech rights are those with “a press function,” such as itself; this January, a Times opinion writer called the decision “legalized bribery.” This elitist animosity toward others’ speech is now extended, as the NBC debacle shows, to rival media organizations. And it has only been accelerated by the moral panic over “fake news.”
Another actor here that should not be overlooked is Google itself. My friend and frequent Washington Examiner contributor Robby Soave described the episode as “a media hoax story, not a tech censorship story.” With respect, this is wrong. It’s a story of censorship as well, and the blame should extend to both parties involved. While NBC and Fraser are unarguably the primary bad actors here, it is a mistake to gloss over Google’s participation.
It is unclear what, exactly, Google’s actions were. Fraser’s story includes (and, for now, still includes) the above quote from someone she says is a “Google spokesperson” saying the Federalist had been demonetized. Federalist co-founders Ben Domenech and Sean Davis stated last week that “Google never formally notified us that we had run afoul of any of its rules.” Fraser, for her part, claims Google “backtracked” from this position after publication. And even with all the journalistic malpractice involved in the story and its rewrites, it seems unlikely that an NBC reporter would simply make up a Google company statement out of whole cloth. Nor, it is important to note, has Google yet disavowed it. Similarly, Fraser’s article discusses violations from articles published at the Federalist and ZeroHedge, whereas Google’s after-the-fact announcement about the Federalist concerns the website’s comment section.
Someone is lying.
What we do know is that, at the behest of NBC News and an activist group, Google reviewed the Federalist’s comment section and found it violated policies about racism, misinformation, and the like. And that if action was not taken, the site would be demonetized. This position beggars belief. Anyone who has ever been on a comment section knows that they are invariably open pits of reprehensible idiocy. And we’re expected to accept that one conservative website is uniquely in violation of Google’s rules? Google, for example, owns YouTube. If we are to believe this is its procedure for demonetization, let me formally make Google aware of the racist, anti-Semitic, flat-earth, hateful, bubbling stupidity that occupies that website. Physician, heal thyself.
We are left with an organization putatively committed to journalism tattling to mommy that another media outfit was mean to it. That Google is acting as mommy of the public square, and willing to hand out arbitrary punishments, is bad news. Google does not have to host any website it does not like and is not subject to the First Amendment, but what it did constitutes speech coercion. And one need not think we should repeal Section 230 to recognize that is a problem.
J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
