What Happened Today: July 5, 2023
Federal judge tells White House no more censorship; Naftali Bennett talks sense to the BBC; On court puzzle protest at Wimbledon
The Big Story
The White House and several federal agencies will no longer be allowed to police content on social media platforms after a new injunction issued on Tuesday by a U.S. federal judge in Louisiana. The ruling found that Biden administration officials had likely violated the First Amendment when they sought to have content taken down from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms. “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” said the judge, the first federal court to enact broad limits on how the federal government interacts with online platforms. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
The preliminary ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, who argued the Biden administration was operating a “federal censorship enterprise” by curtailing content online.
While federal offices would still be allowed to flag online content dealing with criminal activity, national security threats, and foreign adversaries seeking to influence the outcome of elections, the ruling found they could not otherwise request that posts be taken down or ask for updates on previous requests for content removal. The Justice Department is expected to appeal the ruling.
In the Back Pages: The Media’s Hypocrisy on Vaccines
The Rest
→ The suspect who stands accused of killing five people and injuring children as young as 2 years old during a shooting spree in Philadelphia on Monday night appears to be a transgender woman who was active in the city’s Black Lives Matter movement. The shooter, who has not yet been officially identified, reportedly told police that they were trying to do their part to thwart the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis because “all these guys are out there killing people.” The suspect, wearing a ballistic vest and armed with both a handgun and an AR-style rifle, was firing randomly at pedestrians and vehicles, including one car driven by a mother who was heading home with her twins when one of the children was struck by a gunshot to the leg.
→ Video of the Day:
In an incredible BBC interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, broadcaster Anjana Gadgil says, “The Israeli forces are happy to kill children,” a reference to the 17-year-old militant who was killed during the Israel Defense Force’s raid of a terrorist stronghold in the West Bank city of Jenin. “What would you call a 17-year old person with a rifle, shooting at your family and murdering your own family. How would you define that person?” Bennett asks in reply. Gadgil, who says “the U.N. are calling them children,” tries to brush off the question: “We’re not talking about that.” But Bennett, pointing to the surge in terrorist attacks on civilians in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, replies, “That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
→ A controversial new child labor law went into effect in Iowa over the weekend, allowing kids as young as 14 to work till 11:00 p.m. and serve alcohol as long as they’re in the line of sight of two adults when handling the beverages. The new law will also ensure that young teens will not miss out on factory work in Iowa: Now 15-year-olds can hop on assembly lines, and 14-year-olds can be put to work inside meat lockers. Similar laws are set to go into effect later this month in Arkansas, where proponents of the loosening of labor protections for minors say it will free up a workforce for jobs that employers have struggled to fill because of either low wages or the dangers of the workplace conditions.
→ Following an oppressive heat wave that’s significantly increased the risks for migrants attempting to cross the U.S. southern border, four people, including one infant, were found dead by Texas law enforcement in the Rio Grande river over the weekend. The drownings come just as Texas state officials are set to deploy new floating barriers along the Rio Grande in the hopes of discouraging migrants from making the dangerous border crossing. The total number of crossing attempts have significantly decreased since the expiration in May of Title 42, the public health order that allowed U.S. law enforcement to quickly expel those detained at the border.
→ A GQ profile critical of beleaguered Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was radically edited after someone close to the executive complained to GQ, before the men’s magazine yanked the article off the internet altogether.
Yet both versions of the piece are still floating around, and readers can see that GQ editors had removed the sentence describing Zaslav as “the most hated man in Hollywood” and rewritten several concluding paragraphs that had characterized him as someone who was “only good at breaking things.”
Author of the original article, freelance film critic Jason Bailey, told his editors he wanted his byline off the piece after they made changes. Soon after, the article was unpublished.
Advance Publications, the owner of GQ’s parent company, Condé Nast, is a major Warner Bros. shareholder.
→ Quote of the Day:
When the office consistently undercharges violent-crime cases, when it offers sweetheart deals to violent defendants, when its overall stated priority is decarceration, when it leads the charge for lenient bail conditions … when the district attorney refers to himself as a “public defender with power”—violent criminals take notice of all of that. And they become emboldened. They think they can literally get away with murder.
Speaking of Philadelphia—that’s from the city’s top federal law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney William McSwain, unleashing frustration over the lenient plea deal given by the city’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, to a man who’d shot and almost killed a shop owner during an attempted robbery earlier this year.
→ Riding high on the fumes of the Wall Street Bets meme-stock phenomenon, investors swapping speculative theories of how Bed Bath & Beyond could be revived after its bankruptcy in May have led the charge in trading some $200 million of its nearly worthless stock in an over-the-counter exchange. According to a Bloomberg analysis, some 18 million shares have been swapped every day since the homewares retailer was delisted, leaving speculators to make trades of so-called pink sheets, a reference to the old pink sheets that published quotes for risky and unregulated stocks. The stocks will exist there until the bankrupt estate is settled, and it’s unlikely stockholders would receive anything after creditors are paid out. Unlike previous meme stocks, there are no hedge funds holding shorts against the stock, meaning right now meme-stock retailer speculators are only betting against each other.
→ Climate-change activists from a group called Just Stop Oil managed to slip by a massive security presence at Wimbledon on Wednesday. One protester interrupted a match by throwing a 1,000-piece Wimbledon jigsaw puzzle and orange confetti on the grass and sitting on the court until security removed him. A second protestor invaded the same court at a subsequent match using the same puzzle-confetti tactic. Players helped court staff pick up the puzzle pieces before resuming play. Spectators who had to wait in longer lines because of bag checks and other security measures designed to thwart the expected protests were frustrated at the demonstrations. “We’ve paid a lot of money to get in here. … It’s just the way they go about it. It makes the queues longer. I understand why they’re doing it, but disruption like this is just outrageous,” tennis fan Louis Harvey told The Times.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Welcome to Blackstone U.S.A. by Valerie Stahl
How private equity is gobbling up the American city and turning residents into collateral
Separating Pearls From Sand by Joseph A. Skloot
The status of stories in Sefer Hasidim, one of the most reprinted Jewish books
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Media’s Hypocrisy on Vaccines
The New York Times is bashing RFK for vaccine skepticism that it helped stoke when it thought it would hurt Donald Trump
Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tossed his hat into the 2024 presidential ring, his detractors have repeatedly pointed to one issue as evidence that he’s unfit to be president: his skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines. The reality, however, is the same media institutions depicting Kennedy as a wingnut spreading fringe conspiracy theories played a key role in popularizing vaccine resistance.
The sheer volume of sudden reversals in public health policy makes it difficult to recall what anyone was claiming a few years ago, but there is a simple formula to understand why “the science” keeps changing: It’s often about who benefits politically. In the months before the 2020 election, the Trump administration seemed close to hitting its stated goal of delivering a COVID vaccine by the end of the year. That would have been a clear boost to the president’s electoral chances.
Evidently alarmed by this prospect, the mainstream media, led by The New York Times, hit on the novel tactic of claiming that Big Pharma had used its financial might to corrupt government oversight of their development. The storyline had the distinct benefit of being a direct offshoot of the media’s larger narrative about Trump’s thoroughgoing and relentless corruption.
One of the first, most detailed and fleshed out versions of the Big Pharma-Covid vaccine theory can be found in the early days of The New York Times’ COVID-19 reporting. On May 20, 2020, the Times launched its first broadside in this effort. The headline of the article, “Trump’s Vaccine Chief Has Vast Ties to Drug Industry, Posing Possible Conflicts,” painted a picture of lurking corruption, invoking a network of malfeasance reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
The first paragraph underscored this point, alleging that Trump’s new virus “czar,” Moncef Slaoui, former head of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, had “intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests.” The Times went on to enumerate the $12.4 million worth of Slaoui’s shares in Moderna—even though Slaoui had sold those shares as he stepped into his government role. The Times also repeatedly implied that administration officials involved in the development of the vaccines possessed vast conflicts of interest, writing that Health Secretary Alex Azar “is a former Eli Lilly executive” and former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, “has moved in and out of government twice.”
The paper’s later stance on the integrity of the vaccine development process aside, this all would have been worthy reporting, important for the American public to know. But the Times went far beyond showing the ties of officials to the pharmaceutical industry and—months before a single vaccine had been produced—began insinuating that any vaccine produced could carry major risks. “[Moderna’s vaccine] technology, which uses genetic material from the virus called mRNA, is relatively new and unproven. And many vaccine candidates fail after showing preliminary promise, or cause serious side effects in later human trials,” the Times wrote in its May 2020 piece [emphasis added].
Just two weeks later the paper went much further, implying in a June 3, 2020 article that COVID vaccine corruption was systematic and political. “Operation Warp Speed amounts to a sprawling, on-the-fly experiment in industrial policy by a Republican administration that has been otherwise dedicated to giving private industry a free hand,” two Times reporters asserted.
There were, to be sure, irregularities and conflicts of interest in the emergency authorization to produce the COVID vaccines (not surprising given that pharma is the largest and most powerful lobby in the United States). But the media coverage of the issue, which reached a fever pitch in the Trump years but fell mostly silent on the topic once Trump was out of power, ignored nuances to score political points. The unintended consequence was that, imbued with more than a grain of truth, the story about Big Pharma putting profit ahead of prudence took on a life of its own. Now that the political winds have shifted, the media is essentially fighting a narrative of its own creation.
By late summer 2020, this narrative was braided with another about vaccine malfeasance, simultaneously slamming Trump for rushing the vaccine development process and for allegedly lying about the rollout date. In May 2020, after Trump said he was “confident” vaccines would be available by the end of the year, it triggered a barrage of snark from supposedly neutral fact-checkers attempting to refute the president’s claim. NBC’s fact-check offers an example of the genre: “experts say [Trump] needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” Trump was simultaneously painted as an unreliable fibber who would never be able to follow through on his promises while being accused of rushing to get the vaccines ready ahead of the November election.
But the gut punch came when the Times again questioned the safety of the vaccines being produced. "Under constant pressure from a White House anxious for good news and a public desperate for a silver bullet to end the crisis, the government’s researchers are fearful of political intervention in the coming months and are struggling to ensure that the government maintains the right balance between speed and rigorous regulation,” the Times reported in an August 2020 piece.
By that month, the media’s effort began to pay dividends. A week after the Times claimed the Trump administration was “desperate for a silver bullet,” news broke that House Democrats had opened an investigation into Slaoui on the basis of the Times’ unfounded allegations. NBC News, citing the Times’ claims, reported that Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn had called financial arrangements involving Operation Warp Speed “opaque.”
In September, the Times ran an op-ed by American historian Rick Perlstein that cast the government’s plan to use emergency authorization for the Covid vaccine as Trump’s “most reckless obsession yet.” This bid, the Times op-ed blared in alarm, could end with the vaccines being distributed “before some scientists believe it would be safe to do so” and in a way that could “further erode public confidence in vaccines—and possibly kill.”
Those tropes in fact were and are similar to those advanced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr—tropes that, as if by magic, are now roundly condemned by the media that lent them credibility and seeded them into the public consciousness.
By the time of the 2020 election, the notion that Big Pharma had unduly influenced the Covid vaccines for profit was media gospel. The accepted narrative was that, with a nod from Trump, Big Pharma had rushed out potentially dangerous experimental vaccines with a bevy of unknown side effects. With so much momentum behind it, this idea continued to gather steam. And now it’s more like an out-of-control freight train than the power-corridor Accela it was supposed to be. The media is reaching for the brakes but the public, long since convinced, is racing full steam ahead.
Ashley Rindsberg is the author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History (2021).
What’s so interesting is that what they were reporting about the vaccine rollout was all essentially true: it was experimental, it was not safe, the FDA is corrupted via its revolving door between Govt and Big Pharma and money, and the EUA was utterly reckless and prevented OTC medications from being used or even promoted.
Then after the election “poof”, all that became mis-dis-mal information.
The Left is always telling on themselves via their projection.
Thank you, Ashley Rindsberg, for the article about RFK and the NYT hypocrisy. The level of hypocrisy has reached a nauseating level and is only possible within the dizzying 24 hour media cycle, where people simply forget what happened yesterday. This article provides the perfect example for readers of the NYT, which was once a source of information, but now is nothing more than pure propaganda.