Leftist media thinks US can't survive free speech

 Charles C.W. Cooke:

Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.

That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs.

C. S. Lewis once observed that “it would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” So it is here. Yesterday’s bowdlerizers were at least open about the enterprise in which they were engaged. Today’s, by contrast, are pathologically determined to euphemize it. Because they are vaguely aware that there is something untoward about members of the press playing whack-a-mole with the national conversation, their rules come couched in the language of necessity. Once upon a time, everything was speech. Now, there is “speech” as classified and approved by media sentinels, and then there is “disinformation,” “hatred,” and even “stochastic terrorism.” One might sum the caprice with which free expression is now treated with one of those “irregular verbs” from Yes, Minister: “I report, you harass, he should go to jail for incitement.”

Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it.
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There is much more.

This is why many on the left are in a panic over Elon Musk's decision to allow free speech on Twitter.  Their panic at not being able to control the narrative omits some obvious flaws in their shutting down stories they do not like.  The clearest example is the garbage argument that the NY Post story on Hunter's laptop was misinformation.  This censorship had the catastrophic impact of getting Joe Biden elected as the worst President in history.  The real disinformation in that case was wholly theirs and the so-called experts who labeled it as such.

See, also:

The left throws a tantrum as Elon Musk reverses censorship on Twitter