The Censorious Censoring Borg

Fresh on the heels of Barack Obama's much-derided warning that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is moving #TooFarLeft, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has chimed in with the exact same sentiment.

Several paragraphs into an interview with The Guardian newspaper that has him fretting that Donald Trump is putting his reporters' lives at risk with his "enemies of the people" rhetoric, Baquet issued this dire warning:

“We have a new generation that grew up in a different world that have not only different demands of their news, they want a different relationship with their readers.”
He warned junior staff and readers against pushing to embrace leftwing Democratic candidates such as Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, saying the outlet would lose its status if it openly sided with particular politicians.
“They probably want a more political New York Times than I’m willing to give them. I hope they will learn over time that a New York Times that plays it straight has much more power and much more longevity.”

As to "junior staff" siding with Warren and especially Sanders, there is little danger of that, given that at least half the journalists at the Times are the products of elite schools. Sydney Ember, for example, was assigned to cover Sanders fresh off a stint on the business-friendly Dealbook section of the paper, where she was fresh off a stint working in private equity by way of a Harvard Business School degree. She is also the daughter-in-law of the retired CEO of Bain Capital. So just by virtue of her class and pedigree, she is highly unlikely to go crazy and "embrace" Bernie's ideas. In fact, her coverage of him has been mostly of a derogatory nature, only varying in its degrees of hidden and blatant vitriol. 

You might have noticed that neither Obama nor Baquet warned people against moving too far right. When it comes to serving the wealthy and corporations, one can never move far enough to the right.

It was Baquet's censorious warning to readers not to embrace left-wing politicians that left me shaking my head -  although, to be fair to him, there is little chance of his readers ever doing such a thing if their only news sources are the Times and its defacto sister outlet, MSNBC, which also covers Bernie harshly when it bothers to cover him at all.

In denigrating the left at the same time he insists "his job is to cover the world with tremendous curiosity” while avoiding opposition to the president – despite calls from many readers and some of his own staff to take a more directly critical approach to Trump," Baquet exposes his own embrace of the extreme ideological "centrism" practiced by Obama, the corporate wing of the party, and all the wealthy donors and advertisers and corporations that the Political/Media Borg caters to.

Baquet finished off his interview with The Guardian by discounting any threat of competition from independent journalists who stray too from the ascribed center:

He said that with the exception of BuzzFeed there were few online startup news organisations that had had a substantial journalistic impact. “It’s the Guardian, it’s the New York Times, the Washington Post. It’s the papers that were supposed to be the dinosaurs that are breaking the big stories.”

Baquet has every reason to feel smug and secure. Because at about the same time he was flicking smaller news sites off his shoulders like so many pesky flakes of unsightly dandruff, the Wall Street Journal was publishing a blockbuster report exposing how Google, with the direct help of Baquet's own publication, actively censors independent news sources from its search results. For the past several years, Google has maintained a secret blacklist of sites deemed by the Information Authorities to be dangerously outside the turgid centrist mainstream.

The Journal article  - unfortunately for nonsubsribers, but good for the Elite who can afford to read it - is paywalled. But the World Socialist Website, which did its own investigation of Google two years ago, had already exposed an Orwellian mechanism called Project Owl, by which Google admitted to "burying alternative viewpoints" determined not to be "authoritative."

What's new is that the Journal has uncovered the existence of an actual blacklist compiled with the help of elite censors from the establishment media. The names of the banned sites were not released, but probably correlate with reports by such outlets as Truthout, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism and the World Socialist Website that their traffic had decreased anywhere between 30 and 60 percent because they were no longer included in Google's search results.

I've noticed a precipitous decline in my own traffic in recent years, but don't have the technological wherewithal to do a deep analytical survey of the numbers. 

Guess who not only helps to continuously compile this blacklist, but financially benefits from it? 

Why, the New York Times itself, along with a precious few other "authoritative" censors, including the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. These all-powerful media behemoths boost their own traffic and revenue at the expense of others deemed to be lacking in the necessary authority. (read: their failure to boost the interests of the wealthy and their failure to market endless wars of aggression.) 

Coincidentally, the Times earlier this year ditched its policy of allowing several hundred pre-approved readers to instantly self-publish, including yours truly. I am now facing the other extreme, with the vast majority of my comments either being buried in a dump of hundreds at a time, delayed* for up to 24 hours, or entirely rejected. This is the common experience of other "regular" commenters with whom I've been in contact. The Times has gone from celebrating the popular (and largely progressive) commenters on its articles and op-eds to, as one prolific participant named "Socrates" described it to me, banishing us to Commenting Siberia. 

Censorship comes in so many delightful forms. And the perpetrators of it all share the same responses when confronted: What censorship? You're just being paranoid. Or the secret banned keyword in your commentary must have tripped our algorithm.

Quoting from the Journal article, the World Socialist Website piece continues:

Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an “anti-misinformation” blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products....

In 2018, Google set up a “news initiative” to “Clean Up False News,” as the New York Times reported. Among its partners are the New York Times, theWashington Post and the Guardian, all of which circulated false statements by the Bush administration regarding so-called “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, among countless other lies.Google’s statements about promoting “authoritative” news outlets is code for promoting news outlets that support US foreign policy and the lies that underpin it, because, as the Journal writes, “search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another.” 

With information and news available to the public now being so reverse-engineered, so artificially limited and consolidated, and often so distorted if not downright false, is it any surprise that the Times has sucked up a record number of new subscribers this year?

They don't even bother describing the Trump-intensive information and fear that they're selling as news. It's "product."

Subscribers aren't simply readers and seekers of knowledge. They're customers with open wallets.

 The number of paid subscriptions, digital and print, reached 4.7 million, a high. Nearly 3.8 million people pay for the publisher’s online products, with the company adding a net total of 197,000 customers for its news, crossword and cooking apps during the quarter, a sharp increase from the 109,000 subscriptions added in the same period in 2018. Of those subscribers, 131,000 came for the digital news product.Since introducing its web paywall eight years ago, The New York Times has sought to guard against industry declines in print advertising revenue by making most of its money from subscriptions, breaking from the traditional newspaper business model.

OK, everybody. Stop your complaining. Pull up your droopy pants and get off your extreme lefty Twitter. Shop for product, whether it be approved information or predatory health insurance policies.  If you demand Medicare For All and a debt-free education and a secure old age and a roof over your head, you're nothing but a bunch of whining purists. And, we the Censorious Censoring Misanthropes of the Borg, will make sure that you never forget  that your only job is to consume even as you are being consumed. We'll drown out your voices and we'll infiltrate your brains and we'll press your panic and hate buttons with the money we steal from you every single day through private equity and privatization of all public spaces. We'll just go on merrily pretending that the Market knows best, until it collapses under its own weight and we escape to our yacht cities and our billionaire colonies in a thawed-out Greenland.

Thus spake moderate extremists Barack Obama and Dean Baquet, to some very free-thinking, very healthy, very refreshing impolite jeers and derision from the world outside the Borg.

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Here's my response to a column by Charles Blow about Mike Bloomberg's phony baloney apology for Stop and Frisk. I submitted it at about 7 p.m. Sunday and the Times finally posted it in a dump at about 1 p.m. Monday....

A lot is being made of the fact that Bloomberg choked while delivering his apology. It must have been so hard for him to force those words of regret from the pander center of his brain, up his throat through clenched vocal cords and out into the un-rarefied air that regular people breathe.

I suppose it could have been worse. At least he didn't excuse his ignorance of how his stop and frisk crusade traumatized a whole city full of black and brown men and boys by pleading to an inability to sweat, or that he regretted behaving in a manner unbecoming a plutocrat, or that he was only ordering racial profiling because it seemed like the honorable thing to do at the time.. At least he apologized in a church rather in a prerecorded TV studio appearance at a TV network he owns.

 But if Bloomberg is really as sorry as he claims, he wouldn't be running for president. He'd be giving a big chunk of his $50 billion fortune in reparations to the black and brown people he has so grievously harmed.

Next stop on the godzillionaire campaign trail: Bloomberg explaining to voters that Medicare for all, enhanced Social Security, affordable guaranteed housing, college debt forgiveness and wealth taxes will be fiscally irresponsible non-starters under his beneficent watch.