Topic: Media Research Center
We've documented how the Media Research Center has continuallly attacked Nina Jankowicz even after the "disinformation governance board" at the Department of Homeland Security she was to head was shut down due to lies told by the MRC and its fellow right-wingers. Unsurpriringly, those attacks continued many months after the board was shut down. A Sept. 8 post by Luis Cornelio whined that Time magazine added her to one of its lists:
TIME is laying the groundwork for a return of the embattled warlord of the defunct Ministry of Truth.
TIME awarded Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s disgraced disinformation czar, with a puff feature piece on the first edition of then TIME 100 AI list, which lists individuals influencing the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. The piece, first published on Sept. 7 by TIME staff writer Astha Rajvanshi, falsely portrays Jankowicz as a victim of so-called “disinformation” and touts the infamous Biden administration Ministry of Truth called the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB).
Ignoring the real reasons for the backlash against the DGB, TIME engaged in revisionist history. “[H]ours into her appointment, the then 33-year-old became the target of a sustained disinformation campaign herself,” Rajvanshi claimed of Jankowicz. “Right-wing trolls on the internet waged continuous attacks that included allegations that she was transgender and infertile.”
However, the truth is that Jankowicz resigned from her position amid a relentless outcry from Americans concerned about the government’s role in censoring free speech online. Through the defunct DGB, Jankowicz had positioned herself to be the arbitrator of truth despite her own contentious trouble with spouting disinformation. But don’t expect TIME to report on any of this.
Don't expect Cornelio to ever admit that the "Ministry of Truth" smear is an outright lie; the board would have done no such thing. That means Cornelio is the one engaging in "revisionist history."
Catherine Salgado spent a Sept. 14 post whining that "The Biden Pentagon awarded a contract to a disinformation researcher who celebrated Big Tech’s election interference by suppressing the 2020 Hunter Biden bombshell scandals." Now, this wasn't Jankowicz, but this person apparently bears the taint because she has "ties" to Jankowicz. This gave Salgado an opportunity to repeat the MRC corporate line: "A 2020 Media Research Center poll found that censorship of the Hunter Biden scandal helped steal the election for Joe Biden, since 4.6% of Biden’s total vote wouldn’t have voted for him if in possession of all the facts. Kaplan approved that election-altering censorship, making her recent DoD contract questionable." As we've documented, that poll was conducted by a polling firm founded by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, casting doubt on its accuracy and raising the specter of bias and bad-faith "media research."
A Nov. 12 post by Tim Graham whined that Jankowicz (accurately) called out right-wing election misinformation as a threat:
On Friday night’s ludicrously titled All Things Considered, NPR devoted almost seven minutes to the whining of left-wing social-media censors – or as NPR put it, “the people working to safeguard voting” – complaining that the 2024 election won’t be as free of “election lies” as 2020 because conservatives are fighting back.
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NPR even interviewed Nina Jankowicz, the foiled federal censor. She's not in the radio story, but she is there in the online story:
As Nina Jankowicz sees it, the opening salvo came in the spring of 2022, when a right-wing campaign quickly snuffed out a Department of Homeland Security initiative called the Disinformation Governance Board...After a barrage of death threats and abuse, Jankowicz resigned, and DHS scrapped the board altogether. Jankowicz told NPR that the timid effort by the federal government to defend her or push back against the allegations sent a clear message.
"That showed ... that it was open season on researchers, on civil servants, on anyone who was working in this space," Jankowicz said.
So leftists trying to keep Trump and his "MAGA extremists" out of office are "researchers and civil servants," not terribly disguised campaign operatives who "fortify elections."
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It's fair to be alarmed about the "Trump won in a landslide" messagers. But NPR and other liberal media outlets obsess over that and ignore all the other cases where social-media giants censored conservative narratives that have turned out to be true.
Graham listed "the Hunter Biden laptop" and "the Chinese lab-leak theory of the Covid pandemic" as examples of those "conservative narratives." But as we've also noted, the New York Post failed to offer any independent verification of the Hunter laptop that might have assuaged reasonable fears that the story was Russian disinformation being spread by a biased pro-Trump rag. And the idea that the COVID virus originated in a Chinese lab has yet to be proven.
Clay Waters complained in a Nov. 19 post that NBC defended Jankowicz in a story on GOP efforts to shut down anti-disinformation efforts on social media by dishonestly crying "censorship":
They even defended would-be-censorious songstress Nina Jankowicz, who would have headed the Biden Administration’s Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” but had her own problems spreading disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop, complaining she “quickly became the target of a debilitating harassment campaign.”
Waters didn't deny that Jankowicz faced (and still faces) a right-wing harassment campaign -- or disclose that his employer is one of her chief harassers.
