Free Speech Is Suddenly Important to the New York Times
You know, once in a while it almost seems like the media, particularly the New York Times, aren’t consistent about the things that outrage them.
That certainly sounds annoying. Enough to quit over? Perhaps. Enough for a 1,000+- word article in the Times? You bet.
Exhibit A: On April 18th, a Wall Street Journal review of An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig, summarized the book’s conclusions about the COVID-19 pandemic: “Credentialed experts, especially those in the fields of epidemiology and public health, had tied themselves to badly flawed theories, closed their minds to new evidence and thrown the mantle of ‘science’ over value judgments for which they had no special competence.” The book, the WSJ said, “documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing.”
Exhibit B: That review includes another book about Covid, in which the Ivy League political scientist authors “stress the willful suppression of reasonable debate, including the unfortunate tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists.”
Exhibit C: A month prior to that review, on March 16, the Times ran a piece by columnist Zeynep Tufekci, titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” It was about, lest you couldn’t guess, COVID-19.
Keep those (refreshing yet isolated) examples of honest COVID perspective in mind as you consider an April 16 Times article lamenting the plight of a “leading” National Institutes of Health (Yes, that NIH) nutritional scientist. Kevin Hall is leaving the agency because of what he claimed “amounts to censorship and controlling of the reporting of our science,” from the Trump administration.
After all its disinterest in scientific censorship over the last half decade, this must be a huge scandal for the Times to notice it. So what happened?
Well, in one incident, Hall told the Times, “He was barred from speaking freely with reporters about a study that might have been seen as contradicting [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s] stance on the addictive nature of ultraprocessed foods.”
And in February NIH brass said that if he wanted to be listed as an author on an as-yet unpublished paper on ultraprocessed foods he wrote with other scientists, they needed to remove a part about “health equity,” in keeping with the administration’s purge of woke speak from the government. Hall refused and his name was left off.
Reinforcing the Times’ s Narrative
That certainly sounds annoying. Enough to quit over? Perhaps. Enough for a 1,000+- word article in the Times? You bet. It fits with the Time’s running narrative of a Trump “attack on science.”
Note that Hall was not ordered to change his findings. He was not told to lie to reporters. He was not told to slander anyone who disagreed with his findings. He was not told to run his data by a shaman to get the “indigenous knowledge” stamp of approval. No other federal agency or NGO was brought in to help silence dissent. The FBI wasn’t coordinating with social media companies to keep a lid on uncomfortable questions. All those things might have happened during COVID and under the Bident administration.
Hall was told he could not speak on these topics with the imprimatur of the NIH — something that happens in professional life all the time — in and out of government.
Hall’s other complaint also reinforces the Times’ s narrative: budget cuts and hiring freezes were hindering his work. Except that, as the Times almost sheepishly notes: “(N.I.H. investigators were allowed to resume hiring research assistants last week, Dr. Hall said.)”
But take it from the Times and the “outside experts” it likes to quote: Trump’s war on science leaves doubts about whether “the new administration will invest in gold standard nutrition science.” (Even assuming Mr. Hall’s research is impeccable, American elites really should break the habit of referring to “gold standard” or “crown jewel” research. As we’ve seen with the supposed apex of climate science, the gold and jewels tend to be furnished by taxpayers for the enrichment of insiders).
It’s been five years since the American people trusted the public health bureaucrats, and the media lost our trust decades ago. But they labor on, fooling themselves that they’re fooling us. Which will gain self-knowledge first: our incompetent, complacent, and politicized health/science bureaucracy or the media that flacks for them? You may as well bet on a race between a sloth and a snail.
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Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
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