I read “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation/Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online” in the New York Times this morning and was properly disgusted with the Times’ lockstep endorsement of Big Tech (and thus federal government) censorship of “disinformation and “misinformation,” cover words progressives use to describe opinions and framing of facts that undermine the Axis’s official narratives or that threaten their policy agendas. I was not, however, surprised. How could anyone be surprised? The Times censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Times embargoed the rape accusation against Joe Biden. The Times hyped the Wuhan virus threat with extraordinary misrepresentations and fearmongering while applauding social media efforts to suppress dissenting views that turned out to be correct. The Times took down an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because its woke staff found his position offensive There are so many more examples that it would be pointless (and boring) to list them.
And thus I was stunned to see this morning that Ann Althouse, who clearly reads the Times (and the Washington Post) port to stern daily and usually blogs about one or more Times pieces every morning, commented on the article by saying she was sad to see the NYT framing the fight for freedom of speech as a perverse force.
As frequent readers here know, Althouse runs one of the few blogs that I follow consistently (along with Prof. Turley’s blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, Instapundit, and a few others…RIP, Popehat). She claims to be “fiercely” independent, neutral and non-partisan, but bias makes her periodically stupid as it does everyone else. I find her resistance to accepting the fact that the Times is a card-carrying propaganda agent for the Democratic Party, the Left, and the nascent totalitarianism they are pursuing thoroughly depressing. I also pay to read the Times every day because as biased and untrustworthy as it is, the paper is still the best journalistic source available, which tells you just how far that profession has rotted. The bias and hypocrisy on display constantly is throbbingly obvious. How could Ann, a smart and perceptive lawyer, academic and political observer, be saddened when the Times shows its true colors again?
Ethics Alarms 
While on the subject of the lack of intgrrity in journalism I just watched and highly recommend “Shattered Glass.” A 2003 docudrama about Stephen Glass, the unethical, writer and editor of the THE NEW REPUBLIC ib the 1990’S.
His lack of ethics however, did not prevent him from earning a JD magnum laude from Georgettown. Fortunatly, various state Bars, obsturcted his admission to the Bar.
PS: I followed that by watching “My Cousin Vinny,” a more ethical lawyer story.
Glass has been discussed in quite a few posts here. I found it fascinating that he has been denied a law license in New York and California while bank robbers, drug dealers and illegal aliens, among others, have been admitted. I wouldn’t have let Glass into law school.
By the way, Vinnie is a pretty unethical lawyer too, and his misrepresenting his bar status and name to the judge would probably get him disbarred in real life.
I is almost funny when you are surprised by people like Althouse. This is exactly the position I would have expected Althouse to take. She claims to be independent, but she is really a die-hard Democrat, much like Bill Maher. She just calls herself an independent because she doesn’t want to be lumped in with the insane Antifa/BLM/Hamas crowd that is the progressive left. As a die-hard liberal, she most likely supports ‘reasonable’ speech control (no ‘hate speech’ etc) just like she supports ‘reasonable’ gun control. These supporters of ‘reasonable’ control on the plebians usually support it all the way until they are told to hang their car keys outside on their porch so the criminals won’t hurt them or that they can face life imprisonment for supporting Israel (way to go, Canada!). If you talked to her in private, she probably agreed with much of the censorship and slanted news of the Times, because it was for the greater good. You just can’t have people saying stuff like that, even if it is true because it would cause disunity or cause people to loose trust in the government and the system.
Ann Althouse is one of those people who would live in Northern Vermont or Maine, vote Democrat and support ‘immigration’ for decades and suddenly complain that illegal aliens are traipsing through her yard at all hours of the night, ringing her doorbell to ask for rides in 8 different languages, and attacking people. Before it happened to her, people that complained about things like this were alt-right MAGA racists. Now that they experience the issue, they demand something done about the ‘problem’.
I don’t know how regularly you read Ann, but that’s not a fair assessment of her evolution over the last several years. For proof, I would offer the amazing change in the orientation of her commenters, which were overwhelmingly left-leaning but are now the exact opposite. Conservative readers don’t typically say active on progressive blogs. She has defended Trump frequently and been critical of the news media slant against him. I’d say she’s about 75% red-pilled at this point, far from her attitude when Obama was President. Maybe getting away from the Madison campus helped.