Who’s excited to talk about another flaming bag of dogshit attached to a $402 check and flung unceremoniously at the federal docket?
More like who isn’t, amirite?
This particular sack of crap is being filed by a pack of weirdos including: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; his anti-vaxx philanthrogrift Children’s Health Defense; a couple who make their living flogging “alternative” cancer treatments; an osteopath flagged by the CDC as one of the foremost purveyors of COVID misinformation; and the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, known to readers of this little mommyblog as The Stupidest Man On The Internet. So, the plaintiffs are All the Worst Goddamn People. (With the notable omission of Naomi Wolf.)
As for the defendants, well, we’ll come to that one in a moment.
All the Worst Goddamn People (Minus Naomi) are GRRRR and ARRGGHHHH and WELL I NEVER because they got booted off Facebook and Twitter and YouTube just for flogging lies about coronavirus. Don’t worry, they’re mostly back on the bird now thanks to Saint Elon. But they are sure that this is all part of a heinous plot perpetrated by a dastardly media cartel that goes by the street name the Trusted News Initiative (TNI).
Formed in the wake of the 2016 election in which the media proved unequal to the task of confronting the avalanche of misinformation from both foreign and domestic sources, the Trusted News Initiative describes itself as “a unique global partnership bringing together organizations across media and technology to tackle harmful disinformation in real time” with a focus on “moments of potential jeopardy, that could threaten life or the integrity of electoral processes.” In other words, they promote accuracy in media and the defense of objective standards of truth, making them the natural enemy of these nutbag COVID “truthers.”
All the Worst Goddamn People are represented in this public act of onanism by a DUI lawyer in Amarillo and John Howard, an anti-vaccine crusader out of California whose website must be seen to be believed. The case was filed in the Northern District of Texas, probably to get in front of the Fifth Circuit, which is notoriously insane and hostile to vaccine mandates, and they’ve managed to get on the docket of FedSoc loon Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. But even that is unlikely to save them, because, friends … this one is bugfuck.
The theory of this case is that the consortium violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by perpetrating a “group boycott” to “impede the free flow of ideas,” to “keep others from publishing,” and to stifle “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources.”
As proof of this, All the Worst Goddamn People cite to a March 2022 interview in which Jamie Angus, Senior News Controller for BBC News, said that “rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms.” He went on to warn of “the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations.”
Now, any normal, sentient person would understand that Angus was describing the danger of misinformation generally, not warning that legacy media outlets needed to band together to stamp out competition by smaller upstarts. But these are not normal, sentient people, so of course they’re pretending this is an admission that the TNI is functionally the five families of media:
In other words, instead of “work[ing] in competition with one another,” TNI members agreed to “club together” to suppress the “real competition in the digital media world”—the “tidal wave” of rival, “unchecked” online news publishers who undermine “trust” in legacy news publishers, take “audiences” away from them, and thereby pose an “existential threat” to them.
The TNI is thus a paradigmatic antitrust violation: a horizontal agreement among competitor firms to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.
So, that is clearly bullshit, for reasons you don’t have to go to law school to understand. Propounding voluntary industry standards to avoid publishing actual fake news is not remotely analogous to the 1954 case where the Associated Press was held to have violated the Sherman Act by cutting off members who published stories with non-members.
But now let’s talk about the defendants. Because, although the major complaint from All the Goddamn Worst People is that they were “censored, shadow-banned, and deplatformed” on social media, that’s not who they sued here. Indeed, Twitter, Meta, and Google/YouTube are members of the TNI … but that’s not who these goobers named in their complaint. The defendants here are Reuters, the AP, the BBC, and the Washington Post.
How did Reuters make Mark Zuckerberg censor Jim Hoft, you are wondering? And what exactly did the BBC do to make it amenable to jurisdiction in the Northern District of Texas?
Look, that’s not important now. The point is RFK Jr. needs Jeff Bezos to pay him eleventy billion dollars and acknowledge that truth in media is fake news. And if that sounds crazy, maybe you should take another hit of your hydroxybonermectin liver smoothie and think about the error of your ways.
[Kennedy v. Washington Post, Docket via Court Listener]
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