The Federalist’s political editor John Daniel Davidson condemned legacy media Tuesday after NBC News published a story attempting to deplatform the website with the help of a left-wing British think tank.
NBC News reported Tuesday afternoon that The Federalist along with the website ZeroHedge were each banned from profiting off Google ads after NBC’s Verification Unit compiled a report with the United Kingdom’s Center for Countering Digital Hate complaining about Federalist reporting that exposed legacy media lies about the ongoing social unrest engulfing the two nations. While NBC omitted which article it submitted to Google to claim violation of the tech giant’s rules, its description of grievances aired at The Federalist points to a piece by Davidson titled “The Media Are Lying To You About Everything, Including The Riots.”
“For the most part, the mainstream media doesn’t want to be criticized and they’re not interested really in free speech or the free exchange of ideas,” Davidson said on Fox News with Laura Ingraham. “The article in question that I wrote that apparently was considered hateful by this foreign left-wing media watchdog group was an article that criticized media coverage of the protests, many of which devolved into rioting and looting as we all know, because we all saw the videos.”
“The initial coverage I was pointing out, and especially the commentary that we saw from the mainstream media outlets and pundits with big platforms on Twitter, was totally dishonest and disingenuous,” Davidson added. “That’s what I was pointing out.”
Google released a statement Tuesday afternoon clarifying that The Federalist had not been demonetized but that sanctions were being considered on the website for content in its comment sections, which have since been temporarily eliminated.
Davidson said, however, he doesn’t expect Google to begin policing the comment sections of the Huffington Post, The New York Times, or even YouTube, which is notoriously home to some of the worst comments pages on the entire internet.
