Uh-Oh — The Kids Aren't Reading the NYT!

Social media has been blamed for transmitting social contagions, which is ironic because the main social contagion right now is the idea that social media is bad for you. Even people who are happily online 14 hours a day feel the need to apologize, as if they’re admitting to being a heroin addict.

The New York Times recently published an op-ed titled, “The Way to Get Kids Off Screens” that entirely dispensed with the “Why should we?” part of the argument. Times readers, not exactly free thinkers, were right on board. From the comments section: “Mom and Dad: get off your screens”; “Give the kids flip phones only. No surfing ability and no internet, period”; “Take the phone from your child. Dispose of it responsibly.”

Scolding kids for their social media use is today’s fashionable position. Get your kids off social media, don’t wear white to a wedding, and always wear a mask or grandma dies of COVID.

[RECORD SCRATCH!]

Actually, universal masking accomplished almost nothing to prevent the spread of COVID. You’d have known that at the time, except, under pressure from Democrats, social media companies suppressed true information about COVID in the name of “safety.”

In fact, every single thing the major media, from CNN and MSNBC to The New York Times and NPR, told us about COVID was a lie. The officially sanctioned directive was that we had to shut down the country, wear masks, socially distance, close schools, and get vaccinated (because there’s no such thing as “natural immunity”!) to prevent the spread of a virus that was going to spread everywhere no matter what we did.

If you did know the truth, you most likely got it from social media. You sure didn’t get it from the Times.

Consider that the progressive zealots running the Biden administration checked off nearly every item on the hard-left’s to-do list. Not surprisingly, one of those items was to crack down on social media, and demand sweeping censorship of unapproved facts.

Similarly, long before the first presidential debate, it was mostly social media that exposed the MSM’s fairy tale about President Biden’s mental fitness. They’d assure us that the president was fit as a fiddle — and then we’d see videos of him wandering about, drooling, disoriented, and shaking hands with world leaders only he could see.

While we’re on the subject, the very basis of the dementia patient’s decision to run for president was the claim Trump had called white nationalists “very fine people.” This was a lie spread by every mainstream media outlet — as was finally admitted by Snopes five years later. Social media “addicts” didn’t need to wait for Snopes. They’d seen the video — or at least heard about it from people more honest than the MSM.

Or how about the time Jussie Smollett claimed he was violently attacked by Trump supporters, shouting “This is MAGA country” at 2 a.m. in the middle of a polar vortex in Chicago. The incident was widely covered as a genuine hate crime on, for example, NPR, CNN, and ABC — where he was given a sympathetic interview on “Good Morning America.”

But within hours, conservatives on Twitter were tearing the story apart. Literally, that very day, tweets like these appeared:

— “So some racist MAGA rednecks (from Chicago)…recognized this dude from an AA-centric TV show? Mmm.”

— “Yeah in Chicago there are a lot of white people wearing MAGA hats.”

— “I was jumped by 4 black dudes who pummeled me with crow bars and said, ‘That’s for Kamala, you c*cksucking queer!’ Just kidding. I meant to say I bumped my shin on the coffee table.”

Social media isn’t bad for kids — it’s bad for the mainstream media by breaking their monopoly on what the public is allowed to know. It would be as if newspapers responded to the introduction of radio broadcasts in the 1920s by running hair-on-fire headlines about radio waves spreading cancer.

Most recently, a 23-year-old YouTuber, Nick Shirley, posted a video titled, “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal,” that exposed fake Somali “daycare” centers as empty buildings being used to collect millions of dollars in government child care subsidies. It quickly racked up millions of views.

The only thing the major media could do was carp about his investigation and sneer that he was “right-wing.” They dismissed Shirley’s claims as “unsubstantiated” (NPR), or “slopulism” that relied on the “absence of evidence” (The New York Times). They belittled him as part of a “feedback loop” of “mutual back-scratching,” where the “content need not be new, or even particularly revelatory, to succeed.” (The New York Times).

How about Times reporters get off their asses and do some real reporting, instead of complaining about those who do?

Which reminds me. That opinion piece about getting kids off their screens? It was written by law professor Cass Sunstein, now at Harvard. Back in 2001, when Matt Drudge was driving the mainstream media crazy by publishing the stories they were hiding from us, Sunstein wrote a book, “Republic.com,” about the danger of the internet. By allowing people to choose “what they want to read, see, and hear,” he wrote, the internet was a threat to “a well-functioning system of democratic deliberation.”

A “well-functioning” democracy apparently requires Soviet levels of censorship.

The precise Drudge Report post that made liberals lose their minds was published on Jan. 17, 1998 and began like this:

“NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN
"BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT
"World Exclusive Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT

"At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.”

Oh. Now I see why we need to keep the kids off their screens.

The Patriot Post® · Uh-Oh — The Kids Aren't Reading the NYT!