The George W. Bush Institute has joined in the push to cement and expand various forms of speech control and censorship on legacy media as this election year unfolds.
Among those mentioned in a positive way in a piece authored by the institute’s Senior Editorial Advisor William McKenzie is the controversial former head of the former Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz.
McKenzie organized his thoughts about “disinformation” and “misinformation” in a year of elections into five points, and says that these concepts and ideas originate from news, webinars, and interviews.
Given the dramatic importance it is being assigned to (mostly as justification for imposing free speech restrictions), you’d think misinformation is a new phenomenon.
And, the incessant parroting that “4 billion people” in dozens and dozens of countries will go to the polling stations this year makes it seem that even the holding of elections is a new and curious phenomenon, or at least, that they hardly ever before coincided in different countries.
Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West is quoted in the post, promoting that narrative by warning of “a perfect storm of disinformation” because many elections will be held around the world.
Another “deep disinformation thinker” and no doubt, “expert,” is cited by McKenzie – it’s Nina Jankowicz. Despite the disastrous attempt to make her the face of the rapidly disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, Jankowicz is still held in high esteem among mostly the current administration’s supporters in the media and elsewhere.
And even despite her now trying to make dystopian concepts like “pre-bunking” happen. It is, quite literally as far as proponents of this are concerned, the media reporting “ahead of time how lies may be coming our way.”
And what if they are not coming our way, but we’re in fact dealing with simply information that somebody, for political profit, decided to brand as “disinformation?” That point doesn’t seem to have been addressed as Jankowicz spoke at a webinar held at Germany’s New York Consulate.
“Pre-bunking,” fear-mongering, and singling out non-English speakers (like Latinos in Texas) for targeted “fact-checking” – in other words, filtering information available to them – is what these days passes off as “media literacy,” if the likes of McKenzie are to be believed.
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