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Ben Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, explained what he sees as The New York Times’ strategy to silence conservatives and interfere in the election by pressuring YouTube to take adverse action against conservatives who allegedly spread “election misinformation.”
New York Times reporter Nico Grant reached out to numerous conservative figures, including Shapiro, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, entrepreneur Elon Musk, and Andrew Klavan, the host of a Daily Wire show. Grant asked them to respond to criticism that they spread “election misinformation,” citing the left-wing outlet Media Matters, and asking whether YouTube had warned them about this “misinformation.”
“Their goal is to shut the spigot off so you can’t get any information on places like YouTube,” Shapiro told The Daily Signal in written comments Wednesday. He noted that many Americans hear about the news on YouTube. A Pew Research Center survey from September found that 32% of Americans regularly get news on YouTube, an increase from 23% in 2020.
“Shutting off the spigot on news information one week in advance of an election. That is The New York Times’ trick,” he added.
In a post on X, Shapiro suggested the Times’ article represented the legacy media’s “October surprise,” a last-minute effort to sway the presidential election.
“Even the threat of being demonetized from YouTube is threatening us directly; it’s saying, ‘Watch your step, or you may get thrown off YouTube,’ which, of course, would be difficult for us and make it hard for us to get the word out,” Klavan, host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on The Daily Wire and author of the mystery novel “A Woman Underground,” told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.
“It’s both intimidating us and trying to force YouTube’s hand, which YouTube may be in league with them, for all I know,” he added. (Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding this claim.)
When the Times reporter reached out to Carlson, former Fox News host and founder of the Tucker Carlson Network, Carlson responded by asking, “So the New York Times is working with a left-wing hate group to silence critics of the Democratic Party? Please ask yourself why you’re participating in it.”
What Did The New York Times Ask?
Carlson and Shapiro shared messages from Times’ Grant, a San Francisco-based reporter who focuses on Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube.
“I wanted to give you an opportunity to comment for an upcoming article that takes a look at how political commentators have discussed the upcoming election on YouTube,” Grant wrote. “We rely on analysis conducted by researchers at Media Matters for America.”
“Media Matters identified 286 YouTube videos between May and August that contained election misinformation, including narratives that have been debunked or are not supported with credible evidence,” he added. “Researchers identified videos posted by you in those four months that contain election misinformation.”
To Carlson, Grant cited a video in which Carlson referred to the 2020 presidential election as “clearly stolen.” To Shapiro, he cited a video in which Shapiro tells a Democrat, “Your party rigged many of the voting rules in advance to ensure an extraordinary number of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting.”
The New York Times reporter then asked three questions:
- Are you a member of the YouTube Partner Program?
- If so, how frequently does YouTube demonetize your videos?
- Has YouTube sent you messages, emails or notices in the last year that your content contains misinformation?
The media bias monitor AllSides gives Media Matters a “Left” bias, and a visit to the site’s homepage immediately reveals why. The top article on Tuesday was “Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term.” Media Matters focuses on conservatives and Republicans, painting them in a very negative light.
“Media Matters became incredibly famous by essentially launching secondary boycotts on people like Rush Limbaugh,” Shapiro told The Daily Signal. “They’ve tried it with us as well. They’ve tried it with our hosts. This is what they do. The New York Times is overtly, clearly admitting to using Media Matters research in order to pressure YouTube to demonetize people on the Right—to destroy them.”
“That is what this is about. That’s what the text is about. That’s the entire game,” he added. “You run an article on the front page in The New York Times saying YouTube is subsidizing election misinformation. And that pressures YouTube, which, by the way, is Google, which is the number one donor to the Democratic Party.”
While Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is not among the top donors to Democrats in the 2024 presidential election cycle, employees at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have contributed the most to the Harris campaign, compared to any other company, according to Open Secrets data as recent as July.
‘Not About Misinformation’
“It’s not about election misinformation and it’s not about shutting down ‘bad information,’” Shapiro argued. “How do I know that? Because they reached out to me about election misinformation to me, of all people.”
The Daily Wire co-founder noted that, unlike some conservatives, he has consistently accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“I’ve been perfectly consistent since November of 2020 that I believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election,” he said. “I thought that Donald Trump had every right to legally challenge that election, but I did not see the actual evidence that the allegations he was making about the election itself and fraud in the election was sufficient to overcome the state certification of the ballots.”
“You have The New York Times, which is supposed to be the tip of the spear in terms of freedom of the press and free speech, which is overtly, clearly attempting to pressure the biggest video platform on planet Earth to shut off other press outlets,” Shapiro added. “That’s crazy.”
“They say it’s a challenge to the press if Donald Trump calls them fake news. Imagine if we here at The Daily Wire called for The New York Times to be completely demonetized and shut down on social media because of misinformation,” he concluded.
Klavan’s Response
“In one sense, it’s funny because I don’t think anybody is going to intimidate me or Ben Shapiro or Elon Musk or Tucker Carlson, all of whom also got these messages, but on the other hand, there’s also a way in which it’s not funny at all because The New York Times is still a major news outlet, and for a major news outlet to try and intimidate people who disagree with them is really quite despicable and against everything the Times is supposed to believe in,” Klavan said of The New York Times’ upcoming story.
“In the letter, they actually quoted something they said was misinformation from me, which was not only a parody but they mentioned that it was a parody,” he noted.
Klavan claimed that the Left demonizes parody because “all their ideas have failed,” and “instead of admitting that… they want to just shut us down.”
He suggested that The New York Times decided to cite Media Matters in order to elicit a response from conservatives.
“This is what made me think that the target was not just YouTube but actually the speakers themselves,” Klavan said. He said The New York Times knows what makes conservatives angry and sought to exploit that.
“We have gotten constantly attacked by Media Matters. We constantly laugh at Media Matters and make fun of them. We have never been intimidated by them, we just completely laugh them off, and they must have cited that to make us upset,” he argued.
Klavan traced the Left’s demonization of dissent to the 1960s, after the President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs failed to solve the problem of poverty in the U.S.
“As the Great Society welfare programs failed and actually slowed, for instance, black progress up out of the middle class, it became more and more racist for us to criticize those policies,” he said. Klavan claimed the Great Society programs enriched Democratic politicians while not helping the poor.
Exposés like the Twitter Files have revealed that the Biden-Harris administration pressured social media platforms to censor conservatives in the name of combating misinformation on topics such as COVID-19, the 2020 presidential election, and more. It seems rather plausible that YouTube might cave to pressure from the Times.
Neither The New York Times, nor Alphabet, nor Media Matters responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this story.
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