Free Speech Is Suddenly Important to the New York Times
- April 26, 2025
Michael Chamberlain, The American Spectator
You know, once in a while it almost seems like the media, particularly the New York Times, aren’t consistent about the things that outrage them.
Exhibit A: On April 18th, a Wall Street Journal review of An Abundance of Cautionby David Zweig, summarized the book’s conclusions about the COVID-19 pandemic: “Credentialed experts, especially those in the fields of epidemiology and public health, had tied themselves to badly flawed theories, closed their minds to new evidence and thrown the mantle of ‘science’ over value judgments for which they had no special competence.” The book, the WSJ said, “documents the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing.”
Exhibit B: That review includes another book about Covid, in which the Ivy League political scientist authors “stress the willful suppression of reasonable debate, including the unfortunate tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists.”
Exhibit C: A month prior to that review, on March 16, the Times ran a piece by columnist Zeynep Tufekci, titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” It was about, lest you couldn’t guess, COVID-19.
Keep those (refreshing yet isolated) examples of honest COVID perspective in mind as you consider an April 16 Times article lamenting the plight of a “leading” National Institutes of Health (Yes, that NIH) nutritional scientist. Kevin Hall is leaving the agency because of what he claimed “amounts to censorship and controlling of the reporting of our science,” from the Trump administration.
After all its disinterest in scientific censorship over the last half decade, this must be a huge scandal for the Times to notice it. So what happened?
Well, in one incident, Hall told the Times, “He was barred from speaking freely with reporters about a study that might have been seen as contradicting [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s] stance on the addictive nature of ultraprocessed foods.”
And in February NIH brass said that if he wanted to be listed as an author on an as-yet unpublished paper on ultraprocessed foods he wrote with other scientists, they needed to remove a part about “health equity,” in keeping with the administration’s purge of woke speak from the government. Hall refused and his name was left off.