Cringe: PBS’s ‘Amanpour’ Slobbers Over Nina Jankowicz’s ‘Battle for the Truth’
On Amanpour & Co., which airs on CNN International and PBS, journalist Michel Martin commiserated with Nina Jankowicz, cringeworthy songbird and appointed director of the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board before the Orwellian outfit was scuttled after outcry from conservatives and concerns from liberal groups like the ACLU.
Host Bianna Golydryga set the tone with her introduction.
Liberal journalists love pounding that note of violent threats, as if conservatives never get those. It underlines that the conservatives are the kooky extremists. Jankowicz described her would-be work.
Martin flattered her guest by painting her opposition as nonsensical.
Martin’s speech then slowed, as if it was painful for her to inject a few seconds of balance into this 20-minute fawnathon, then quickly scurrying away from providing the actual counter-argument.
The former disinfo head claimed to be suing Fox News for defamation because the network lied “about statements that I was alleged to have made….And they lied about me being fired when, in fact, I resigned, and lied about my intention in joining the government.”
It sounded like an awfully thin reed on which to hang a lawsuit that impinges on the First Amendment rights of journalists, even as she claimed to be “standing up for democracy and standing up for the truth.”
Finally, Martin got to the new bombshell ruling that imposed an injunction on the Biden administration limited its ability to pressure private social media companies, and asked Jankowicz’s opinion. She misleadingly denied what the administration did was censorship, but merely “law enforcement agencies speaking to social media platforms and saying, ‘hey, we see a problem on your website here.’”
Translation: Nice social media outlet you have here, shame if anything happened to it!
Martin concluded with commiseration.
This paean to federal government squelching of free speech was followed ironically by an obit for Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and a man praised by Moldovan-born host Golodryga as “a leading voice of his generation, calling for freedom of speech and equal rights during the Prague Spring in the late 1960s.”
Amanpour & Co.
July 13, 2023
1:06:44 a.m. (ET)
Golydryga: Now to the battle for the truth. Author Nina Jankowicz was for a short while the face of the U.S. efforts to take on disinformation, appointed executive director of a new U.S. Homeland security board tasked with tackling the issue back in 2022. But in less than a month, the board was dissolved amid a storm of right-wing criticisms that it was censoring conservative speech. At the same time, Jankowicz was also facing threats of physical violence. Well now, she’s pushing back against the critics and the conspiracy theories that started to hound her. She tells our Michel Martin just how she intends to fight back.
Michel Martin: Thank you, Bianna. Thank you for talking with us again, Nina.
Thanks for having me.
You were the head of the disinformation governance board. Could you just remind us of what this board was meant to do?
Jankowicz: Sure. This was an intra-agency policy group at the Department of Homeland Security, or meaning to coordinate the best practices across the department to really respond to disinformation. Of course, that board never got off the ground because there were a lot of conspiracy theories, coming mostly from the American right, that said that the board was going to be engaging in censorship. That had no basis in reality. I would not have taken a job that had anything to do with that. And as a result, what we’re seeing today with many of the things that are attacking disinformation researchers, that really all stemmed, in my opinion, from the beginning of that campaign against the board.
Martin: So, you were the target of a disinformation campaign for being part of a working group that was trying to address disinformation.
Jankowicz: Yeah that’s exactly right. It’s very ironic, but I also think, in a lot of ways, it makes me better for the work that I do. I had always studied this, I had seen the human effects on other people, but now, having been the recipient of threats and harassment for the past year-plus, I know that these campaigns have a real human effect.
Martin: I was going to ask you about that, to the degree that you feel comfortable, would you mind talking about some of the effects of this, if you could just talk a little bit about what some of the fallout has been for you and for your family?
Jankowicz: Yeah, I mean, it’s been a really difficult year. And I have, to the extent possible, tried to speak up as much as I can about it, because I think it’s important to underline, again, that I’m not just a caricature on the internet, I’m a woman who has a family and this has had an enormous impact on my family. I’ve had a stalker, against whom I’ve had to take out a protective order. I’ve been named in frivolous lawsuits that have cost me tens of thousands of dollars to dismiss. I have taken about 100 hours dealing with congressional committees, Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government committee, which subpoenaed me to testify before them in a closed door hearing about my activities with the board. It has really taken away from my ability to do substantive work in the national security field, but it also has been an enormous burden on my family in terms of our security. It’s never going to be the same. We still receive violent threats pretty regularly, and as a result of all this, I just — I decided that, you know what? I’m not going to stand for it, and I decided to file a suit against Fox News for their defamation of me, which, in my opinion, led to a lot of the threats and harassment that my family has received.
Michel: Talk about that, if you would. What is the — what is the argument of this defamation suit, which I think you filed in May? What is the underlying allegation in the complaint?
Jankowicz: Sure, so, across Fox News programs for many months after I resigned, Fox News personalities lied about me and my body of work. They lied about statements that I was alleged to have made and did absolutely no fact-checking where they could have proved that I did indeed not say those things. And they lied about me being fired when, in fact, I resigned, and lied about my intention in joining the government. And, again, this has led people to make allegations against me, like I committed treason, like I was going against the U.S. Constitution, that have led to things like this stalker, that have led to enormous professional consequences for me, as well, and that’s exactly what many of the Republicans are trying to do in attacking researchers and government employees who are trying to do the same thing that I did, standing up for democracy and standing up for the truth.
Martin: So, they make you controversial and that becomes an excuse for people to make you untouchable, because you are controversial, even though controversy is invented to begin with.
Jankowicz: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. And I’m happy to say, you know, I’ve risen above that and I’ve been surrounded by great family and friends and colleagues who have stood by me during all of this, but I think for a lot of people, it would be much easier to throw in the towel and say, why research this stuff? I’m just going to go live in the woods somewhere. I’m determined not to let that happen, but I think for a lot of people, that might just be a bridge too far. And certainly for civil servants who might be on the other end of lawsuits and investigations like this, they don’t want to risk their career, they don’t want to risk their livelihood, they don’t want to race their family’s safety in order to do this work. And that’s the calculation.
Martin: As we said, you filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox in May, and last month, Fox News filed a motion to dismiss your lawsuit, stating that, quote, hosts and guests on Fox exercise their First Amendment rights to join the public debate and voice their opinions and predictions that the board and plaintiff would polite speech, be arbiters of truth and thereby censor speech. So in the spirit of fairness, that’s there comment, they called the lawsuit a broadside attack on bedrock First Amendment principles. I mean you know, we’re not going to argue that here, that’s what courts are for.
So, let me turn to the reason we asked you to join us today, a news event. Last week, a federal judge imposed an injunction on the Biden administration, restricting its ability to work with social media companies encountering online conspiracy theories and it named specific individuals that they say cannot meet with the social media companies. And in fact we know for a fact that at least one high-level consultation was canceled as a result of this. Could you just talk a little bit about, you know, your knowledge about what led up to this…
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