It brought to mind a similar talking point reported across far-right media: The CDC's own official numbers drastically reduce the number of COVID deaths, or co

It brought to mind a similar talking point reported across far-right media: The CDC's own official numbers drastically reduce the number of COVID deaths, or conflate them with other illnesses. You could read the CDC page, and come to such conclusions, and write articles about them (and people did, and linked to those CDC pages even). However, to come away with this conclusion, you would have to ignore the lower part of the page titled, "Understanding the numbers", which goes into why and how they split up numbers due to co-morbidity. (i.e. Official cause of death might be pneumonia, but you most likely wouldn't have had a fatal case of pneumonia without COVID, not unlike cancer also causing a lot of pneumonia deaths.) By this author's logic, these breathless articles aren't lying about the COVID numbers, they are just "missing context". Intentionally misinterpreting CDC data, which is easily explained further on down the page, with the assumption that your readers will be too lazy and dumb to scroll down and read and/or understand it is fucking lying, and not incomplete context. The author of course is making the point that censorship will always be hard, because people can make the argument that they are just reporting the facts. But the story is a simple one in some ways: It didn't used to be hard, because news media was trusted by the public because they exercised good editorial controls. The public trusted them, because they did a good enough job with it. The public lost that trust because they started to loosen standards due to declining revenues as a result of the internet. The problem of censorship will be solved when somebody figures out a business model for news which makes news media profitable enough to operate with the same editorial standards, and not having to resort to clickbait for ad views. This is the hard part to solve, but if you solve that, the hyper-partisan and fringe news sites will start to lose eyeballs. Currently, the mainstream media is incentivized to be dishonest, and people rightfully have lost trust in them (creating the fringe ecosystem where people seek out news sources which just cater to what they want to hear, or whatever is most stimulating). Or, to summarize, censorship (or as we used to call it, "honest news") in our current media ecosystem is hard because you impact your profits, and people don't want to do it. A systemic fix is what is needed.