Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times.
Lauria spoke to Sputnik about YouTube's decision to censor an interview he conducted with award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, about voter suppression in the 5 January 2021 senate elections in Georgia, US. YouTube penalised Consortium News with a "strike", in the latest example of increasing censorship and quasi-censorship of popular media channels, by search engines and social media companies. "With three strikes CN Live! could be kicked off YouTube", Lauria explains. His comments appear to reinforce the assessment of
Sputnik: Explain, briefly, what exactly the CN Live! video, that YouTube censored, was about.
Joe Lauria: CN Live! is the webcast of Consortium News. This episode consisted of an interview with Greg Palast, a journalist who has done serious work over two decades about voter suppression, mostly by Republicans. Our show with him was about voter suppression during the January 5 senate run-offs in the state of Georgia. It was not about the November presidential election. It was not about allegations of election fraud in that vote, but about voter suppression, which are methods employed to prevent mostly Democratic minority voters from voting.
Election fraud is about what allegedly takes place in the actual voting and counting of votes. Though our program was about suppression and not fraud we opened the show with a brief clip from Palast's latest documentary on the subject. In the first scene some Trump supporters are shown protesting the election results, claiming fraud.
After about a minute a woman Palast interviewed rejected that argument and at no point during the hour-long interview did either Palast or a CN Live! host support the notion that Trump had the election stolen from him. We at Consortium News have never supported that notion.
Sputnik: Did YouTube explain why they censored that video?
Joe Lauria: Google’s YouTube deleted the episode for supposedly breaching YouTube’s policy against “scam, deception and spam.”
The policy reads:
“Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
It is literally impossible that anyone at YouTube could have watched even ten minutes of the video and come to their conclusion. We do not know if this decision was made by an algorithm or a human being.
Sputnik: What is the impact of this decision, both in respect of your video as well as for Consortium News overall?
Joe Lauria: YouTube gave Consortium News a “warning” about this video on Feb. 21 and said if we violated the policy again it would cast a strike against us. Three days later, during which Consortium News posted no new videos to its YouTube Channel, the warning was inexplicably turned into a strike. With three strikes CN Live! could be kicked off YouTube, with its massive reach. The episode remains banned.
Sputnik: Will this decision result in self-censorship by Consortium News for fear of losing access to YouTube altogether?
Joe Lauria: Essentially YouTube penalised us for reporting what one side said briefly about the November election, which was then rejected in the rest of the program. We had originally planned to hold a debate between someone who thinks the election was stolen and someone who thinks it was not. Obviously YouTube would take down that video too, because no one, even in a debate, can argue that the election was stolen. Otherwise, we will continue with our work as normal.
Joe Lauria: It is a grave danger to a free press. And it may grow worse. Democrats are behind this pressure on social media companies to censor material that they do not agree with. Our show was critical of Republicans, not Democrats, so the Consortium News case is a perfect example of why censorship is never a good idea because it will eventually come back at you. The hypocrisy of the Democrats is underscored by the fact that they and their media allies spent four years questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election with false claims and no one called for censorship against them.
YouTube should clearly not be engaged in censoring news reports on behalf of a U.S. political party, which now controls both houses of Congress and the White House. With this incident YouTube has clearly shown it is incompetent to carry out the task it should not have been given in the first place.