New York Times reporter Katie Rogers covered the impromptu discussion at the White House on video games and violence, and casually worked in several strong “censorship” smears against those concerned about the issue: “‘Lively’ Discussion, Like Many Before It, on Video Games and Violence.”
President Trump on Thursday began the next leg of a listening tour he promised after last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., eliciting heated opinions at the White House from critics of violent video games and from game makers who reject any connection to mass shootings, but offering no concrete views of his own.
In broaching the subject after a mass school shooting, Mr. Trump was traveling a path well worn by his predecessors going back for decades. But his approach was all his own....
Melissa Henson, the director of programs for the Parents Television Council, a censorship advocacy group, said the president tried to “draw people out” for a “lively” discussion.
“I don’t think he came to the meeting with his mind made up,” Ms. Henson said. “I think there’s more fact-finding to be done before anything is acted on.”
A nytimes.com search suggests the last time the paper used the term “censorship advocate” was 87 years ago, in 1931. This despite the paper’s favorable coverage of actually censorious left-wing pressure groups like GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has linked up with YouTube to monitor the channel for what qualifies, in its twisted view, as “hate speech.”
The rest of the text was merely cynical against Trump and conservatives:
People involved in listening tours during past administrations doubted that Mr. Trump’s meeting would lead to productive policy. Mark DeLoura, who worked as a digital media adviser in the Obama White House, said that a similar meeting after Sandy Hook had been “well rounded,” and that the recommendations that came out of that wide-ranging listening tour were concrete.
“There are no researchers, no scientists,” Mr. DeLoura said of Mr. Trump’s meeting. “It doesn’t look like people reached out to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the West Wing.”
....
Conservatives have often turned to the idea of video game censorship after mass shootings to steer the discussion away from gun restrictions. In 2007, one month after an armed student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, Mitt Romney, running for president, said that “pornography and violence” in music, movies, TV and video games were to blame.
The Parents Television Council wasn’t the only victim of the “censorship” smear: Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center (the parent of NewsBusters) received the same drive-by attack from the Times.
Other attendees included Brent Bozell, a longtime advocate for media censorship, and Strauss Zelnick, the chairman of Take-Two Interactive, the video game maker behind Grand Theft Auto. Robert A. Altman, the chairman of ZeniMax Media, also attended. The president’s younger brother, Robert, sits on the board of that company.
But Bozell told The Verge that he is against “government control” of video game content. Some “censorship.”
In case you didn’t get the hint the first time, Rogers again called Henson a “censorship advocate.”
“I think it would be fair to say that he feels strongly, clearly that the violence in the video games is excessive,” said Ms. Henson, the censorship advocate who attended the meeting. “But I don’t think he went into the meeting with the purpose of condemning an entire industry.”
The paper is hardly a defender of free speech, either in its opinion pages or news pages, as it rails against the Supreme Court’s decision in the political speech case Citizens United.
The Times was more respectful about criticism of violent video games from the president after a mass gun tragedy -- when that president was named Barack Obama.
Editor's note: Brent Bozell also founded the Parents Television Council in 1995, but stepped down from the group at the end of 2006.
