Op-Ed: Why Has Journalist Katie Couric Went To The Dark Side of Censorship?

PORTSMOUTH, OH – Puzzled, baffled, confused. That’s how I feel about a well-known journalist that would dare promote censorship. That’s hypocrisy times a bazillion. That’s double duplicity. That’s a downright dirty deed.  

American television journalist Katie Couric was the co-host of ‘Today’ throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and in 2006, became the first woman to anchor ‘CBS Evening News’ alone. In 2012, she became the host of the ABC talk show Katie. Since early 2014, Couric has served as a global news anchor for Yahoo.

Why did Couric jump aboard the censorship train? It just does not make sense to me. 

In 2021, Couric co-chaired a project at the Aspen Institute that produced an 80-page report on controlling and censoring online misinformation. 

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder released a report that blamed misinformation for almost everything on the planet: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises … Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.” 

Couric went rogue woke. Does she believe the Fibber Fauci lies about COVID-19 and vaccines? The climate crisis carbon emissions hoax? That citizens cannot use critical thinking to analyze and come to their own conclusions – so biggie government and special committees must make rules on what people can and cannot read on the Internet? Apparently.  

A 2021 opinion piece in the New York Post examined the hypocrisy of media manipulators and censors who claim to fight misinformation. “There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.” 

Perhaps the new scourge is just the old scourge, but more brazen.  

According to a 2022 article Blaze Media, “The federal government paid hundreds of media companies to advertise the COVID-19 vaccines while those same outlets provided positive coverage of the vaccines.” 

“In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety,” the article added. 

So, Team Biden paid off the mainstream media and in return the news outlets and platforms did not report alternative information about the coronavirus or the vaccines. Now, isn’t that interesting. No, it’s deceptive, but is it a crime?  

What happened to the Code of Ethics of Professional Journalists? Doesn’t Couric take this oath seriously? Apparently, not. 

It appears that Couric skipped merrily along with the censorship crowd during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. I guess censoring journalists of a feather flock together. 

According to a 2021 Fox News report, “Journalist Katie Couric selectively edited her 2016 interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by omitting negative comments the justice made about those who kneel during the national anthem, she admitted in her new memoir.” 

First, Couric committed censorship and then she wrote about it in her book. One has to wonder if there are other interviews from news stories where she added or deleted. Does she actually think her career success and the resulting money and power give her permission to act unethically? Yes, indeed – is the answer.  

Let’s investigate and see if connecting the dots will lead to the World Economic Forum – the global hub of censorship. 

Ding, ding, ding. “Katie Couric moderates the World Economic Forum panel on Ending Poverty through Gender Parity – Davos, 24 January 2015.” See her smiling face in a photo at WEF. 

According to a 2006 article in Observer, Katie Couric represented CBS for the International Media Council at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

Hmmm.

The Katie Couric censorship investigation trail led to the World Economic Forum. Censorship case solved. 

“The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.” –George Orwell