CNN opened its coverage of Murthy v. Missouri, the historic censorship case argued in the Supreme Court yesterday, as follows:

CNN — For doctors like Eileen Barrett, a pending Supreme Court case challenging the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies isn’t principally a fight about the fraught politics of online speech.

Instead, they say, it’s a matter of life and death.

“I have seen countless statements that are at best problematic and at worst flat-out disinformation that I’m terribly fearful are causing harm to patients,” said Barrett…

If CNN’s line about “a matter of life or death” sounds a bit dramatic, it’s at least a perfect echo of the original defendant in the case, President Joe Biden. In July of 2021, Biden said Internet companies were “killing people” when they refused to remove content his White House deemed “problematic.” However, the White House itself contributed to enormous problems during the pandemic by wildly overestimating both the impact of the disease, and the effectiveness of vaccines. Somehow, this form of “misinformation” never gets proper billing.

The government’s performance in oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday has already led to huge success on this front, from a public relations perspective. Instead of hearing about a broad, military-scale operation spanning multiple agencies to address social media posts about everything from Ukraine to Gaza to immigration to schools and gender issues, the public heard the case was about “the government’s ability… to combat misinformation,” and stop “posts that officials said spread falsehoods.” Instead of a case about the state attempting to enforce uniform narratives on huge ranges of subjects, and being consistently wrong when doing so, the public will hear yesterday’s case was about occasional, gentle efforts to offer input about one or two emergencies.

Here’s the answer to both CNN and Biden, and a snapshot of why this case went to the heart of the First Amendment:

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