The journalist just won a huge victory for free speech. Why hasn’t the mainstream media noticed?

“When I went to bed last Thursday night,” Alex Berenson told me, “I was sure we didn’t have a deal. The government offered money, but they weren’t willing to admit what they had done. And I wasn’t going to agree to a settlement without that acknowledgment. But the next morning,” he added, “my lawyer texted me with the news that they had agreed to the language. So we made the deal.”

If you don’t know what Berenson is talking about, well, you can hardly be blamed. The mainstream media has studiously ignored Berenson v. Biden, even though it has enormous implications for the First Amendment. That “language” that Berenson insisted upon—and that the government finally agreed to include in the settlement? Let me quote some of it:

The United States Government. . . has acknowledged and conceded that the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantive coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.

Oh, yes, Berenson’s victory last Friday is a victory for anyone who cares about free speech.

The Free Press has closely covered the pressure the government put on social media companies to ban the contrarian Covid takes from the likes of Berenson and Jay Bhattacharya, now director of the National Institutes of Health. Berenson isn’t a doctor or PhD economist like Bhattacharya is, but he has long been a damn good journalist—a former pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, in fact.

...read more at thefp.com