Now known as 'glamor'

Well! Good thing the Fair 'n' Balanced Network had a lead story for Tuesday afternoon, so the faithful wouldn't be distracted by any pesky stories about anyone's former campaign manager going on trial or anything:

Twitter’s campaign to foster healthier conversations on its platform with the aid of academics is itself facing an allegation of anti-Trump bias.

In previous tweets from their personal accounts, a number of the academics involved in the high-profile project have repeatedly slammed the Trump administration.

Sound familiar? Drudge foreshadowed it on Monday afternoon:

And you know that when "academics" are hired to "monitor" "hate speech," no good is going to come of it. Scare quotes and all, as it turns out, we've known that since 1942. The World's Greatest Newspaper is going to tell us all we need to know about Harold Lasswell, investigator of "glamor" (or, as you might recall from your first masscomm survey class, the guy who articulated the who-says-what-to-whom-through-what-channel formula for looking at media effects). At the Trib, of course, he's just another nutty perfesser:

The propaganda rating of America's newspapers, it was disclosed today, is being studied by Harold D. Lasswell, a former University of Chicago assistant professor who attained publicity a decade ago thru:

1. A scholarly investigation of the meaning of "it," a feminine quality now popularity* known as "glamor" and termed thruout history by various titles, all meaning what the boys like in the opposite sex.

2. A learned thesis on the meaning of the Bronx cheer -- an expression which also has historic qualities but which Dr. Lasswell now thinks has no place in newspaper columns.

A Formula of Questions.

Lasswell is director of war communications research for the library of congress and has produced a "weighted average" system intended to be used in measuring the volume of Nazi propaganda in American publications. The system was explained at a postoffice hearing by Dr. Lasswell himself.

The Post Office, you might recall, was a pretty big factor in the travails of the "vermin press"; this particular hearing was about banning The X-Ray from the mails, and a month earlier, Fr. Coughlin's Social Justice had been impounded at the Royal Oak post office** to see if it was still being seditious. See if you can figure out why the Trib (or Fox, or Drudge) might be so concerned about Lasswell's formula for analyzing a publication:

1. Does it follow the Nazi propaganda that the United States is economically corrupt?

2, Does it oppose the administration's foreign policy or conduct of the war?

3. Does it assail the President on moral or ethical grounds?

4. Does it disparage Great Britain or other allies?

5. Does it say that Washington is run by  Communists, plutocrats, Jews, or crooks?

I hope we can all agree at this remove that the Roosevelt administration overreacted to the threat of the vermin press (though at the same time, we can note that banning Alex Jones from Twitter in 2018 isn't the same as banning The X-Ray or Social Justice from the mail in 1942). And there's not a lot of point to having a free press if anyone isn't free to oppose any administration's foreign policy. It's still worth noting who screams loudest when one asks why some news outlets consistently paint their enemies as commies, crooks and people named Soros.

* (Sic), adjective fans. The War on Editing has been with us for a while. This is May 1942, so only a few weeks until an unfortunately accurate headline was part of a package that almost got the paper indicted.

** It's still there. The new parking deck across the street looks really nice, too.