But in the year just been, reputations were trashed, bombshell stories were buried, and careers were snuffed out as newsrooms — with the eager support of Big Tech — abandoned truth for ideology and suffered no dissent.

An interesting piece from an Australian journalist, pairing the censorship of the Chinese state with the censorship of the pomo critical theory zealots in the mainstream media and their indulgence in deplatforming and information suppression.

Since most of the good classical liberal journalists seem to be ending up at Substack, perhaps that is where I should be redirecting all the money I used to spend on traditional mainstream media but have cancelled in the past couple of years as they have been transformed from news outlets to ideological organs.

From China Censors Journalists - But So Did the West in 2020 by Kurt Mahlburg.

Last week, a Chinese citizen journalist was sentenced to four years in jail. Her crime: reporting on the coronavirus outbreak that began in her city of Wuhan.

Zhang Zhan, 37, insists that all of her reports were based on first-hand accounts from locals. But because she scrutinised the government’s response to the virus and provided a more sombre narrative than the official one, she was arrested on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”—and then sentenced to jail for “disseminating false information” via social media.

As Westerners, it’s easy to read news like this and let sympathy give way to apathy: these events took place in another country, we reason, under a foreign regime, in a land far away.

But what just happened in China has eerie parallels in the West. During 2020 — like no other year I can recall — Western journalism traded its proud tradition of open inquiry for censorship and suppression.

If you think I’m exaggerating, you must have missed the stories I’m about to tell you.

To be clear, journalists are not being criminalised in the West — yet. But in the year just been, reputations were trashed, bombshell stories were buried, and careers were snuffed out as newsrooms — with the eager support of Big Tech — abandoned truth for ideology and suffered no dissent.

Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi is one of many who felt the force of this. In April 2020, he made the decision to quit mainstream journalism and write full-time on Substack, a platform that lets journalists reach readers directly through subscription.

Read the whole thing to find where classical liberal journalists have taken refuge from the authoritarian mob of the woke MSM.