Over the weekend, The New York Times did the journalistic equivalent of crashing an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile into a men’s store and telling police “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” while wearing a hot dog suit.

Half a decade after the start of Covid hysteria, the paper is now willing to consider that “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” in an op-ed by columnist Zeynep Tufekci. Instead of acknowledging any responsibility for the corporate media’s part in the misleading, the article blames “some officials and scientists” for running “orchestrated campaigns … to keep the public from hearing the whole story.”

It kind of sounds like The New York Times just admitted to falling for, how do you say, misinformation?

A few years ago, you’d risk being accused of “spreading misinformation” for suggesting that Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab, that flimsy paper masks don’t prevent the wearer from the transmission of airborne viral particles, that Covid had an extremely low rate of serious side effects among children and young people, or that the Covid “vaccine” didn’t actually prevent infection. The Federalist endured monumental censorship for platforming these arguments, as did the Americans who made them.

The New York Times, on the other hand, played a significant role in defending the officially sanctioned narrative on every one of those topics: casting doubt on the lab leak theory, calling mask skepticism a “dangerous assertion,” erroneously overstating the number of child Covid hospitalizations, and publishing story after story decrying concerns about the Covid shot as “unfounded claims” and “misinformation.”

They weren’t just helpless journalists victimized by a cabal of sneaky government officials. They played an active role in perpetuating false narratives and choking dissent.

Along with the rest of the legacy press, the Times mocked critics as purveyors of mis- and disinformation and blamed them for the deaths of Covid victims who had shared their skepticism. Headlines like this one littered its pages:

Now, the Times begrudgingly admits, “perhaps we were misled on purpose” — not by the people once deemed “misinformation superspreaders,” but by the very people who refused to allow dissenting voices to challenge the reigning narrative.

In their defense, Tufekci says, “circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.”

But in her view, this censorship campaign was bad because it “made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions.” In actuality, revealing the illegitimacy of so many “expert” institutions was probably the only good thing it did. It was bad, not for that reason, but because censorship is inherently at odds with truth and free expression.

Her conclusion proves Tufekci hasn’t actually learned anything. The obvious lesson the Times and every other corporate media outlet that unironically used the word “misinformation” should shout from the rooftops is “CENSORSHIP IS BAD AND WE’RE VERY SORRY WE HELPED IT HAPPEN.”

Media outlets gave air cover to Big Tech and government censors by constructing artificial boundaries around what qualified as acceptable thought and dismissing everything outside those boundaries as “dangerous misinformation.” They also performed censorship in their own coverage, not by disappearing social media posts and profiles but by boxing out dissenting ideas and perspectives.

Turns out, it was their own writers and editors who were “misled.”

Tufekci marvels that the “natural” Covid origin theory, the most common version of which involved someone eating an infected bat from a Chinese wet market, had “certainly seemed like consensus.”

That consensus was manufactured, as she admits; the Times helped with its manufacturing, which she doesn’t admit. (She also paints the situation as if everyone had the wool pulled as far over their eyes as the Times did, despite some of us entertaining the lab leak theory a month after the pandemic began.)

The obvious solution to avoiding such an insular bubble of ignorance would have been welcoming, not silencing, dissenting thought. But like every kind of censorship that has been tried, the point of the Covid “misinformation” police wasn’t truth-seeking, it was control.

The same goes for other times the phrase “misinformation” has been deployed to silence the opposition. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal, we were told right before the 2020 election, was probably “Russian disinformation.” It wasn’t disinformation at all, Russian or otherwise, but putting that label on it gave Biden Sr. a talking point in his debate against Trump, which was the entire point.

That same year, concerns about the security of an unprecedented election-by-mail were branded “misinformation” by “election deniers.” It’s just shorthand for speech the regime doesn’t like.

The fact that the Times and the rest of corporate media got things so magnificently wrong — and still won’t own up to their own damning role in the speech-silencing operation — tells you everything you need to know about the “misinformation” charade and the people who deploy it.

The media didn’t just fall for the biggest propaganda op of my lifetime. They helped run it.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.