These past few days, we have seen a perfect illustration of “the Streisand Effect.”

Perhaps you are among the few people in the nation who doesn’t know what that term refers to. I asked around and found friends who had never heard of it.

So as a public service, I’m posting the definition., relying on Wikipedia

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued an aerial photographer and the company he worked for when she learned that her house in Malibu had been photographed as part of the California Coastal Records Project, to document coastal erosion. Her home was part of a collection of 12,000 photographs. She sued for $50 million for “invasion of property.” Before she sued, the image had been downloaded only six times; after she sued, it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. A judge dismissed the case and required her to pay $177,000 to the folks she sued for their legal expenses.

The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

So here’s the Streisand Effect in action, before our very eyes. Bari Weiss, the new “editor-in-chief” at CBS News, saw the report called “Inside CECOT” that “60 Minutes” planned to air last Sunday. After careful review, the segment was heavily promoted as a coming attraction.

Then Bari Weiss decided to yank it.

Consequently, the story of censorship exploded and got far more attention than if the show had aired as planned. Bootleg copies of “Inside CECOT” are in many corners of the Internet, sent from Canada, where the show played before it was spiked.

If it had aired on schedule, there would have been no mention of it in every major news outlet.

Bari Weiss blew it up into a news story.

The Streisand Effect.