There was a time when the disclosure of a back channel for politically motivated censorship would have generated widespread acclaim and called for awards. This is not that time. Just ask Matt Taibbi.
No one is suggesting that the New York Post should receive a Pulitzer Prize for its long fight to prove the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop. Despite an alliance of most of the media and political establishment arrayed against it, the New York Post fought censorship and unrelenting attacks to bring this massive influence peddling operation to light. (Of course, the New York Times and Washington Post can keep Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on debunked Russian collusion claims created and pushed by the Clinton campaign).
In the case of journalist Matt Taibbi, his analysis of thousands of documents has met with the standard scorched earth campaign from liberal reporters and pundits.
As discussed in today’s Hill column, the document dump confirmed what had long been suspected: Biden and Democratic party officials succeeded in getting Twitter to block the New York Post story and suspend those who even tried to retweet or link to the story before the election.
I will not repeat the content of those emails on how Twitter “handled” demands from the Biden campaign and the DNC for censorship. Musk gave the material to Taibbi to synthesize the voluminous record. That is when the familiar media flash mob formed.
NBC Reporter Ben Collins attacked Taibbi on Twitter and said “Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating s***.”
New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali also attacked Taibbi:
“Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day. Should be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth. Well, he’ll eat well for the rest of his life I guess. But is it worth it?”
So Taibbi’s reported downfall as a writer is due to his role in disclosing a massive censorship system operated at the direction or behest of one political party and one political family. He is “disgraceful” because he is suggesting that the media and social media companies should not have censored a story on a multimillion dollar influence peddling scheme run by the Biden family.
Taibbi is not alone in such disgrace, according to Ali. He has also attacked former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, including for her statement that she was tired of the pandemic as being somehow racist. (“It reflects America’s cruelty, right?…we have also had cruelty, White supremacy, misogyny. America says go ahead and die, but just don’t die on my lawn.”)
Of course, Ali may be right on what it takes today to be accepted as a journalist. Taibbi is now persona non grata as opposed to Ali, who is routinely invited to write for publications like the New York Times and the Daily Beast despite a litany of controversies.
In one column, Ali suggested white Republican voters would prefer to burn down their own homes then rent to a minority member and compared them to the Al Qaeda terrorists on Flight 93 . He then wrote off most of them as “lost. It’s going to be a long, ugly, violent death rattle of a death cult.”
In today’s world, the New York Times bans Sen. Tom Cotton for his view on the use of the military to quell violent protests, but publishes Ali who told people not to “waste your time reaching out to Trump voters as I did.”
“Reaching out” apparently means calling them virulent racists storming an airplane cockpit. That is the model of real journalism and commentary, not some journalist detailing a politically driven censorship system on social media.
Most critics like MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan attacked Musk or Taibbi while omitting any discussion of the details in these documents. Hasan simply declared that the full transparency ordered by Musk is just one of those “nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives . . . But sure, the laptop! The laptop! The laptop!”
There is a simple reason for this evasion and enmity. The media is too invested in the suppression of this story to now acknowledge that this was a scandal involving both massive influence peddling and massive censorship to cover it up.
I previously wrote a column on the one year anniversary of the Hunter Biden laptop story that marveled at the success of the Biden family in making the scandal vanish before the 2020 election. It was analogized to Houdini making his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear in his act. The Biden trick, however, occurred live before an audience of millions.
The key to the trick was involving the media in the original illusion. Both Twitter and these reporters became invested in the trick. It is like calling audience members to the stage to assist in the performance. Reporters have to insist that there was nothing to see or they have to admit to being part of the original deception. The Bidens were able to make this elephant of a scandal disappear because Twitter and the media wanted it to disappear.
Musk has now pulled away the cover and revealed the elephant. Rather than acknowledge the beast, the media is turning on those who made it visible. The Bidens forced many liberal reporters and pundits to excuse the raw corruption of influence peddling. They are now getting the same figures to dismiss censorship. The alternative is simply too bear, let alone explain. After all, if it is still on the stage, it was there all along . . . and that can only be a “nakedly and cynically right-wing narrative.”
Neo-Progressivism (aka) Human Devolution..
I often disagree with S. Meyer sometimes those disagreements are vigorous, on rare occasions his arguments are stupid and he thinks mine are.
But he has never come close to the lack of civility of nearly all the posters from the left here.
Do you have any evidence that Darren has censored anything on this blog outside the well known rules ?
First my acknowledgment of crap journalism on Fox News and in even shriller outlets. Those exist on the right too.
That noted, it has now been some time since mainstream. librul, news outlets–ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, LA Times, NY Times, WAPO, and others–formed a defencive muskoxen circle, only to strangle news such outlets dislike. Like the HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP. Like other BIDEN contretemps.
What a record! Starting with Clinton, we have now had five joke-presidents in-a-row. The warty Dems’ warts got hidden. The Republicans were warty enough without making stuff up. The facts alone would have sufficed. But that would take some digging which today’s librul, mainstream news crowd shuns. Fox is in the running of low-performers too.
For some time already, free-standing reporters, like Taibbi, and non-conformists like Musk have noticed this problem.
That Musk and Taibbi would do something together on the deplorable state of US news dissemination is really no surprise.
This exposé was just the 1st and it’s not over yet!
Librul, mainstream outlets try ad hominem attacks to refute it. How about the facts, Boys? If it is false, factually show how.
They cannot falsify the Biden laptop report. So we may regard this muskoxens’ circling as like drawing a line in the sand.
From now on, expect news that librul, mainstream media try to stifle to come out thru Twitter, Taibbi, or some combination of those two and others. Outsiders will now air news that mainstream media try to suppress.
For example: What about the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s customers? Granted they were just indulging their sexual tastes, but their such, out-of-ordinary, sexual tastes exposed them to blackmail or manipulation by foreign governments. Plain old blackmail should have been a reliable of funds to keep Epstein’s Potemkin store-front financed. Epstein’s customers were rich, WELL PLACED and INFLUENTIAL Epstein did not just take ordinary travelling salesmen from out-of-town.
Librul, mainstream outlets head into a death-struggle contest against free-standing reporters who can still dig out facts.
Good luck, Fellas! My money is on free-standing reporters.
Hats off to both Taibbi and Musk. Without that dynamic duo the american people would be clueless as to how our current liberties are sinking to the level of China. In China, the government and political parties don’t directly censor opinions. They turn to the tech oligopolies to do it for them. Sound familiar??
Our founding fathers are twirling around in their graves and will twirl some more until we get off our tuckuses and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Muck and Taibbi deserve Kudos.
But I would Call out Glenn Greenwald – who is indesputably on the left,
and who left the intercept – a media outlet that he founded, because they tried to censor his story on the Biden’s and the Biden laptop.
Greenwald was calling out the media and social media in October of 2020 for failure to cover the truth.
“For example: What about the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s customers?”
Is there any evidence this list exists? There is plenty of evidence that Epstein had a book with names in it, but so did I in my working days before hand held electronics. A book with names in it is a book with names in it, until there is evidence that it is something more than that. Epstein was a schmoozer, and I dealt with many. They find what you do, collect your business card, then call you out of the blue when they want something. All of the people Epstein rubbed shoulders with were like that. I’m not suggesting that Epstein (or Maxwell) is swell and a paradigm of virtue, but there is way more to this story – including serial liar and shakedown artist Virginia Guiffre – than we will ever know, and I’ll hazard a guess that it has more to do that boinking underage girls.