Don’t expect a ‘media reckoning’ over Twitter Files revelations, but effort to dismiss is doomed to fail

New Twitter boss Elon Musk showed the nation firsthand how executives at the company colluded to censor what may have been a deciding factor in the 2020 presidential election, Hunter Biden’s infamous “laptop from hell,” and in the process interfering in the outcome of that election.

In reality, the “Twitter Files” released by Musk only confirmed what was already known, that being that Twitter functioned as a de facto arm of the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, Twitter was far from alone in censoring the story. Just about every significant social media platform did so, as well as almost every major corporate media outlet outside of Fox News. For all the talk on the left about “our democracy” being under threat, few things top this blatant election interference.

So, with Twitter executives being exposed as party zealots, even colluding with the Biden campaign, has corporate media learned its lesson? Not at all, according to the video clip below:

Media watchdogs are equally skeptical that today’s media will own up to its shortcomings.

Almost as if they are playing two steps ahead in the propaganda war, a Washington Post insider fell back on Rudy Giuliani, who was President Trump’s attorney at the time, pushing the story and the disgraceful interference provided by the intelligence community — lest we forget, more than 50 former intel officials signed a letter saying Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” including former CIA chiefs John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden.

“CIA types were saying it looked like Russian disinformation—which after 2016 sounded like a plausible concern. So, egg on our faces? No,” the source told Fox News Digital. “Solid reasons to be very, very wary and skeptical. Were we wrong? Possibly– but we couldn’t know that at the time.”

Slowly, and well after the election, media outlets came around to admitting that the laptop was authentic — comically, the once venerable CBS News just made their determination last week, some 2 years later.

A network news insider told Fox News that the timing of the New York Post story was a reason to be cautious, as if that would deter reporting on a story that would have harmed Trump, but the source couldn’t dodge the reality that politics came into play in admitting that if the laptop belonged to Donald Trump Jr., all bets would have been off.

“I tend to think that right before an election, especially, you need to be really cautious with late breaking revelations, October surprise type stuff,” the source said. “Obviously, I think it was a mistake for Twitter to suppress the New York Post story… And their reason obviously turned out to be entirely wrong.”

The self-righteous response ignores the fact that behind Twitter there was a standing line of media outlets and other social media platforms suppressing the story.

“I think that news organizations and reporters were obviously in hindsight too quick to believe that the laptop was a product of Russian misinformation, disinformation,” they added. “That was kind of an assumption that was taken by a hell of a lot of reporters and news organizations… If it had been Don Jr’s laptop, it’s not too much of a stretch to think it would have been handled differently.”

After Friday’s release of the Twitter files, which showcased how biased Twitter was in favor of Democrats, the same journalists and media outlets that censored the laptop story took to social media to downplay or dismiss altogether the revelations, or to outright condemn Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

More from Fox News:

Many criticized Taibbi for even reporting on the story, and the Washington Post framed the news as Musk igniting divisions and failing to bend “the will” of Democrats.

The New York Times ignored the story for over 24 hours until a single article headlined, “Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and a Very Modern Media Maelstrom,” was published Sunday night. The article didn’t lead with the news, but instead put a spotlight on the atypical fashion the news was delivered.

MSNBC devoted only three minutes of coverage and CNN covered it for 10 minutes over the weekend. CNN’s online coverage was criticized by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who said it “reads like the rantings of any #Resistance maniac.”

 

In addition, as Fox News noted, the major Sunday talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN devoted a total of seven seconds to the story,

So, to answer the question, nobody has learned their lesson because they know they control information, and when you control information you control the game.

“This muted response is yet another indication that the mainstream media are not genuinely interested in the flow of actual news, but instead are interested in the political shaping of the public sphere,” DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.

McCall suggested that now would be an “appropriate time for big media to do some soul-searching” and acknowledge the “clumsy way” it handled the laptop story, but he’s skeptical that this will happen, saying most would rather “accept cratering public trust” than admit fault.

“Mainstream outlets surely don’t even now believe they actually bungled the laptop story, because stifling that story ultimately served their political agenda. Activist media surely have no regrets in this matter, and they aren’t going to acknowledge that this journalism of omission did a disservice to the citizenry,” he said. “This sorry incident again shows that the noble mission of journalism has been bastardized by the establishment media.”

Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, said in an op-ed run by  Fox News that the liberal media’s effort to dismiss what was learned from the Twitter files is doomed to fail.

“The censoring of the Hunter Biden scandal before the 2020 election by Twitter and others was a tragedy for our democratic system,” Turley wrote. “That tragedy was not in its potential impact on a close election, but the massive (and largely successful) effort to bury a story to protect the Biden campaign. It has now ended in farce as the same censorship apologists struggle to excuse the implications of this major story.”

He said as a long-standing liberal Democrat, “it has been chilling to see the Democratic Party embrace censorship and denounce free speech, including organizing foreign and corporate interests to prevent Musk from restoring free speech protections.”

As for why the effort to dismiss the story will not work, Turley first noted that more files are expected to be released AND that with the GOP soon to be in control of the House an investigation is expected to learn more about entities “carrying out censorship for Democratic allies.”

“That investigation is important because there is always the risk that Twitter officials (who were long aware of the threat of such inquiries) may have avoided or even destroyed written communications,” he concluded. “Indeed, the increasingly shrill chorus that “there is nothing to see here” may only prompt a closer look from many skeptical citizens. After all, nothing draws a crowd as much as a farce.”

Tom Tillison

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