https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1599165345461596160.html The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.” Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election. (1/x) They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing. And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since. (2/x) They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will. But they’re actual just blunt instruments. (3/x) Trump got impeached the first time for trying to condition congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine on Zelenskyy announcing an “investigation” of Biden corruption. He wanted the appearance of corruption, so he could wrap the media’s attention around it. (4/x) The laptop was basically Plan B. They wanted everyone to freak out about it for a few weeks. Normally what happens is conservative media shouts about it, mainstream media genuflects and “covers the controversy,” and Bannon and co high-five each other for setting the agenda. (5/x) It didn’t work this time. They’ve been pouting ever since. It’s a lot like a kid who loses a video game and starts slamming the controller, insisting it’s rigged or the system is cheating. It’s NOT FAIR! Their plan was supposed to WORK! (6/x) Musk and Taibbi are tapping into that well of resentment. Why should we care about the President’s adult failson who doesn’t work in the administration? Two years later, what’s the scandal supposed to even be? The media didn’t take the bait. No fair. That’s the scandal. (7/x) They’re gonna keep b****ing about it for years. It’s going to be louder and emptier than the Benghazi hearings. The scandal is that their clever propaganda effort sank like a lead balloon. And that has to be SOMEONE ELSE’S fault. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. (Fin)
for those who don't care, Ann Althouse dissects the NYT coverage of the Twitter Files story: The New York Times finally put up a story about the Twitter files. (Really, it's a story about the reaction to the release of the files.) https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-new-york-times-finally-put-up-story.html
This thread blew up on the Twitter news. Which I actually still haven't read, lol. But I do find the Hunter story a little more interesting because of the Ukraine war. We knew that Ukraine has been in this East-West struggle for quite awhile, trying to cast off the corruption and dictatorship from Russia and embrace the western world. In hindsight really, I see now that the US was more deeply involved in helping them do so than I'd previously realized. And in hindsight, it has been more of an issue of contention in US politics for longer than I realized. Bush looking into Putin's soul, then increasing distance put between the US and Russia over the Obama years coupled with attempts to address corruption in Ukraine and pull it into the western sphere (a cleanup in which Hunter Biden was involved) and Obama's attempt to normalize relations with Russian ally Iran, then Russia trying and succeeding to help Trump get elected and Trump happy to take that help, then Trump disrupting the isolation of Russia by blowing up the Iran deal and his attempt to have rapprochement with Putin and trying to blackmail Ukraine, and now open war. Looking back at the long arc of our relationship with Russia and Ukraine, I'm guessing there has been a lot of funny business on both sides of the fight over how we relate to Russia (coddle a dictator vs a new cold war) that we haven't been seeing. In that light, Hunter joining the board of Burisma looks much more like shadow foreign policy than before, trying to pry a key industry in Ukraine out of Putin's grip. And if that's what he was doing there, he might have been doing similar stuff in his China dealings.
What was the key finding in the “Twitter files” they the NYT didn’t mention in their initial article on the subject?
Yes, thanks to Elon we have the newest and presumably most accurate information. The Biden campaigned asked twitter to remove dick picks of Hunter. If you are interested in male genitalia, there are numerous websites or anonymous encounters you can pursue.
Essentially you have to have hand wave away Russian actions in order to believe this was all politically driven.
basically this If A Legitimate Free Press Existed, The Twitter Files Wouldn’t Nothing Twitter did or could have done would have buried the Biden family scandal story had journalists just done their jobs — but they didn’t. https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/05/if-a-legitimate-free-press-existed-the-twitter-files-wouldnt/ excerpt: Had journalists from legacy outlets and especially the supposed standard-bearers of journalism, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, approached the story with the seriousness it deserved, it seems unlikely Twitter would have dared censor the story. Or such censorship, had it occurred, would have been futile because journalists would be falling over themselves to report the latest details in a political scandal that suggested the Democrat candidate for president had participated in a pay-to-play enterprise with his son while vice president. Real journalists would have tracked down and authenticated the laptop materials, as they did a belated two years later. Real journalists would have questioned Bobulinski and reported his collaborating statements. Real journalists would have demanded answers from Joe, Hunter, and James Biden, the president’s brother who also profited from the many deals; they would have sought answers on every detail suggesting corruption discussed in the emails and other materials recovered from the laptop. And real journalists would have pushed intelligence agencies, and the former members of them who signed on to a letter casting the laptop as Russian disinformation, on the basis for that claim. Nothing Twitter did or could have done would have buried the Biden family scandal story had journalists just done their jobs. But they didn’t, and a retrospective review of their contemporaneous “reporting” shows they took pride in their non-coverage, as best illustrated by an Oct. 18, 2020, CNN story titled “The Anatomy of the New York Post’s Dubious Hunter Biden Story.” In reference to the bombshell story, Brian Stelter called it “a classic example of the right-wing media machine.” The story is a “manufactured scandal,” the former host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” said. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed with Stelter, telling him approvingly, “The media world has largely ignored the Post’s Hunter Biden story.” Trump’s team is “so confident that the story’s just going to be too much fun for serious journalists not to pick up,” Benkler added. “They’re trying to produce it now, but the media at the moment — major professional media — doesn’t seem to be falling for it.” PolitiFact likewise celebrated the media’s refusal to cover the Biden family scandal story, writing that “no credible news outlets have reported any wrongdoing or role held by Joe Biden…” And NPR announced it was not covering the story because it didn’t “want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” and didn’t “want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” *** For all the outrage and anger directed at old Twitter for its censorship of the Biden family scandal, the lack of a vibrant journalistic class proved more problematic to free speech. And for all the kudos and back-patting bestowed on Musk for his efforts to remake Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech, reforming Big Tech will do nothing to right the news media — and the condescension dripped on Musk and Taibbi since Friday show the corrupt journalists have no intention of curing themselves. more at the link
Its totally every journalist job to run to Twitter and post every uncorroborated piece of info spoon fed to them by political dirty tricks campaigners with agendas without doing any research or finding corroboration. Especially when those dirty tricks campaigners sit on it and wait for exactly the most opportune time to release it to the press so as to not give any possibility for corroboration or research. If you aren't allowing yourself to be used as a tool by known media manipulators, you aren't doing Journalism right. -Os Trigonium School of Journalism
Huh? Y’all are completely redefining the bill of rights via Twitter and blogs.. Why do you assume that any news will just publish anything without looking at the veracity of it?
It’s really not…. You may actually believe the various things you’ve posted…. Because everything you posted is redefining the bill of rights and journalistic SOPs….
What if someone finds price fixing of basic human needs like rent through algorithms a huge story and your favorite publications not covering it? Are they failing in terms of journalistic integrity by not covering it? Is the Federalist failing as journalists by never covering Yeildstar price fixing? Actually I do think they are failing. I think these publications you are on your knees for want you to be fixated on unless stuff like this because I'm sure the Federalist is owned by people who are in real estate or are somehow invested in it some where down the line where that type of price fixing benefits them.
here you go, all you folks who don't care about Hunter Biden will love this Reporters against reporting https://hotair.com/david-strom/2022/12/05/reporters-against-reporting-n515583 excerpt: The attacks on Taibbi are totally ridiculous. 95% of the “news” is repeating what powerful people want out there. Leaks come from powerful people. Press releases come from powerful people. Deep Throat was a powerful person. The media rarely covers anything else. Reporters need not be stenographers for the powerful, but every single one of them utterly depends upon what the powerful tell them. Most of those leaks are utterly unsubstantiated. Many are outright false, but printed verbatim. Taibbi is using the actual raw data and releasing it for the world to see. That is actual reporting, not the kind of stenography most reporters do. Even if nothing of note comes out (and I think lots already has), Taibbi will have done us the service of filling in gaps that everybody wanted filled. People are desperate to know what has been happening at Twitter. Twitter is in the news every single day, near the top of the media agenda. Yet none of these reporters is covering anything besides opinion and insinuations, and they are attacking the sole reporter who has the complete story. Remember when all these guys were predicting the collapse of Twitter? It was NEWS, despite being totally ridiculous and clearly wrong speculation. Reporters compliantly spew the Biden Administration line that Elon Musk is a national security threat, that he has enabled White supremacists, that hate speech is now running rampant on Twitter. All without any data to back it up. None. Just repeating the line of the powerful Leftists. Yet they attack Taibbi for reporting from original documents. You know, evidence. None of the “journalists” ever corrected their reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop being Russian propaganda, because they are hacks. Deceptive, propagandistic hacks. They just repeat lies and then memory hole them when they are proven false. Have you seen any corrections about the Russia collusion stories? Of course not. They got a Pulitzer Prize for lying. So spare me the attacks on Taibbi, who is doing real journalism covering the Twitter files. They clearly don’t want this story told. At all. Why? Because each of these people participated in the coverup of a bona fide news story right before the election, and they are doing everything they can to distract from that fact. There was little doubt that the Biden laptop was real–even Hunter didn’t deny that it was his. Hunter Biden did less to cover up his own misdeeds than the MSM. Almost every reporter went into overdrive to debunk the legitimacy of the laptop, calling it Russian disinformation, cheering on the censorship of the story, and amplifying “information” that was absolutely false. These reporters were doing stenography, not reporting, repeating the Narrative™ given them by the Biden camp. They don’t want that exposed for all the world to see. Their excuse for covering up the laptop was being careful not to spread misinformation before an election–but that is exactly what they in fact did. CBS waited two years to acknowledge the obvious, and played their verification of the authenticity of the laptop as news. Each of these news outlets in fact promoted false propaganda for the future President of the United States, and they are doing everything they can to discredit the evidence that they did so. more at the link
