By Jeffrey Blehar
Saturday, December 03, 2022
Allow me to offer my thumbnail and, as always, only
semi-informed take on Elon’s Adventure in Investigative Reporting from last
night, a.k.a. the “Twitter Files.” For those unaware, this refers to a cache of
internal email communications, the completeness of which is to the best of my
knowledge as yet unknown, that was handed over to dissident independent
reporter Matt Taibbi by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
Taibbi’s “piece,” such as it was (the qualification is
necessary because it was unveiled
on Twitter), contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who
have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter’s suppression of
the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It confirms
that Twitter’s employees were progressives trapped in a progressive bubble
making indefensibly ad hoc decisions on the basis of their
left-wing political priors that resulted in the disgraceful censorship of
information that turned out to be both 100 percent accurate and of acute
national political interest. Notably, Taibbi’s reporting seems (at least
preliminarily) to clear the Biden campaign team of involvement in the decision
to censor the New York Post’s story, establishing an
important fact in the case (albeit not in the direction certain partisans might
have hoped).
The lack of anything hyper-alert newshounds deemed
newsworthy partly (but only partly) explains the dismissive reaction to the
story online. The clumsiness of the delivery mechanism is also a part of it:
Musk hyped the upcoming revelations as if they would come from his Twitter
account in a big “news dump,” and then surprise-lateralled it off to Taibbi to
tweet out from his own account (as opposed to writing it up for ease of
reading, analysis, linking and digestion). The entire affair inevitably came
off like the vulgar promotion of “Twitter as a news platform” that it was
clearly intended to be. Taibbi revealed that Musk insisted upon this delivery
mechanism as a condition for allowing Taibbi access to Twitter’s internal
emails. Taibbi, a once-mainstream journalist who now reaps in truly impressive
amounts of money via his Substack newsletter, is his own boss and has the
latitude to make this sort of ethically squeamish move. While his story reads
as carefully reported (in its very lack of wild or unexpected surprises, no
less), it’s natural that the compromise he made for access raises eyebrows,
regardless of one’s opinion of the phony pieties of the mainstream media.
But it was the almost overt class envy that was even more
difficult for me not to notice. Taibbi is regarded as a traitor to his
journalistic class by some of his contemporaries and as an intolerable grifter
(with a wildly disreputable past that few discuss anymore) by the younger and
more explicitly progressive generation of mainstream-media commentators and
journalists. One need only witness Ben Collins, putative “dystopia beat”
“reporter” at NBC News, attacking Taibbi last night as a man who was “throwing it all away” by doing “PR work for the richest man
in the world” — as if Elon Musk’s talismanic status as An Evil And/Or Rich Man
was more important than whether Taibbi’s reporting is solid and correct. If it
is solid and correct, it is valuable journalism that confirms long-disputed
details about a matter of signal importance to the future of America’s online
political discourse. And it reflects poorly upon a predictable class of
mainstream-media commentators that they no longer see the value in that — at
least so long as the story being told is inconvenient, or is told by the wrong
messenger.
No comments:
Post a Comment