Left-wing journos have slammed reporter Matt Taibbi after he released evidence of collusion between Twitter executives and the Biden campaign team seeking to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election. DailyMail.com has more.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, gave Taibbi access to the documents, which he began to publish excerpts of on the social media site on Friday evening.
The documents included internal Twitter emails appearing to show staffers removing tweets showing a nude Hunter Biden at the behest of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Taibbi, a podcaster and former Rolling Stone correspondent, came under heavy criticism from top journalists at NBC News, MSNBC, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere, who accused him of doing “PR work” and committing journalistic malfeasance.
“Matt Taibbi… what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day,” tweeted Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali.
“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?” he added.
NBC News Senior Reporter Ben Collins wrote: “Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating s**t.”
Mehdi Hasan, the MSNBC host, had a similar criticism, tweeting: “Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you’re speaking truth to power.”
NBC Senior Reporter Brandy Zadrozny offered more nuanced critique of Taibbi’s analysis.
Zadrozny pointed specifically to Taibbi’s conclusion that Democrats had “more channels” to lobby Twitter employees for content moderation than Republicans, because the staff’s political donations overwhelmingly went to Democrats.
“To leap to political contributions as the reason the right was more often reported for rule breaking is just bad reasoning and really bad reporting. Good thing this guy doesn’t have an editor,” tweeted Zadrozny.
One widespread criticism of Taibbi’s report centred on a list of tweets that were apparently deleted at the behest of Biden’s campaign, which Taibbi failed to reveal showed nude photos of Hunter, in violation of Twitter’s own policies.
Taibbi could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.
On the other side, prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is frequently critical of the mainstream media, praised the files as “extraordinary documents” that show “the extreme pressure and collusion between liberal Twitter execs and Dem Party leaders to censor reporting on Biden”.
Greenwald slammed journalists who criticised Taibbi’s release as “the little employees of media corporations who don’t do any reporting – just tattling on powerless citizens to get them censored”.
“The reason these people insist Taibbi’s story is trivial is they will not and cannot recognise any scandalous or improper behaviour by leading Dem politicians. Ask them to name any. Any critique of leading Dems is automatically, to them, a fraud, a ‘nothingburger’,” wrote Greenwald.
“The whole sleazy, in-group liberal gang from NBC, Daily Beast, etc – all the censorship advocates who think censorship advocacy is somehow compatible with journalism – are furious that the the acts of their Dem Party allies in getting the Biden story censored are being exposed,” he also tweeted.
Musk also criticised the way much of the media covered of the files.
“Rather than admit they lied to the public they’re trying to pretend this is a nothingburger,” he said. “Shame on them.”
For more on this story, see this piece in the New York Post, and, for a compendium of all the most hysterical, over-the-top reactions from liberal journalists to Taibbi’s revelations, see this piece by Caleb Howe in Media-ite.
You can read Matt Taibbi’s now infamous Twitter thread here.
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I read the thread. It’s worth reading – not long. What struck me wasn’t the pressure from Dem politicians, which is par for the course, but the desperation on the part of the Twitter people to find reasons within their existing “rules” for suppressing the story. What comes across is that they wanted to put a lid on it at all costs but equally wanted to be able to show justification for doing so, suggesting to me that they knew it could be something big that might backfire on them. Somewhere in the thread I believe there’s a stat on political donations by Twitter employees – 98% or more by monetary value went to the Democratic Party. If you have a plethora of policies that allow or encourage you to suppress content, and politically committed staff, what happened is pretty much inevitable. So far in the thread (Part 1) the top man (Jack Dorsey) apparently didn’t know what was happening – will be interesting to see at what point he found out and what he did about it.
The squealing from the left indicates they know this is bad for them, as does the attempt to characterise Musk as a white nationalist.
Hence the rush by Western Governments to publish ‘online harms’ bills all with a similar theme, to give social media companies the cover they need to suppress conservative and right-wing voices.
Imagine that someone went around handing out a list of smear points to whorenalists telling them to take pot shots at the richest man in the world. Why, it’s almost like all the different
adspublications would sound like they came from the same crib sheet.And why do these hacks think people other than the infantilised virtue signallers they pander to would care to be addressed as ‘kids’? Smacks very much of the condescending, pathetic attempt of the Fraud and Drug pushing Administration to smear ivermectine with their “You are not a horse, you are not a cow. Seriously, stop it y’all”. Like water, crap seeks its own level.
What is the phrase people use – the flak is always heaviest when you are over the target?
Along with shooting the messenger if you don’t like the message?
I’m going to follow this with interest…I agree with a Glenn Greenwald’s assessment….
One more time: the US is in the bizarre, surreal situation where the leading advocates of state and corporate censorship are media corporations and their employees.
It’s an amazing propaganda feat: getting “journalists” to take the lead role in *demanding political censorship*:
I’m also sure Matt Taibii can look after himself, and I hope they bring the whole corruption scandal out…I hope he can deliver on his latest tweet…
“Looking forward to going through all the tweets complaining about “PR for the richest man on earth,” and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House, etc.”
Bring it on, it should be massively entertaining….
Interesting to see the repeated use of certain key words (PR, world’s richest man) in a lot of posts: Dr Jordan B Peterson on Twitter: “Wow.” / Twitter
They spent four years chasing Trump with 1% of the evidence against Biden, and yet the ‘Democrats’ seem not to care that their guy has been caught in a web of corruption that grows and grows and grows. Is there no-one on the left who is looking at this and saying, ‘Hang on. Our guy or not, this is wrong.’. Seemingly not. I seriously wonder what it would take.
‘Wrong’ is a word the Leftwaffe uses to describe other people’s actions and opinions.
It never applies to them. Pitchforks at the ready!
What’s interesting is how the responses from the lefties take the similar line. Did they reach this conclusion independently, are they all just copying each other… or is somebody else feeding them their talking points even though they supposedly work for different outlets?
Apparently you can get away with all sorts and have it censored as long as you include “dick pics” in the material.