On the reporters who named the twitter handle of the private jet tracker (whose account was gone by that point) latest news is they were reinstated. Still waiting for Kathy Griffin’s reinstatement. I’d be interested in Fab’s views on those examples, though I’d agree if he said they don’t rise to the same level of importance.
No, I’m not going to disagree that what twitter did was wrong. My feedback is to do with the Munk debate…
I didn’t think Michelle Goldberg was the worst on stage (a manifestation of my biases vs. Fab’s?). The ivermectin attack wasn’t great or interesting to me, she seemed to lose the plot in her closing arguments and she was embarrassingly confused by the applause cut off thing. But I thought she added to the debate, whereas both Gladwell and Murray came off as dick swinging blowhards. Taibbi clearly won, but what I thought she offered was the equivalent of what reporters (we are told) are supposed to get in an article (different rules for the muckraker style?), i.e. the statement from the entity being reported critically on. She sort of represented that for the NY Times. The way she conceded that the Times fucked up but offered this other explanation that they didn’t want to be accused of swaying the election from being burned in the past, I find that useful. It’s possible she’s carrying water for them, enjoying her recent success (online searches suggest she used to be relagated to the pages of the Nation), but that’s not obviously the case to me. Where Taiibi and Greenwald are weak, as I remember their reporting, is that we’re asked to jump from specifics that have evidence to general conclusions about the motivations of the people in the newsroom, the latter without so much evidence that I can remember (Taibbi did mention one NY Times editor quote that leaked – but then the NY Times, though doing lots of great reporting, seems totally fucked at times, particularly during wars, and that’s nothing new).
I found her convincing enough and doubted Taibbi’s portrayal (correct me if there was no such portrayal, it’s been awhile since I listened) of “mainstream media” burying the Hunter Biden laptop story enough that I sought and found the article below from Robert McMillan and Jeff Horwitz of the WSJ, captured by archive.org shortly after the NY Post story. It even briefly mentioned the online censorship problem by way of quoting a journalism professor in the last paragraph. In fact, it has everything I would have wanted on this story if I’d been able to take it seriously at the time. I voted for Hawkins/Walker and live in a state that’s never close in the presidential vote, so no impact either way, but I will admit that when I heard it making the rounds I probably thought little more than, “nice try Giuliani you walking sausage wrapper of excrement.” Is any paper in the U.S. more mainstream and respected than the news side of the WSJ? Even Noam Chomsky has said he reads them, saying that people investing money aren’t fond of news fables. Although if you look back you can find a reasonable article by the Washington Post too. Did the “suppression” of the story happen later?