Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) In 2016, Roy Den Hollander sued media outlets over their Trump-Russia coverage. In 2020, 96 hours after a judge was assigned a case with Trump-Russia implications—120 days pre-election—Hollander tried to kill her. A media fight followed. This thread is about that fight.

1/ There's no doubt social media sites have become what those of us who teach journalism call "social news websites" in the last decade. Accounts discussing breaking news in real time have *skyrocketed* in popularity. A related cottage industry in conventional media has appeared.

2/ This new "cottage industry" in conventional media is writing articles attacking New Media—particularly feeds on social news websites that track, disseminate, curate, analyze and facilitate conversations on breaking news. You can always get an editor to say yes to such a story.

3/ The premise of all such stories is identical: things were better—*much* better—when breaking news was not discussed on social news websites, but rather in the relative anonymity of individuals' homes and workplaces. These articles exhibit a nostalgia for "water-cooler gossip."

4/ A recent article by @Chris_Maag (pictured atop this thread) in the NORTH JERSEY RECORD, a USA TODAY affiliate, is an example of this new cottage industry—and candidly, the animating event for this thread. Maag feels great nostalgia for when breaking news was discussed offline.

5/ Back when things were offline, you could have a day care worker, a plumber, and an investment banker sitting in a private residence in Poughkeepsie discussing the latest major media–covered crime.

Not a single one of them would know anything about the criminal justice system.

6/ Back when things were offline, you could have a workplace full of librarians or construction workers or accountants discussing the latest major media–covered crime.

Not a single one of them would know anything about the criminal justice system.

7/ Now we have Twitter, where tens of thousands of CJS experts congregate to discuss—in a way everyone can witness—the latest major media–covered crime. In other words we don't need untutored water-cooler or private-residence conversations anymore. Experts can always be involved.

8/ Chris Maag also feels great nostalgia for a time when digital research by citizen journalists was impossible (because the internet didn't exist). You received the newspaper you subscribed to and whatever it said was what *was*. You had no ready access to additional reporting.

9/ Twitter users almost certainly have more ready access to expert analysis of breaking news than any news consumers in human history. And internet users almost certainly have more ready access to major-media reporting on topics that interest them than any humans before them.

10/ So what does this have to do with the Roy Den Hollander story? A lot. Because the Roy Den Hollander case—as I know from trying homicides as a criminal defense attorney and from time spent working as a criminal investigator—is a 1 in 100,000 criminal case. It is idiosyncratic.

11/ The "1-in-100,000" cases—with fact-patterns so bizarre they don't just get reported upon but become the subject of workplace and private-residence gossip and idle chatter—are ones we actually *most* need social news websites for, as they're the most complex and controversial.

12/ With "common" criminal cases (trespassing, destruction of property, burglary, drug possession) Americans around water coolers or at home on sofas often have at least *some* basis to start a coherent conversation about what's occurred. Not so with the Roy Den Hollander case.

13/ The Roy Den Hollander case—for that matter, the Jeffrey Epstein case, the Ghislaine Maxwell case, the Trump-Russia and Trump-Ukraine cases—are at a level of complexity at which we *really* want folks discussing it in environments where subject-matter experts reside and speak.

14/ It's for this reason that the *first thing* a person like Chris Maag does in one of these new-cottage-industry "New Media hitpieces" is *eliminate* the credentials of anyone being discussed. Take today's story in the NORTH JERSEY RECORD, for instance—in which I'm discussed.

15/ I'm an attorney. I practiced criminal law—including homicide cases—for years. I was also a criminal investigator. And I've published two NYT bestsellers on Trump's associates—of which Epstein was one—and the Trump-Russia case. So how does Maag describe me? See the next tweet.

16/ Though he knows he's writing a story about criminal law (specifically homicide), criminal investigations, Trump associates (specifically Epstein), and Trump-Russia-related federal cases, Maag calls me "a columnist for Newsweek and a professor of digital media at UNH." *What?*

17/ As you can see, Maag's goal here—and the goal of every hitpiece within this subgenre of Old Media dreck—is to position Twitter as a place where readers are listening to *random people*, indeed far more than they did around water coolers or in their private homes in the 1970s.

18/ When Maag approached me about his story, his pitch alleged—falsely—that Twitter began discussing the Roy Den Hollander case "before any reporting [could] be done." In fact, the amount of reporting Twitter was working from was staggering—even more than Old Media reporters had.

19/ What Maag doesn't get—and what no one who writes hitpieces like these seems to—is that, on the political left, Twitter users read, disseminate, and credit far *more* conventional reporting than non-Twitter users. Twitter is a vehicle to spread and discuss major-media reports.

20/ The reason Twitter users could discuss the Roy Den Hollander case is they first built a foundation of major-media reports anyone present in the discussion could refer to. It wasn't, "I know a guy who knows a guy who read it in a paper—so let's discuss it by the water cooler."

21/ But it's more than that, as *contemporaneous* with Twitter users making major-media reporting on the Roy Den Hollander case go viral—you're welcome, Old Media—Twitter users were *also* Googling *older* major-media reports on Roy Den Hollander (you're welcome again Old Media).

22/ But that's not all! As a *triple* confirmation of Twitter users' uncanny interest in reportage, large numbers of users began seeking out original-source documents from reliable sources that could be folded into the conversation—for instance, Roy Den Hollander's LinkedIn page.

23/ The result is that by the time Twitter users engaged in the digital version of water-cooler talk—which they've every right to do, and humans *always* do—they had a) subject-matter experts present, b) two rounds of major-media reporting, c) new reporting Old Media didn't have.

24/ In Maag's telling... *none of this happened*. In Maag's telling, Twitter started spouting off about the Roy Den Hollander case with a) random people *only* involved in the conversation (no experts), b) *no* major-media reporting having yet occurred, and c) no access to OSINT.

25/ The reason I wrote this thread—quite transparently—is that Maag's shoddy "journalism" made me upset. But that's *partly* because (and Maag made sure his readers didn't know this either) I teach journalism, pre-law, and professional communications. Odd that Maag left this out?

26/ The worst part isn't what Maag left out about me. I'm used to it. Most journalists must tweak the facts to write about me in the way they and their editors want. Far *more* important is that Maag deliberately misled his readers as to the *facts of the Roy Den Hollander case*.

27/ When you read Maag's story in the NORTH JERSEY RECORD/USA TODAY, you're immediately assured this was an "isolated crime," and that it was "misinformation" to even imply a *possible* Epstein connection. Anyone who said otherwise, Maag primly explained, was an internet "troll."

28/ To Maag—positioning himself as the sort of journalist we should trust—Roy Den Hollander was merely "a disturbed person" and... wait for it... "a lonely senior citizen." With no mental health records available, Maag concludes Roy Den Hollander had an "apparent mental illness."

29/ This is a thread on why major media is collapsing—a topic I'm writing a book on for Macmillan that will be published in 2022. So I hope Maag, who's reading this, and others reading this will realize this thread used an anecdote as a jumping-off point for a broader discussion.

30/ In his effort to take down New Media and—ironically—prove his bona fides as a journalist, Maag:

🔹 Eliminated all relevant info from his discussion of my credentials;
🔹 Eliminated the truth about how Twitter used reporting in the Roy Den Hollander case.

But it gets worse.

31/ Maag *lies* about the Roy Den Hollander case itself, eliminating *any* reporting in the case—whether from major media or from OSINT (open-source intelligence) identified by citizen journalists—about, for instance, Roy Den Hollander's controversial 2016 Trump-Russia lawsuit.

32/ Maag *eliminates* any information about Roy Den Hollander's startling background—all of it publicly available on his LinkedIn—as someone who *worked in intelligence in Moscow*, married a Russian woman he said was mob-connected, and was obsessed with the Russian mob generally.

33/ Maag *eliminates* any information about the case Judge Salas had just been handed 96 hours earlier—a case that very much has to do with how Deutsche Bank handles potential money laundering situations, *particularly* involving Epstein, Trump, the Kremlin, and the Russian mob.

34/ Maag then *falsely* claims the Twitter feeds (including certain major-media Twitter feeds, ironically) he's attacking said that "Trump allies" had "turned" Roy Den Hollander into an assassin.

In fact, that wasn't what the accounts he was attacking—including mine—said at all.

35/ Maag quotes me as saying one of the "more likely" motives in the case—among other possibilities—was that Hollander was acting in a way he knew would delay the Deutsche Bank case Salas had just 96 hours earlier been assigned to oversee. I said *nothing* about Trump allies.

36/ What I said—and other experts said—is if you're planning to assassinate a judge you've been tracking for years, you're aware if they become national news (as Salas had just become). So there's an investigative reason to think Roy Den Hollander knew of the Deutsche Bank case.

37/ As Roy Den Hollander had earlier *brought a lawsuit* saying media unfairly hurt Trump's election odds in 2016 via ubiquitous Trump-Russia claims, and as Roy Den Hollander—a lawyer—would've appreciated the political fallout of a Deutsche Bank case he would've been aware of...

38/ ...it's eminently reasonable for a subject-matter expert to say that one possible motive for the assassination attempt was that Roy Den Hollander didn't want Donald Trump to again suffer political fallout from Trump-Russia allegations in the run-up to a presidential election.

39/ And indeed, the writings of Roy Den Hollander that have subsequently been unearthed underline that he was obsessed with national politics, and obsessed with allegations of wrongdoing by the Russian mob. So it is *one* investigative line that investigators will have to pursue.

40/ Investigators will also have to pursue—as I said in my several threads on Roy Den Hollander that Maag read (but did not discuss) in writing his piece—allegations that Roy Den Hollander's connection to the Men's Rights Movement (and his misogyny generally) prompted the attack.

41/ They'll *also* have to pursue—as I wrote on Twitter—evidence he *specifically* was stalking Judge Salas' career out of misogyny, racism, and other reasons. They'll *also* have to pursue the possibility his cancer diagnosis and imminent death allowed others to influence him.

42/ Who could've influenced him? Who knows. White supremacists? Men's Rights Movement folks? Litigants with an ax to grind about prior Salas rulings? Russian mobsters? Politicos? Or, quite possibly, no one at all? After all, it's just a line of inquiry investigators may consider.

43/ None of this appears in Maag's article. 90%+ of the facts of the case are missing; 90%+ of my bio as an expert commenting on the case; 90%+ of how Twitter engaged with major-media reports on the situation.

And this article is supposed to prove... how *accurate* Old Media is.

44/ This isn't, in the end, about Maag, who's just a bad journalist.

This is about how anger at New Media makes bad journalists out of Old Media journalists—because they distort facts to create a narrative in hitpieces about {checks notes} distorting facts to create a narrative.

45/ Anyone who followed the Salas case on Twitter knew *more* about it—and I include major-media reporting on it—than Maag did. Or does.

Repeat: *Anyone* who followed the Salas case on Twitter knew more about it than Chris Maag did or does, including major-media reporting on it.

46/ The reason it matters as a matter of "media studies" is if you followed the Salas case on Twitter, then read Maag's piece, *because* you knew *more* about the case than Maag and could easily see that, reading his piece caused you to *lose* confidence in Old Media—not gain it.

47/ Now imagine this phenomenon repeated a million times daily—as users of social news websites *routinely* discover they know more about breaking news than major-media journalists do. Why? Because they've read more reporting on it, read OSINT, and have heard from *many* experts.

48/ Maag is creating the very vicious circle he wants to write articles complaining about. By misleading readers, eliding facts, and knowing less about his topic than his readers do—all while arrogantly telling them their news consumption habits are sh*t—he destroys his own case.

49/ I always lose followers when I write long threads. I've lost 100 while writing this thread. According to Maag, high-traffic Twitter feeds never do anything that loses them readers. Maybe it's another thing he's got wrong? Maybe we operate off principles he doesn't understand?

50/ Old Media: stop lying about folks' credentials. Stop eliding messy facts about breaking news. Stop denigrating OSINT. Stop saying Twitter users don't consume conventional reporting—as their fascination with it, and their spread of it, is the only reason you still exist.

/end

UPDATE/ Having *armchair-diagnosed* Roy Den Hollander's attempted assassination as being motivated by mental illness, Maag now calls me crazy, too. If Maag accidentally trips over doing any journalism on the Salas case, I'll let you all know. For now, it's just a Luddite ranting.

UPDATE2/ For what it's worth, here's my long-form bio—including all the info relevant to Christopher Maag's piece on a criminal case (info he eliminated in order to spread his narrative about people who use Twitter and people who consume news via Twitter): sethabramson.net/bio

AUDIO1/ Today I'm testing recording equipment for my fall classes. I decided to test it by reading the email Maag calls "unhinged." The audio has two parts; the next is in the next tweet. I insisted he not misstate my bio, but you'll hear nothing unhinged.

AUDIO2/ My bio is so often misstated in the media that yes—in emails to journalists—I often have to be very firm about misrepresentations. But in this second, longer part of my email to Saag, you can see that my primary interests are academic and forensic.

AUDIO3/ That a USA TODAY columnist wanted his readers (and readers here) to consider what reads like an NPR podcast "unhinged" underlines that there's an Old Media narrative on New Media that's stubborn.

I may, as time goes on, post some of my Twitter commentary in audio format.