Thread by @DavMicRot

In 2016 @nytimes published 10 front-page articles on Secretary Clinton’s IT Security in a 6 day period from 10/29-11/3/16. NYT was signaling this is an important story, that people should pay attention to this story above and beyond other possible topics about the 2016 election.

Consequently other publications also wrote up this story and Clinton's IT Security became the most consumed & remembered issue of the election.

In 2017 @USATODAY reported that Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump were routing personal and government emails through a private server hosted by the Trump Organization. @nytimes did run one front-page article on this, before the story was eclipsed by other news usatoday.com/story/news/pol…

@USATODAY @nytimes There were numerous other egregious IT Security lapses by Trump Team that followed in 4 years of their rule (including Jared using WhatsApp to *potentially* greenlight Saudi Arabia murdering a US-based journalist), most of them flying under the radar of national mainstream news.

One particular story was broke by @nytimes just a few month ago: Jared Kushner used FreeConferenceCall.com to run the US’ COVID-19 response. This tantalizing IT Security failure was noted in the 21st paragraph of an article that ran on the 14th page nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/…

.@nytimes did not actually think Clinton had an IT Security problem that the American people needed to know in order to choose wisely in the 2016 election: expecting Clinton to win the election, they needed a story to show how “balanced” they were by bashing her.

Mainstream media defines balance by falsely equating the competency, scruples, and policy merit of the two major party candidates: it was hard to bring Donald Trump up (dude is super incompetent, corrupt, policy was ill-defined and/or cruel), so they dragged Clinton down.

Mainstream media's light handling of Trump’s *way worse* IT Security failures show that the issue is not inherently important, but that the mainstream media made it important for Clinton, while *choosing* to not make it important for Trump.

When it comes to IT Security the mainstream media did not spread misinformation, but they made the general population misinformed.

Clinton actually did have a tiny IT Security situation: despite being legal and secure, she should not have run government emails through a private server. And, her campaign manager did get hacked by the Russians, in a completely separate incident.

Trump actually does have a big IT Security situation: not legal to hide government correspondence from public record AND between Trump’s unsecured cell phone & Jared’s use of open calling tools, highly probable that malicious actors hacked sensitive information from US.

General public thinks that Clinton is a bad at IT Security & Trump is fine at IT Security because mainstream media *chose* to selectively promote anti-Clinton propaganda, while ignoring true issues w/ Trump. Their choices matter: IT Security won Trump 2016 election, not Pizzagate

Too much effort has been put into finding where the Russians have seeded some really fake news that few will ever see, but too little effort has gone into how mainstream media actually has magnitudes more power to inform or misinform the public.

(1) Everyone agrees Russian propaganda is bad so it is easier to call it out. But, awkward mainstream media, which draw their sense of worth from providing equal validity to both sides and embracing the patriotic greatness of our institutions, to discuss their misinformation.

(2) Mainstream media believes that social media is stealing their business, making them an appetizing target (which is partly true).

Journalists and editors—at least those not at Fox—tend to see themselves as detached observers of events whose job is simply to report them. They are actually active—and highly influential—participants in shaping public opinion through agenda setting and narrative construction.

Which brings US to today: This morning @maggieNYT of @nytimes amplified extremely suspect reporting on emails taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop, while Democratic member of Facebook’s Communication team issued a statement saying they will suppress the story

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1316359549843103744

Mainstream media has had a lot of bad coverage of Trump lately: terrible debate performance where he gave a shout-out to White Supremacists, diagnosis & subsequent hospitalization for COVID-19 spotlighting his personal and administration failures to contain the pandemic, etc.

Will the mainstream media try to balance the sheet by spreading anti-Biden propaganda in last 20 days? They have certainty not learned from their past mistakes and @NBCNews decided today to undermine spirit of debates. But, let's keep the pressure on them to do better this time.

@NBCNews This is not just for the mainstream media, but the academic research community that obsessed with fake news on social media, but barely explores mainstream news, especially TV, which includes about 85% of news consumption.

Thread borrows liberally from my work with @duncanjwatts