Thread by @caitoz

Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails

"A world where all news stories are held to the same evidentiary standards as Hunter Biden’s emails are being held would be a world without empire."
caityjohnstone.medium.com/imagine-if-msm…

Mainstream media and social media platforms are actively blacking out an October surprise published by The New York Post which purports to show “smoking gun” emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Twitter claims the emails were in violation of its policies banning content which contained private information and its rules against “hacked materials”, both of which would have forbidden all articles sharing the contents of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1316525305796980737?s=20

As I warned could happen back in August, these rules have set the stage for the cross-platform censorship of a 2020 October surprise.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1294605660701638656

There's a good thread going around compiling posts that MSM reporters have been making in objection to the circulation of Hunter Biden’s emails alongside posts made by those same reporters promoting far more ridiculous and insubstantial allegations.

https://twitter.com/DrewHolden360/status/1316524211813462021

A new Reason article discusses how the mass media are not just avoiding the story but actively discouraging it:
reason.com/2020/10/14/hun…

A new Washington Post article titled “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: an explainer” takes great pains to outline how important it is to be very, very certain that this story is everything it purports to be before investing any credulity in it.

This would be the same Washington Post that has been circulating disinformation about Russia for years due to its disinterest in verifying information before reporting.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/wapo-publishes…

WaPo and all MSM have been promoting the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election based on unproven government assertions despite many gaping plot holes. Where was the concern for seeing the data and inspecting the hard drives then?
realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…

In and of itself there is no problem at all with mainstream news media applying high evidentiary standards to its reporting and making sure readers are aware when political manipulators could be pulling the wool over their eyes. In and of itself this would be a good thing.

The problem is that all this emphasis on verification and truth only comes up when it is politically convenient for these plutocratic media outlets, because only favoring truth when it’s convenient is the same as lying constantly.

Where were these high evidentiary standards when The Guardian reported without evidence and against all common sense that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been having secret meetings with Trump lackey Paul Manafort?
theintercept.com/2019/01/02/fiv…

Where were these high evidentiary standards when Politico published the idiotic, nonsensical story that Iran was plotting to assassinate the American ambassador to South Africa?
news.antiwar.com/2020/09/14/sou…

Where were these high evidentiary standards when leaks by anonymous spooks dominated headlines for days with their evidence-free allegation that the Russian government had been paying Taliban-linked fighters bounties on western occupying forces?
caityjohnstone.medium.com/this-russia-af…

We now know that story was completely baseless and would have been dismissed by news reporters who were actually doing their due diligence, yet it’s still being cited as fact on Twitter by sitting US senators and in a recent debate by Kamala Harris.

https://twitter.com/SenDuckworth/status/1316484683929137152

If news reporters had spent anywhere near as much energy cautioning their audiences to be skeptical about this story and educating them about its plot holes as they’re spending on Hunter Biden’s emails, this would not be happening.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1305547377437224960

The problem is not that there are high evidentiary standards for Hunter Biden’s emails, the problem is that there are virtually no evidentiary standards when the plutocratic media want to sell the world on imperialist narratives to benefit the imperialist status quo.

If a news report facilitates the national security state, all journalistic protocol goes out the window and nobody knows the meaning of the word evidence. As soon as a report becomes inconvenient for a friend of the national security state like Joe Biden, suddenly that changes.

This is the same as lying all the time. They lie because the MSM in the US-centralized empire are the propaganda engine for that empire. The drivers of empire understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they control all points of narrative influence.