Thread by @joshtpm

This is a very good column. And it includes details of what sounds like yet more White House lawbreaking. But I disagree with Ben that this is a reassertion of an elite media gate keeping role. There’s hardly a blackout of the purported hunter ... nytimes.com/2020/10/25/bus…

2/ biden hard drives. There are lots of stories about it in msm publications. Not to mention the fact that I think it’s dubious to say that fox, wsj, nypost et al aren’t part of the elite press. The key is really who decides what the story is. For decades the elite ...

3/ political press has been wired for the GOP. This has been true for a number of reason. But the upshot is a pattern that right media defines what the question and then more elite corporate media engages that question, even if their conclusions are sometimes different.

4/ The fact that the gaming rogue Bannon was able to fund a deeply tendentious, error-riddles loaf of poo by this clown Schweitzer and have it run in the countries two most influential news publications as hard news was the ultimate example of this pattern.

5/ The Wikileaks drama is a different sort of example. It’s not just we now know that it was the product of a Russian intelligence operation which involved the Trump campaign. It’s more that there really wasn’t anything in them that was remotely controversial. That didn’t stop ..

6/ most elite media from being transfixed by them as if they were. That’s largely because the right media ecosystem said so. And elite media was scared to say otherwise. With this laptops story the two examples collide. What’s the story? Well, the story seems pretty obviously ...

7/ to be another dirty tricks operation either run by the Presidents pals in Russia or stateside criminals working on his behalf. So do reporters explode with yada yada! Hunter Biden yada! It’s probably all fake but it raises question and how will it effect the horserace?

8/ Or do they see whether the basic facts are confirmable (they aren’t) and look to the fairly obviously story: an almost absurd attempted replay of the 2016 games. This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s reporting. This isn’t like the news media that simply refused to report ...

9/ on jack Kennedy’s numerous affairs because it wasn’t suitable for print. That’s gate keeping. The Journal story at the center of Bens piece really tells the tale. They published a story. They didn’t hide anything or sit on anything.

10/ They just embarrassed the Trump team because they reported it out and didn’t just repeat credulous what Bannon brought them like the Times and WaPo did in 2016.

11/ We see it as gatekeeping because again elite media has been largely wired for the gop for three or four decades. That breaking down seems like gatekeeping. It’s not.