Thread by @davetroy

Regarding coverage of Parler, let’s talk American history. Alger Hiss was found to be:

I will be adding illustrative commentary here around our current media moment once this poll closes, so please check back tomorrow for some discussion. Thanks!

Ok, so a lot of people don’t know who Alger Hiss was, which means they also aren’t very familiar with the history of espionage in America.

The technically correct answer to the question is that Hiss was found guilty of perjury, for lying under oath.

He was never convicted of espionage, despite later evidence from the KGB archives that suggested that Hiss’ codename was ALES. The US had signals intelligence on this the whole time through a top secret project called VENONA; we could monitor the communications of spies.

But the existence of the program was not revealed, even though it might have helped indict Hiss and other spies in his group, so as to preserve the capacity to monitor communications.

Hiss served 3.5 years on his perjury charge, and then became a cause celébrè among liberals.

He became a symbol of the overreach of McCarthyism. Liberals accused Richard Nixon of *manufacturing a typewriter* in order to frame Priscilla Hiss.

Some people even today maintain Hiss is innocent, and that ALES was someone else. Americans learned some bad lessons from this.

First, the term McCarthyism was coined as a kind of political cudgel.

It is true that false accusations of disloyalty were harmful and incorrectly targeted some innocent people.

It is also true that many people were involved in subversive activity.

We must know the difference.

An intelligence report is different from journalistic reporting. Intel works in weighted evidence, journalists work with confirmable facts. Intel reports can tell journalists where to dig.

This gap presents an exploitable vulnerability which is being used by foreign powers.

While people working on intelligence assessments have a good idea of who the bad actors are and what they are doing, it is often difficult to cover these actors journalistically.

This brings us to the topic of what stories get covered, and how they are reported.

Increasingly editors and reporters look for ‘turnkey’ stories that can be reported in a fixed amount of time with predictable results in terms of engagement, clicks and revenues.

While the “wall” between journalism and ads still exists, it is badly eroded in practice.

I say this not to disparage journalists, most of whom do a very hard job incredibly well with too little pay; this is its own national security vulnerability.

But this means hard, complex stories often don’t get the investment they deserve. This isn’t new though...

Hiss benefited from the same dynamics. His spying ran from roughly 1935-1948. His (near certain) guilt was not established until 1995.

How long will it take us to establish the guilt or innocence of such actors working today? How long *should* it take us?

Arguably, 2070 is too late to learn about hostile foreign influence being deployed today. Even 2025 is too late to stop damage being done now.

We need to develop better reporting capacity about what things are happening *now* and report on them in real time.

Many of the people engaged in subversive operations today have been at it since around 2012. When do we call someone like Cassandra Fairbanks out, vs. have her parade around as a “journalist?”

When is Mike Flynn reasonably guilty of treason? Do we decide this in 2035? Why?

The DNA of the Hiss case became embedded into the journalism culture of the 1970’s, which persists today. Anything with a hint of Nixon/McCarthyism became anathema.

Better to assume people are innocent than guilty. Fair enough, but this assumes people are acting in good faith.

Today’s bad actors are LARPers aiming to exert specific outcomes and divide societies against themselves. They are supported and promoted by an opaque network of state and criminal actors.

If spycraft has always been a grey zone, it’s more murky and grey now than ever.

As such, these subversive activities are effectively resistant to reporting.

So what is Parler? Dark money op? Foreign intel op? Data manipulation play? Active measure? All of the above, most likely. But how do you report on it?

Some reporters take it at face value.

Some reporters just don’t know what they are looking at. Others look the other way due to bias or laziness. Others lack the skills to evaluate this from a business or influence perspective. Fair enough; we all have blind spots. But how long should we wait for deeper coverage?

There are also reporters who would dig in and do more if they had the leeway from editors and outlets to do deeper investigative work. I’m not here to bash the press.

But I can say that the gap between what’s actually happening and what is being reported is large, and growing.

And societally, we are gullible about stuff like Parler. The notion that it was funded solely by Bongino and Wernick was patently laughable on the surface, but yet reporters took this lie at face value.

Now that we know they are liars, what else are they lying about?

Furthermore, what were their motivations for lying about this?

Had people known that it was funded by Mercer dark money, that would have revealed what, exactly?

Rebekah Mercer was very quick to jump on this grenade as it exploded and try to shield against further inquiry.