I don’t know if folks remember how bad the smear campaign was about NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting was, so quick trip back down memory lane.
Beyond the full-court press from Twitter & Facebook, the media & Dems worked overtime to shut down the story. Look ⤵️
It’s worth starting with @CNN. They brought on James Clapper to call the scoop - confirmed today by Politico - “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft.” @brianstelter had a program about how it was obviously fake. @apbenven had an “anatomy” of it.
Where’s the follow up, guys?
I mean, for crying out loud, @NPR went through the trouble of explaining why they weren’t going to report on the story!
Can we revisit that?
@MSNBC went all in on this. They had a member of Congress, @CongressmanRaja, on to spread misinformation about it being a “Russian influence operation.”
@kylegriffin1 said it “appears to contain disinformation”
All lies.
A lot of the original narrative was framed up by @politico, who ran a story that a bunch of former intel types disputed the findings (without seeing them, of course).
Today Politico announced that they had confirmed two of the key underlying details.
Might be a good time to update this fact check, @washingtonpost
There were a bunch of elected officials who repeated this bogus allegation. Here are just a few.
I want to pause to drive a point home: in the weeks leading up to an election, big tech, the Democrats and the corporate press worked together to bury a damaging story about one of the candidates, and they succeeded.
If you can shrug that off, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
There were a ton of the usual suspects pushing this false narrative. I don’t have room for all of them but I wanted to point out some of the more egregious ones.
@joelockhart and @ThePlumLineGS, anything more from you guys? Still convinced it’s Russian disinformation?
And you, @McFaul? Do you still stand by your belief that this is a “hit piece so false that Twitter won’t even post it”? Or might there be something else afoot?
And I suspect @TVietor08 is right that folks haven’t learned the lessons of 2016, just wrong about what the lesson is.
Wherever Russian conspiracy theories go, the Never Trump crowd is rarely far behind.
Also worth pointing out: the smear here worked in both directions. Not only was Biden the blameless victim of supposed disinformation, but Trump was the reported bad guy pushing the (supposed) conspiracy theory.
Days before the presidential election between the two.
Quick addendum. @McFaul reminded me of a long thread he had on this subject, part explanation, part apology. Some of that is below.
A couple points:
First, I certainly don’t dispute that Russia actively uses disinformation to target the US. Or that Rudy Giuliani has proven himself an unreliable narrator, to put it mildly, when it comes to just about anything.
But he elides an important distinction here. It wasn’t that he “automatically questioned the veracity of [Giuliani’s] claims,” as he says.
He wrote those claims off completely as a malicious lie, helping feed into an effort to bury a real news story as “disinformation.”
As I’ve told him, I don’t expect I’ll be able to change his mind now that he‘s “MOVING ON FOREVER ON THIS!” but it’s obvious that he hasn’t actually taken any responsibility for helping to bury a since-verified, damaging story about the now-president days before his election.
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I’m sure you’ve all seen the protests and attendant anti-Semitism at many elite American universities. What you may not be aware of is the hypocrisy in how schools have handled them.
Do you remember what these places said about protests in 2020? I’ve got receipts. ⤵️
We’ve gotta start with @Columbia, given their central role in this drama.
In 2020, the university pledged to change how campus police operated, and said protests were part of a “heightened state of consciousness” on race & were driving the “revitalization of American democracy.”
That, unsurprisingly, led @Columbia to embrace defunding the police on their website, citing a professor.
It’s hard to square that sentiment with calling in police in riot gear to rough up students on campus, @Columbia.
Want to see a media conspiracy, based on Biden admin propaganda to smear a GOP governor, come into existence?
If so, follow along. Let’s revisit the media claim that Texas “physically barred” drowning migrants from entering the country.
Another long one ⤵️
Back in mid-January, three people trying to enter the country illegally drowned in the Rio Grande. It happened while Texas & the Biden admin were fighting about security measures.
The Biden admin told the press a lie. The media ran with it, and most never corrected the stories.
The fraudulent story was advanced first by @CBSNews. On January 14, they claimed that the crossers had drowned b/c Texas “physically barred” rescuers trying to help.
The takeaway from CBS was clear: Texas had deliberately killed people, rather than allowing them to be rescued.
Do you remember how bad the media’s “Covid lab leak” - the hypothesis that the virus came from a lab - coverage was?
I thought I did. But it was a more dramatic example of uniform media malpractice than even I remembered.
So I revisited it. Buckle in, it’s long. ⤵️
It started in Feb 2020 when @SenTomCotton suggested looking into the CCP lab studying bats near the initial cases in Wuhan.
The media were outraged. In a since-updated piece, @washingtonpost said the idea was a “conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.”
It wasn’t just WaPo. Shortly thereafter, @nytimes trotted out a similar allegation, calling the lab leak hypothesis a “fringe theory” and a “tale” designed to inflame social media.
@CNN’s @ChrisCillizza said Cotton was “playing a dangerous game” with his suggestions.
The reason I take screenshots is that I'm always paranoid that an outlet or journalist will scrap the evidence of a bad take. Maybe I should be giving folks more credit for standing by their inaccuracies.
Every so often I check back in on this, perhaps my all-time favorite headline from @NPR, only to see that it still exists in its original form, from April 2020.
I launched a newsletter, called Holden Court, about the media, what they get wrong & why it matters. The goal is to reach beyond what my 🧵s have on Twitter & to build a better recent history of media & media criticism.
You can sign up at the link in my bio. More ⤵️
At that link you can read my launch piece and get a better idea of what it is that I’m trying to do.
The piece also walks through a recent example of bad media coverage that I worry we’re already forgetting about: the start of Covid.
My general premise for the newsletter is that media criticism could be a lot better; more driven by what the media actually does and says and more set in recent context, rather than an impressionistic sense that the media is hopelessly off-track.
I’m launching something new, so naturally I figured the best explainer was a 🧵thread🧵.
Introducing Holden Court, my Substack about the media, what it gets wrong, and why it matters.
You probably know the drill, but more details & links to sign up in the tweets below. ⤵️
Holden Court aims to unpack media failures, particularly when the media misses in unison on important political topics. But I’ll also have one-off content, Q&A opportunities, a mailbag and maybe virtual (or even in person) happy hours, too.
That doesn’t mean the threads are going away. But the amount of context and nuance I can capture in a thread is limited. So the Substack will (hopefully) provide that more robust analysis, aiming ultimately at *why* the media misses the way that it does.