This makes no mention of the fact that the FBI intentionally suppressed and discredited a story that would be damaging to Biden right before the election. They knew it was in fact true and not "hacked" or "Russian disinfo" because they'd had those very same materials in their possession for a year. They knew the story was about to break when it did because, among other reasons, they'd been monitoring Guliani's phone calls. That is a level of election interference by a state security agency that dwarfs the complaints about Comey in 2016.
Still waiting for a credible argument detailing why this Twitter files stuff matters. Some points and stuff for framing and context:
The Post laptop story played out in really time -- essentially promoting the story.
Twitter’s block on the story lasted approximately one day.
The FBI, the DNC, Biden (then a private citizen), Trump (then POTUS), et al, don’t have final say on Twitter allows; they suggest, Twitter then has final say.
Anyone who thinks free speech requires a platform being provided to someone promoting an insurrection or government overthrow is, to put too kindly, profoundly wrong. Or worse.
Twitter, from Day 1, has suffered from inept management from the top down. It was never well managed -- which is the single significant thing documented in the Twitter files. Of course, the Twitter files wasn’t needed for that. Twitter’s historic failings have been known for years, again pretty much from the start.
Perhaps having the FBI decide who can and can not have access to social media should concern you.
Have you met the FBI? COINTELPRO? That delightful letter writing campaign to get MLK to commit suicide? The kind folks who assassinated Fred Hampton in order to stop Black economic progress?
Anyone who thinks the FBI is a force for good is either profoundly ignorant of the FBI actually does - like ignore white supremacists while spending their resources persecuting the actual Left - or is an authoritarian.
I'm very sorry that Taibbi has reported real things about real people in positions of power, even if they have D next to their name. That's what some people would call "journalism".
Perhaps you'd be more at home watching MSNBC tell you what it's perfectly fine for the failchildren of the President should be perfectly free to sell access to the Presidency - just as long as it isn't Jared and Ivanka. But if Hunter does it, it's totally fine.
Morals don't work if they only apply to your political enemies.
Will the Republican Party make major hay out of this reporting come January and they re-take the house, in likely an annoying and overstated way? Absolutely. Does that mean liberal/lefties with a dedication to civil liberties or democratic ethical principles should dismiss the story or even attack it? No! If this reporting can stop the violations of civil liberties and invasions of our privacy being perpetrated by the government and intelligence for generations now, that’s good, no matter which party is pushing for it. (Not that anyone should trust the Republicans to be better; they want this power for themselves.)
Taibbi’s reporting here has been fantastic. Barkan is almost good here, but a few lies/distortions herein:
-Taibbi hasn’t covered Musk’s reign (especially in the future somehow, as Barkan brings up), because that’s not the major story yet, no matter what any soft brain at the Washington Post says.
-Taibbi and the other journalists aren’t doing “PR for Musk.” I’d agree that releasing on Twitter is in every way a “publicity stunt,” but that’s made people actually pay attention. These are two very differ things. If Taibbi had released solely on his Substack, it would have been totally ignored.
-Bari Weiss is not a conservative! She’s a centrist democrat. She was a bit cassandra-like on calling out the new (phony) progressives’ deathly embrace of culture war issues, and she’s a serious Zionist, but not a conservative. (Let’s not forget that one of our great free speech writers, Nat Hentoff, defended Bari in the Village Voice at the time of that Columbia imbroglio that people love to call her out for, that’s constantly mischaracterized.)
-Michael Shellenberger is also not a conservative. He, and Leighton Woodhouse, who he’s been working with, are what I’d argue are old lefties, who’ve rejected the fallacies and zealotry of the new phony progressives for a new, pragmatic (actual) progressivism.
If this story is so unimportant, why have there been thousands of tweets, shitty “stories” brazen lies published about it? If you’re aligning with the shitty neocons at the Bulwark on this, you’re on the wrong team (neocons reshaping the power center of the Democratic Party, that is).
For everyone that’s yelling “this isn’t journalism, because journalism speaks truth to power,” what the hell do you think this story is doing? I’ll say it again: repeating approved Democratic Party talking points in not journalism.
Still see no explanation what was shown in the Twitter files that was important let alone unknown to anyone with prior familiarity with anything starting with, to name two, the histories of the FBI and of Twitter since it’s founding.
Give yourself a break: do some research for actual facts, not opinions, *then* get back to me. TTTT.
"Everyone knows that the FBI censors the media! What's the big deal about the national law enforcement agency routinely violating the First Amendment?
"Everyone knows that civil liberties are no big deal! Who cares about free expression, the right of the people to report on obvious, blatant political corruption? The FBI should absolutely be able to have just as much control over the media as the KGB used to! That's just common sense!"
Social media is the new journalism platform, as NYT and WaPo have given up all pretense that they do little more than manufacture consent.
Raising awareness of these problems is the first step to solving them.
Having the FBI in control of social media won't be helpful toward that end.
And it is not unreasonable to feel that government suppression of our constitutional rights is always important, especially with the rising tide of bipartisan authoritarianism in DC.
Manufacturing consent is right, but just as importantly, in the junior high cafeteria table that is the mainstream “journalist” hive mind on Twitter, is “manufacturing consensus.” “Think like us, and only report the stories we deem worthy and within the margins we’ve set forth - ‘moral clarity,’ remember - or sit at the losers’ table, forever.”
And unless I am deeply mistaken, that is the fundamental engine in the consent manufacturing machine. If you don't fit in, you don't get promoted. You don't get access. Or you just plain don't get hired.
Like all stable systems, it has a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps it spinning. Until it doesn't.
Some people might find the newsworthiness and importance of the author's work to be the best way of judging their worth as a journalist, not who their employer is.
Especially if that employers you seem to uncritically worship had, say, I don't know, participated in a cover up of the president's crack smoking failson selling access to his father with an excuse so transparent and flimsy that only the most credulous would have possibly believed it.
"All the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign." LOLZ.
And what were those earmarks again? That they didn't like it?
I guess you are one of those people who lies awake at night worried that not enough of our resources are going to Ukraine and not at all concerned about how we've been funding the Yemen humanitarian crisis. Problem didn't notice that both are profit centers for the military industrial complex, either.
People smarter than you apply their moral standards evenly, regardless of political party.
Your assumptions are way off base -- actually offensive.
Still waiting for you to come with facts. The best you have is that someone knew something to begin, one could be more informed. As I noted, nearly everything though was ancient history.
But you’re wasting my time, specially with your reliance on insulting assumptions.
The idea that Taibbi doing a major story that doesn’t benefit the democratic party or parrot the talking points you’ve decided are the only thing that’s important - which is what you’ve done here - doesn’t dismiss or disqualify this very important story.
I hate to tell you this - I’m a lefty/liberal - and I don’t think you are. You’re engaged in full partisan brain, and have forgotten simple democratic liberal principles (Barkan can be good, but he does this too). There’s no such thing as “moral clarity” or “ideological purity,” but there is such a thing as “cognitive dissonance” and “suspension of disbelief.” Journalism is not a team sport and shouldn’t be. Don’t treat it like one.
I think Barkan knows that if he is critical of Biden, he will not get published in New York, a magazine I suscibed to for a decade plus until Johnathan Chait became Glenn Beck.
Once the flowcharts come out, Chait lost all credibility with me, as well as the trashy rag that would stoop to that sort of BS.
Anyone trying to prove that Donald Trump (the dumbest, laziest failson of them all) was some kind of Russian supersoldier does not have an opinion that needs to be taken seriously.
I think Barkan has been plenty critical of Biden, and the mainstream of the Democratic Party overall. He can be very good, and is one of the younger NYC journos I try to read.
My issue with some of his work is the same issue I have with Ryan Grim, David Sirota, Briahna Joy Gray, Krystal Ball, and other Bernie 2020-aligned reporters, all of whom I mostly like: in their eagerness to remake the Democratic Party in the image of the Bernie 2020 campaign pledges, they let a good bit of rotten dem party shenanigans slide and they engage in some (usually, but not always gentle) smearing of non-partisans who aren’t in on the game. The can be good journos, but they often act more as activists. I do appreciate their dedication to independent media, but the post-partisan, non-activist indie media is where it’s at (and legacy media hates it, so you know they’re doing something right).
Am I wrong in assuming that only people who pay for the column can comment? Or is that just some of the Substack folks? I had assumed we were both subscribers, because we could both comment.
I'm a subscriber. I love Barkan's reporting. I just think he's not trying to make any waves that will screw up his beat: NYC. You can't fight everyone, everywhere, all the time. And I don't require for someone to be ideologically aligned with me to read their reporting, so long as that reporting is correct on the facts (as much as one can expect, mistakes can be made and so long as good faith efforts to print corrections are made, etc etc).
I mean, the NYT and WaPo's editorial slant is unambiguously Chomskian (is that a word?) consent manufacturing. But they still do a lot of good factual reporting, even if they both indulged wholeheartedly in the ludicrously transparent Hunter Biden coverup.
Y’all still have at best based the argument the Twitter files’ importance with nothing.
I laid out some facts and the response I get is the FBI is bad. No kidding they’re bad.
That they and the IC reach out to various media who do or don’t comply with their requests.
If y’all can’t respond with facts but just baseless opinions or personal attacks, we’ll, I have all due respect for that.
I asked fora fact-based explanation and I was provided nothing yet.
And here’s another fact y’all can play with or whatever: maybe when the Post story was brought to Twitter’s attention they’d have been quick to reject Biden’s people’s request if it wasn’t for Comey’s cowardice in October 2016.
The facts are right there, in the Twitter threads, and in the associated reporting on the reporters’ Substacks. Pretending it’s not is just willfully ignorant dissonance. Read them with an open mind. It’s there, and it’s developing more with every thread.
It’s been pointed out that Donald Trump idolized Nixon, and has said that Nixon’s failing was resigning and that he’d “never resign.” Now, 100 Watergates of information could come out about Trump, and he’d deny and ignore it. We can all agree that’s true. But what’s also true: it cuts both ways. If a million Watergates worth of damning information came out about the democrats/Bidens/DNC/intelligence/the integrated dem-aligned media arm, it would be denied and ignored. Neither of these things are good, and none of them should have close to this level of power.
maybe you should actually read before you speak. the gov (fbi) was forcing them to censor...how is this NOT important since we know this happens on all the major platforms?
This makes no mention of the fact that the FBI intentionally suppressed and discredited a story that would be damaging to Biden right before the election. They knew it was in fact true and not "hacked" or "Russian disinfo" because they'd had those very same materials in their possession for a year. They knew the story was about to break when it did because, among other reasons, they'd been monitoring Guliani's phone calls. That is a level of election interference by a state security agency that dwarfs the complaints about Comey in 2016.
And a reasonable person could believe that BOTH were bad.
Personally, I think the truth should never be illegal if it protects the powerful.
Still waiting for a credible argument detailing why this Twitter files stuff matters. Some points and stuff for framing and context:
The Post laptop story played out in really time -- essentially promoting the story.
Twitter’s block on the story lasted approximately one day.
The FBI, the DNC, Biden (then a private citizen), Trump (then POTUS), et al, don’t have final say on Twitter allows; they suggest, Twitter then has final say.
Anyone who thinks free speech requires a platform being provided to someone promoting an insurrection or government overthrow is, to put too kindly, profoundly wrong. Or worse.
Twitter, from Day 1, has suffered from inept management from the top down. It was never well managed -- which is the single significant thing documented in the Twitter files. Of course, the Twitter files wasn’t needed for that. Twitter’s historic failings have been known for years, again pretty much from the start.
Perhaps having the FBI decide who can and can not have access to social media should concern you.
Have you met the FBI? COINTELPRO? That delightful letter writing campaign to get MLK to commit suicide? The kind folks who assassinated Fred Hampton in order to stop Black economic progress?
Anyone who thinks the FBI is a force for good is either profoundly ignorant of the FBI actually does - like ignore white supremacists while spending their resources persecuting the actual Left - or is an authoritarian.
I'm very sorry that Taibbi has reported real things about real people in positions of power, even if they have D next to their name. That's what some people would call "journalism".
Perhaps you'd be more at home watching MSNBC tell you what it's perfectly fine for the failchildren of the President should be perfectly free to sell access to the Presidency - just as long as it isn't Jared and Ivanka. But if Hunter does it, it's totally fine.
Morals don't work if they only apply to your political enemies.
You’re right on here. A few points:
Will the Republican Party make major hay out of this reporting come January and they re-take the house, in likely an annoying and overstated way? Absolutely. Does that mean liberal/lefties with a dedication to civil liberties or democratic ethical principles should dismiss the story or even attack it? No! If this reporting can stop the violations of civil liberties and invasions of our privacy being perpetrated by the government and intelligence for generations now, that’s good, no matter which party is pushing for it. (Not that anyone should trust the Republicans to be better; they want this power for themselves.)
Taibbi’s reporting here has been fantastic. Barkan is almost good here, but a few lies/distortions herein:
-Taibbi hasn’t covered Musk’s reign (especially in the future somehow, as Barkan brings up), because that’s not the major story yet, no matter what any soft brain at the Washington Post says.
-Taibbi and the other journalists aren’t doing “PR for Musk.” I’d agree that releasing on Twitter is in every way a “publicity stunt,” but that’s made people actually pay attention. These are two very differ things. If Taibbi had released solely on his Substack, it would have been totally ignored.
-Bari Weiss is not a conservative! She’s a centrist democrat. She was a bit cassandra-like on calling out the new (phony) progressives’ deathly embrace of culture war issues, and she’s a serious Zionist, but not a conservative. (Let’s not forget that one of our great free speech writers, Nat Hentoff, defended Bari in the Village Voice at the time of that Columbia imbroglio that people love to call her out for, that’s constantly mischaracterized.)
-Michael Shellenberger is also not a conservative. He, and Leighton Woodhouse, who he’s been working with, are what I’d argue are old lefties, who’ve rejected the fallacies and zealotry of the new phony progressives for a new, pragmatic (actual) progressivism.
If this story is so unimportant, why have there been thousands of tweets, shitty “stories” brazen lies published about it? If you’re aligning with the shitty neocons at the Bulwark on this, you’re on the wrong team (neocons reshaping the power center of the Democratic Party, that is).
For everyone that’s yelling “this isn’t journalism, because journalism speaks truth to power,” what the hell do you think this story is doing? I’ll say it again: repeating approved Democratic Party talking points in not journalism.
Still assuming and opining.
Still see no explanation what was shown in the Twitter files that was important let alone unknown to anyone with prior familiarity with anything starting with, to name two, the histories of the FBI and of Twitter since it’s founding.
Give yourself a break: do some research for actual facts, not opinions, *then* get back to me. TTTT.
"Everyone knows that the FBI censors the media! What's the big deal about the national law enforcement agency routinely violating the First Amendment?
"Everyone knows that civil liberties are no big deal! Who cares about free expression, the right of the people to report on obvious, blatant political corruption? The FBI should absolutely be able to have just as much control over the media as the KGB used to! That's just common sense!"
Fully familiar with the FBI. Certainly wasn’t making any sort of broad defense of them.
The nation’s facing the following existential problems in no particular order:
A dominant political party working hard to destroy democratic and progressive institutions and policies;
Racism;
An exploitative economy:
Climate change;
And I’d like to hope you can name others.
Not a single one of which is in any way addressed, mitigated, solved, whatever by the Twitter files.
Not saying Taibbi wasn’t doing journalism. It’s journalism, alright. Just of minimal importance if that.
"Breaking up the banks won't end racism."
Ding-ding! We have a winner!
Damn, that’s a huge leap there.
Social media is the new journalism platform, as NYT and WaPo have given up all pretense that they do little more than manufacture consent.
Raising awareness of these problems is the first step to solving them.
Having the FBI in control of social media won't be helpful toward that end.
And it is not unreasonable to feel that government suppression of our constitutional rights is always important, especially with the rising tide of bipartisan authoritarianism in DC.
Manufacturing consent is right, but just as importantly, in the junior high cafeteria table that is the mainstream “journalist” hive mind on Twitter, is “manufacturing consensus.” “Think like us, and only report the stories we deem worthy and within the margins we’ve set forth - ‘moral clarity,’ remember - or sit at the losers’ table, forever.”
That's what they did to Sy Hersh.
And unless I am deeply mistaken, that is the fundamental engine in the consent manufacturing machine. If you don't fit in, you don't get promoted. You don't get access. Or you just plain don't get hired.
Like all stable systems, it has a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps it spinning. Until it doesn't.
Looks like there's a little wobble now.
Exactly. You can add Chris Hedges to this too.
I think the indies, and Taibbi’s Substack is one of the big ones, are really changing people’s thinking. It’s good.
A journalism platform with a minimal number of journalists, many unfit as their day jobs prove.
And as you show, professional judgment is lacking as well.
Jesus.
Some people might find the newsworthiness and importance of the author's work to be the best way of judging their worth as a journalist, not who their employer is.
Especially if that employers you seem to uncritically worship had, say, I don't know, participated in a cover up of the president's crack smoking failson selling access to his father with an excuse so transparent and flimsy that only the most credulous would have possibly believed it.
"All the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign." LOLZ.
And what were those earmarks again? That they didn't like it?
I guess you are one of those people who lies awake at night worried that not enough of our resources are going to Ukraine and not at all concerned about how we've been funding the Yemen humanitarian crisis. Problem didn't notice that both are profit centers for the military industrial complex, either.
People smarter than you apply their moral standards evenly, regardless of political party.
Your assumptions are way off base -- actually offensive.
Still waiting for you to come with facts. The best you have is that someone knew something to begin, one could be more informed. As I noted, nearly everything though was ancient history.
But you’re wasting my time, specially with your reliance on insulting assumptions.
The idea that Taibbi doing a major story that doesn’t benefit the democratic party or parrot the talking points you’ve decided are the only thing that’s important - which is what you’ve done here - doesn’t dismiss or disqualify this very important story.
I hate to tell you this - I’m a lefty/liberal - and I don’t think you are. You’re engaged in full partisan brain, and have forgotten simple democratic liberal principles (Barkan can be good, but he does this too). There’s no such thing as “moral clarity” or “ideological purity,” but there is such a thing as “cognitive dissonance” and “suspension of disbelief.” Journalism is not a team sport and shouldn’t be. Don’t treat it like one.
I think Barkan knows that if he is critical of Biden, he will not get published in New York, a magazine I suscibed to for a decade plus until Johnathan Chait became Glenn Beck.
Once the flowcharts come out, Chait lost all credibility with me, as well as the trashy rag that would stoop to that sort of BS.
Anyone trying to prove that Donald Trump (the dumbest, laziest failson of them all) was some kind of Russian supersoldier does not have an opinion that needs to be taken seriously.
I think Barkan has been plenty critical of Biden, and the mainstream of the Democratic Party overall. He can be very good, and is one of the younger NYC journos I try to read.
My issue with some of his work is the same issue I have with Ryan Grim, David Sirota, Briahna Joy Gray, Krystal Ball, and other Bernie 2020-aligned reporters, all of whom I mostly like: in their eagerness to remake the Democratic Party in the image of the Bernie 2020 campaign pledges, they let a good bit of rotten dem party shenanigans slide and they engage in some (usually, but not always gentle) smearing of non-partisans who aren’t in on the game. The can be good journos, but they often act more as activists. I do appreciate their dedication to independent media, but the post-partisan, non-activist indie media is where it’s at (and legacy media hates it, so you know they’re doing something right).
Am I wrong in assuming that only people who pay for the column can comment? Or is that just some of the Substack folks? I had assumed we were both subscribers, because we could both comment.
I'm a subscriber. I love Barkan's reporting. I just think he's not trying to make any waves that will screw up his beat: NYC. You can't fight everyone, everywhere, all the time. And I don't require for someone to be ideologically aligned with me to read their reporting, so long as that reporting is correct on the facts (as much as one can expect, mistakes can be made and so long as good faith efforts to print corrections are made, etc etc).
I mean, the NYT and WaPo's editorial slant is unambiguously Chomskian (is that a word?) consent manufacturing. But they still do a lot of good factual reporting, even if they both indulged wholeheartedly in the ludicrously transparent Hunter Biden coverup.
I subscribe to both, and have for decades.
Y’all still have at best based the argument the Twitter files’ importance with nothing.
I laid out some facts and the response I get is the FBI is bad. No kidding they’re bad.
That they and the IC reach out to various media who do or don’t comply with their requests.
If y’all can’t respond with facts but just baseless opinions or personal attacks, we’ll, I have all due respect for that.
I asked fora fact-based explanation and I was provided nothing yet.
And here’s another fact y’all can play with or whatever: maybe when the Post story was brought to Twitter’s attention they’d have been quick to reject Biden’s people’s request if it wasn’t for Comey’s cowardice in October 2016.
The facts are right there, in the Twitter threads, and in the associated reporting on the reporters’ Substacks. Pretending it’s not is just willfully ignorant dissonance. Read them with an open mind. It’s there, and it’s developing more with every thread.
It’s been pointed out that Donald Trump idolized Nixon, and has said that Nixon’s failing was resigning and that he’d “never resign.” Now, 100 Watergates of information could come out about Trump, and he’d deny and ignore it. We can all agree that’s true. But what’s also true: it cuts both ways. If a million Watergates worth of damning information came out about the democrats/Bidens/DNC/intelligence/the integrated dem-aligned media arm, it would be denied and ignored. Neither of these things are good, and none of them should have close to this level of power.
?????
The FBI censored the media to effect an election.
That's a problem, Mr Partisan, unless you're a fan of the former Soviet Union. Or the current Russian media.
maybe you should actually read before you speak. the gov (fbi) was forcing them to censor...how is this NOT important since we know this happens on all the major platforms?
Very good reading! My thanks to the author for their willingness to share. Have a blessed and safe holiday season!