Old Journalism Ethics | Rivers
“We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” - Ben Bradlee, All the President’s Men
The break-in at the Democratic National Committee was small-time, ticky-tacky surveillance to get dirt on Nixon’s opponents for his upcoming re-election bid. When the burglars were caught, but for the efforts of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Nixon would have served his second term after his landslide win in 1972. But that was back when we had the kind of journalists who were not afraid to hold the powerful to account. How the mighty have fallen.
The Watergate story wasn’t easy. The Post’s seasoned writers frowned on the rookie nobodies. By the end, it would turn out that the break-in wasn’t the story at all. It was a loose strand of yarn that, when pulled, unraveled a complex system of corruption, a “cancer” inside the presidency.
Nixon’s battle to win the White House had been a brutal, take-no-prisoners campaign, as dirty as it gets. His arrogance was his downfall. He recorded himself committing a crime.
Letting go of power is not easy, especially when you’ve spent so much time trying to acquire it as Nixon had. But he did the right thing and resigned. Watergate serves as a reminder of just how important the press used to be in their efforts to get the story.
Now, as the Twitter files story breaks, all we see are partisan hacks, so afraid of losing their status online or of admitting they were wrong they have to do exactly the opposite of what Woodward and Bernstein did. They have to actively work to bury the story and distract their followers long enough for the story to disappear.
No one in the mainstream media can come close to the kind of courage it took to break the Watergate story. But the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, found one such reporter in Matt Taibbi, who released the Twitter Files, which are only a taste of the unholy alliance between government, media, and social media.
This alliance justified their unprecedented power grab because they believed they served a higher purpose, saving the country from the biggest threat since Hitler. But it was instead their monopolistic power that put our country in danger, eroded our freedom, and threatened our Democracy.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is the loose strand of yarn that, when pulled, will unravel a vast network of corruption at the highest levels of the Administrative State.
As the tweets rolled out one by one, the machine once again whirred to life, with the blue checks running interference to ensure “the take” was disseminated to all media. Naturally, those in the press obeyed the command. They’ve learned their lesson by now not to object or dissent or think for themselves.
Their first “take” was that this was a “nothing” burger. It was just the concerned Twitter employees making sure no hacked information was leaked. Their big discovery was that Trump had been the President in October of 2020, so it couldn’t violate the First Amendment.
With any other president, that might have been true. But the rules were different with Trump. He was at war with his own government, the “swamp” he was trying to drain. They didn’t like that one bit, and they engaged in what has to be a slow-moving coup that included not just the FBI and the DOJ but the major media platforms pushing their preferred narrative. That was all before you even get to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was meant to be an October surprise, which is standard operating procedure during an election.
What we don’t usually have is a coordinated effort to suppress it. We never had an entire media establishment aligned with the government to make that even possible. Trump changed all of that. The media took a side, which meant pushing the “Russian disinformation” lie a no-brainer.
Imagine taking the Access Hollywood tape, for instance, and trying to suppress that in the run-up to the election out of fear it might damage Trump or was “Russian disinformation.” How do you think that would have gone over?
What was so terrifying about watching the 2020 election was just how coordinated the media and social media have become to push the talking points of the Democrats like mindless robots.
Here is a mashup of those media voices compiled by Steven Bannon’s War Room podcast:
Despite the typical gaslighting by the media and blue checks on Twitter, the government had to have been involved in suppressing the laptop story.
According to Miranda Divine, who broke the story in the New York Post, the one big missing piece, the smoking gun, is the FBI directive to deep-six the laptop story on Twitter, as they did at Facebook.
Divine says, “I suspect Elon Musk has been leaned on, and he has kept some information in reserve.”
Michael Goodwin in the New York Post references Lee Fang’s revelation about the FBI:
Moreover, as Intercept reporter Lee Fang has detailed and as a former Twitter official confirmed, the FBI held weekly meetings in Silicon Valley with tech officials about policing disinformation. Of course, their definition of disinformation was so broad as to include virtually anything that made Joe Biden or Democrats look bad.
As the Twitter files unfolded, the blue-check army began to swarm Matt Taibbi in an attempt to mock, humiliate and discredit him by any means necessary. Their big crime against Musk is that he’s the “richest man in the world.” They crudely put these together to suggest Taibbi was some sort of PR shill for Musk.
But this is the new Twitter, not the old Twitter. A new #resistance has awakened.
The journalists getting the important stories aren’t on the Left anymore. The public has been largely convinced never to trust the Right, that they’re the liars and the Q’anon fantasists. But they are also the ones digging up the story. Mollie Hemingway’s must-read book on the election. Miranda Divine’s book on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Trick is Not Minding
The story here is how much power was concentrated on one side, which has become a greater threat to Democracy than anything MAGA could ever have done. They spun themselves a fanciful tale that just kept getting bigger and more fantastical. They were isolating themselves inside their own feedback loop, and at some point, their imaginings about Trump morphed into irrational, uncontrollable, full-blown hysteria.
In March of 2020, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic wrote an article called “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation to re-elect the President.”
From the Atlantic:
The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.
I read that column as a concerned Democrat fearful of Trump and his billion-dollar disinformation campaign. Two years later, I see what a load of hogwash all of it was, reporting done from inside their fear bunker because they could not control the media narrative outside of it. What they didn’t do then, what they still can’t do, is humanize Trump supporters, see things from their side, and understand why Trump would have felt the need to go outside the system to get the word out.
Matt Taibbi said in his Munk debate that our news has to include everyone, not just one side, “We’re not supposed to thumb the scale. Our job is just to call things as we see them and leave the rest up to you. But we don’t do that now. The story is no longer the boss. Instead, we sell a narrative in a dysfunctional new business model.”
The “cabal” that bragged about rigging the election in TIME magazine admits all of this but they paint themselves as the heroes, saving the country from the villain they invented, fighting a war they didn’t understand, with Mollie Ball as their PR rep doing zero journalism:
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.
“The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.”
But almost all of it was based on false narratives driven by the media, backed up by social media users. Dissent was punished, and compliance was demanded, leaving the MAGA voters, many of whom have no power, no wealth, and no cultural or political representation, disenfranchised.
And when they protested, our government hunted them down and called them “domestic terrorists.” Does that sound like America to you? That is America at the hands of this massive power alliance.
They rigged the election by making it an uneven playing field. They used their power to distort the truth, find votes and bring in the win. They dragged Joe Biden, who didn’t campaign at all, over the finish line.
Even with all of that power, all of that control, they still just barely won. But that power they claimed didn’t belong to them. It belonged to the American people. But it is power they keep and still use.
Now, Elon Musk is a problem for them.
Follow the Money
2020 marked the moment when America slipped quietly into totalitarianism. It could not have happened without Big Tech platforms that are now bigger and more powerful than any country, including ours.
There is an “inside” and an “outside.” The Democrats captured most of the biggest platforms, taking them one by one like a game of Monopoly. They did this using influence - who wouldn’t want to be part of the Obama “Camalot?” They did this with pressure from the FBI. Who wanted to be seen as a Domestic Terrorist? And they did it with money. Lots and lots of money.
The Democrats now represent the elite ruling class. They keep their status and wealth by using marginalized groups and “woke” virtue signaling as shields. If they brand themselves as down with the newfound zealotry on the Left, they get to keep their stuff.
Michael Mann’s The Insider shows how even the most respected news organizations can become corrupt if enough money is on the line.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and many of the blue checks on Twitter are all looking out for their business and their own platforms. They don’t just have to please their subscribers and their audience; they have to push their headlines into the social media stream to get those clicks and likes. Without that support from Twitter, or if Twitter becomes angry with them, their careers could be over in a day.
The overlords of Big Tech see themselves as god-like figures with enormous superpowers, like Mark Zuckerberg’s data bank of almost every American citizen. Google can shape search results and affix “context” labels to videos. And Twitter was slowly setting the standard of our new language, punishing anyone who stepped out of line not just by banning them from the platform but hunting them down as thought criminals wherever they might be, publicly humiliating them and destroying their lives.
Twitter has been the new arena for the new Puritans to hurl daily sacrifices into the churn, with very little pushback from anyone. At least until Elon Musk came along. There is a new sheriff in town.
We have to fight for our country. We need people in DC to break up the monopolies as Teddy Roosevelt did once upon a time. If we don’t, we’ll never have a fair election again. We’re living through a new Gilded Age, a Fourth Turning. It will require the citizenry in a people-run government to rise and take out country back.
As Roosevelt once said, “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Yes, the 2020 Election was "Rigged"