Allow me to offer my thumbnail and, as always, only semi-informed take on Elon’s Adventure in Investigative Reporting from last night, a.k.a. the “Twitter Files.” For those unaware, this refers to a cache of internal email communications, the completeness of which is to the best of my knowledge as yet unknown, that was handed over to dissident independent reporter Matt Taibbi by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
Taibbi’s “piece,” such as it was (the qualification is necessary because it was unveiled on Twitter), contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It confirms that Twitter’s employees were progressives trapped in a progressive bubble making indefensibly ad hoc decisions on the basis of their left-wing political priors that resulted in the disgraceful censorship of information that turned out to be both 100 percent accurate and of acute national political interest. Notably, Taibbi’s reporting seems (at least preliminarily) to clear the Biden campaign team of involvement in the decision to censor the New York Post’s story, establishing an important fact in the case (albeit not in the direction certain partisans might have hoped).
The lack of anything hyper-alert newshounds deemed newsworthy partly (but only partly) explains the dismissive reaction to the story online. The clumsiness of the delivery mechanism is also a part of it: Musk hyped the upcoming revelations as if they would come from his Twitter account in a big “news dump,” and then surprise-lateralled it off to Taibbi to tweet out from his own account (as opposed to writing it up for ease of reading, analysis, linking and digestion). The entire affair inevitably came off like the vulgar promotion of “Twitter as a news platform” that it was clearly intended to be. Taibbi revealed that Musk insisted upon this delivery mechanism as a condition for allowing Taibbi access to Twitter’s internal emails. Taibbi, a once-mainstream journalist who now reaps in truly impressive amounts of money via his Substack newsletter, is his own boss and has the latitude to make this sort of ethically squeamish move. While his story reads as carefully reported (in its very lack of wild or unexpected surprises, no less), it’s natural that the compromise he made for access raises eyebrows, regardless of one’s opinion of the phony pieties of the mainstream media.
But it was the almost overt class envy that was even more difficult for me not to notice. Taibbi is regarded as a traitor to his journalistic class by some of his contemporaries and as an intolerable grifter (with a wildly disreputable past that few discuss anymore) by the younger and more explicitly progressive generation of mainstream-media commentators and journalists. One need only witness Ben Collins, putative “dystopia beat” “reporter” at NBC News, attacking Taibbi last night as a man who was “throwing it all away” by doing “PR work for the richest man in the world” — as if Elon Musk’s talismanic status as An Evil And/Or Rich Man was more important than whether Taibbi’s reporting is solid and correct. If it is solid and correct, it is valuable journalism that confirms long-disputed details about a matter of signal importance to the future of America’s online political discourse. And it reflects poorly upon a predictable class of mainstream-media commentators that they no longer see the value in that — at least so long as the story being told is inconvenient, or is told by the wrong messenger.