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‘PR for a Billionaire’ Is the New ‘Russian Disinformation’ for a Press Desperate to Avoid the Hunter Biden Story
Since Matt Taibbi’s ‘Twitter Files’ reporting supports claims made by Elon Musk, it has to be disparaged.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take on the media reaction to the “Twitter Files,” examine an illogical defense of Tiffany Cross, and hit more media misses.
‘Doing PR for the World’s Richest Person’
The time for pretending the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation has come and gone. Faced with the fact that they shamefully ignored the laptop story and Twitter’s outrageous censorship of it, mainstream reporters and pundits have latched onto a new narrative to justify their dismissal of a consequential matter.
All at once, they waved away Matt Taibbi’s release of the “Twitter Files” as a “nothingburger” or mere “PR for a billionaire.”
NBC’s Ben Collins said: “Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating shit.”
Media Matters’ John Knefel echoed: “The Taibbi thread is a great example of overwriting when you don’t have the goods but you don’t want to admit you’re just doing pr for the world’s richest person.”
The Taibbi thread is a great example of overwriting when you don’t have the goods but you don’t want to admit you’re just doing pr for the world’s richest person
— johnknefel (@johnknefel) December 3, 2022
Columnist and University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan took a more pointed approach in attacking Taibbi: “FWIW I never considered @mtaibbi a decent journalist. He was always a hack, a propagandist. The fact that he indulged my political preferences for years did not make his work any better. This moment is not a downfall. It’s a continuation.”
FWIW I never considered @mtaibbi a decent journalist. He was always a hack, a propagandist. The fact that he indulged my political preferences for years did not make his work any better. This moment is not a downfall. It’s a continuation.
— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN (@sivavaid) December 3, 2022
The New York Times, meanwhile, confusingly chose to revert back to a since-refuted claim that the laptop was stolen:
Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop.
According to the Delaware computer-repair-shop owner who provided the laptop to Rudy Giuliani, the laptop became his legal property after Hunter Biden missed the window to pick it up, per a contract Biden signed when he dropped off the laptop.
Taibbi, for his part, shared a link on Twitter to “The Twenty-Seven Most Embarrassing Reactions to Taibbi Thread About Twitter Censoring Hunter Biden Tweets” on Mediaite. “Looking forward to going through all the tweets complaining about ‘PR for the richest man on earth,’ and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House, etc.,” Taibbi wrote.
Among those who made Mediaite’s list:
Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you’re speaking truth to power.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 3, 2022
Watching Matt’s unbelievable fall into lazy, reactionary commentator and now pr hand for the world’s richest man is depressing. https://t.co/JfJNiqy2My
— Elias Cepeda (@EliasCepeda) December 3, 2022
Editors are great not just because they make your work sharper, but because you can ask them things like “Hey should I be doing PR work for the richest man on the planet” and they’ll say “Nah”
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) December 3, 2022
The rest of the list continues in the same vein, with reporters curiously adopting and repeating this “PR for the richest man” narrative.
The Verge, meanwhile, wrote: “Elon Musk’s promised Twitter exposé on the Hunter Biden story is a flop that doxxed multiple people.”
However, as NR’s Jim Geraghty wrote this morning, the “Twitter Files” “paint an ugly portrait of a social-media company’s management unilaterally deciding that its role was to keep breaking news away from the public instead of letting people see the reporting and drawing their own conclusions.”
The internal communications obtained by Taibbi reveal how political operatives from both Biden’s and Trump’s teams wielded influence over Twitter’s content moderation, though Biden’s team had more success in shaping Twitter’s behavior, given the ideological predispositions of its workforce. The reporting offers a timeline of the internal chaos that ensued following the site’s decision to censor the New York Post’s explosive story on the laptop in October 2020.
The decision to block the report was made without the knowledge of former CEO Jack Dorsey, according to Taibbi.
“They just freelanced it,” a former Twitter employee reportedly told Taibbi of Twitter’s reasoning for censoring the story. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
Trenton Kennedy, former U.S. policy communications manager at Twitter, pressed Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde and former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth, both of whom were reportedly involved in the decision, for answers.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we’re waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials,” Kennedy wrote to senior staff. “We’ll face hard questions on this if we don’t have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.”
Even if the reporting redounds to the benefit of the world’s richest man, it’s undoubtedly newsworthy that a presidential campaign was receiving concierge service from a major tech platform. To dismiss Taibbi’s reporting as “PR for a billionaire” is to ignore a major story about the intersection of Big Tech, media, and politics — all because paying attention to it might help a sworn enemy.
“If Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election, shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the very definition of election interference. . . . Frankly Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It was absurd,” Musk said during a live Q&A session on Saturday.
Headline Fail of the Week
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah claimed in a recent piece that “MSNBC’s cancellation of Tiffany Cross sends a chilling signal.”
MSNBC cut ties with the weekend host last month. Sources told Variety that Cross’s relationship with the network was “becoming frayed” and that executives were worried about her willingness to attack cable-news hosts on other networks and believed that her commentary did not meet the standards of MSNBC or NBC News.
The last straw may have been comments Cross made as a guest on Charlamagne Tha God’s Hell of a Week show, when she and other panelists were asked which swing-state Democrats could afford to lose in the midterm elections. Cross named Florida, saying that it “literally looks like the d*** of the country.”
Nonetheless, Attiah has taken the firing as a sign of racism, arguing that MSNBC’s decision was a “a reminder that the rug could be pulled out from under [black journalists] at any time.” She claimed Cross was ousted for her radical truth telling and that the firing is a “bad look” for MSNBC in a time when “attacks against Black educators, authors and journalists are increasing across the country.”
Attiah suggested the decision shows that black journalists are “still disposable.”
Media Misses
• A Washington Post analysis piece asks and answers, “Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated.” The piece opens with the story of Meera Sanghani-Jorgensen, who “couldn’t shake the feeling that, by giving birth, she might be doing something bad for the earth.” The woman has a 13-year-old daughter but said she “felt weighed down by the consumption of her children before they were even born.”
• MSNBC columnist Marisa Kabas appeared to liken “the GOP’s sustained campaign of violence against trans people” to how Jews and LGBT people were treated during the Holocaust.
NEW: The GOP’s sustained campaign of violence against trans people is horrifying, but not without precedent. I wrote about what we can learn from the treatment of Jews *and* LGBTQ+ people in the Holocaust—and the danger of silence.
My latest for @MSNBC: https://t.co/hBX3pb62MS pic.twitter.com/UP0v8xvcSi
— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 4, 2022