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It’s an absolute bombshell of a story—Twitter, the social media home of journalists and politicians, censored a damaging story about Joe Biden’s son in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election, clearly affecting the outcome. Friday night, Twitter owner Elon Musk released the smoking gun: files proving that Twitter engineers purposefully shut down any mention of the New York Post Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story despite knowing that it was actually true.
After years of decrying “Russian influence” in our elections, and lambasting Republicans for questioning election outcomes (despite new Democrat House leader Hakeem Jeffries being one of the great deniers of all time), you’d think the media would be issuing blanket coverage of this outrageous and undemocratic action by the social media bluebird.
Not so. As of 8:11 PM PST, over 5 hours after the news started breaking on Matt Taibbi’s Twitter account (an event which was publicized well in advance by Musk), the Usual Suspects in journalism could barely find the space in their pages to mention it. A rundown:
New York Times: No mention of the censorship on the front page of its website. Instead, the only article was titled, “Twitter Keeps Missing Its Advertising Targets as Woes Mount.”
The Washington Post: Their only mention of Twitter was, “Gio Reyna has played seven minutes. This World Cup, he’s the talk of Soccer Twitter.”
The Los Angeles Times: “Ye suspended from Twitter for violating rules on inciting violence, Musk says.” No mention of Hunter Biden or censorship or election interference.
CNN: “Kanye West’s Twitter account has been suspended after Elon Musk says it violated rule against incitement to violence.” Way down on the page, another story was titled, “Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story.” This is a classic head fake. The employees didn’t just “debate’ the Hunter Biden story—they actively plotted to cancel it. Talk about fake news.
Politico did mention the story in the sidebar with a strange headline: “This will be awesome’: Musk leaks Twitter’s Hunter Biden files.” How can Musk “leak” Twitter’s files? Leaking implies that Elon snuck around in the dark of night like Watergate’s Deep Throat and showed secret documents to reporters in a garage. He owns Twitter, therefore he owns the files. The correct phrasing is that Musk released the files.
The Associated Press, meanwhile, buried any mention of Twitter deep down on its homepage and didn’t mention Hunter’s Ukrainian deals, flights on Air Force Two to China with then-Vice President Joe Biden, payments to the “Big Guy,” or anything else similar. Instead, they went with these two stories:
- Musk says Twitter has suspended rapper Ye over swastika post
- EU warns Musk to beef up Twitter controls ahead of new rules
Contrast this with Fox News, whose top story was “Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna expressed concerns over Twitter’s censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story,” or Breitbart, whose header was, “’Everyone Knew This Was F*cked.’ Elon Musk Releases Twitter’s Internal Convos on Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship.”
RedState and its sister site TownHall devoted several of their top stories to the blatant election interference. The Washington Times and the Drudge Report also had the Hunter story as their main headlines—while not surprisingly—the NY Post made it their priority too.
It did surprise me a little that the Wall Street Journal had not mentioned the shocking new developments at the time of this writing.
Last month I wrote an opinion piece titled, “Why Are We so Polarized? ‘Blindspot’ Shows How Americans Are Living in Completely Different Realities.” The article discussed a very cool website, Ground News, which shows how much play stories get on the left versus the right or in what they call the center-based outlets based on their political views. RedState is no stranger to this: we serve a conservative audience—but we’re open (and proud) about it. The difference with so many other sources is that they are disingenuous about their approaches; they’re serving you up a liberal smorgasbord while telling you it’s straight news.
This roundup is just a snapshot of a moment in time, and the websites mentioned will surely update. But it illustrates that the 800-pound gorillas of “journalism” don’t even need censorship—they simply self-censor, and ignore information they don’t like. In what should be one of the biggest stories of our lifetimes—the (successful) attempts of politicians to collude with one of the most influential tech companies in the world to affect the 2020 presidential election—they are MIA.
Ground News reported when Elon Musk announced that he’d release the internal files that only 11 percent of the coverage was on the left. So it’s no real surprise that once the news actually broke, they showed that less than 20 percent of the coverage leaned left (their definitions of center/right can be amusing to those of us who are conservatives, but give them credit for pointing out the bias at all).
This is bananas.@elonmusk reveals internal files surrounding @POTUS’s son, Hunter Biden, and his laptop from hell (h/t @mirandadevine) and though everyone I know here is all aflutter about it, peeps on the left will hear ????
Thx @Ground_app pic.twitter.com/8rOBC8A06t
— Roxanne ❄️ Hoge (@RoxanneHoge) December 3, 2022
This is appalling. The “danger to democracy” that the mainstream media and the Democrats have been screeching about for months is not Republicans—it’s the dishonest American media itself.
–> Read: RedState’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell, and Twitter under new owner Elon Musk.
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