Since Elon Musk and his crew of independent reporters began publishing the Twitter Files late last year, the legacy media has been eerily silent, ignoring documents and emails that shine a negative spotlight on the government and its allies in the press. Journalist Matt Taibbi released the 16th installment of the Twitter Files, called “A Media Experiment.” It exposed everything that is wrong with the Fourth Estate, from hypocrisy to bias. The latest edition focuses on Sen. Angus King (I-ME) and his campaign targeting more than 300 accounts on the blue bird outlet.
Angus King, Sniffing Glue, and the Twitter Files
Taibbi started the 17-tweet thread noticing the lack of attention the Twitter Files have received from the corporate press. Although news organizations were silent about elected officials and the intelligence community peddling false information, reporters became apoplectic when a witness told a recent House hearing that former President Donald Trump requested the tech company remove a critical tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen.
“The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!” wrote Taibbi. “Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.”
As Taibbi noted, if the president becoming enraged over tweets generated headlines, then a prominent US senator targeting more than 300 accounts also should garner the same outrage. King reached out to Twitter to point out “suspicious” accounts based on questionable criteria, such as someone tweeting “Rand Paul visit excitement” or another user “mentions immigration.” The most well-known Twitter handle on the list was ZeroHedge, which the senator identified as a “bot.” Ostensibly, neither King nor his staff has perused the publication if they consider the website a bot.
“If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like,” Taibbi tweeted.
Since the Twitterverse has accused Taibbi of concentrating his efforts only on Democrats, he shed light on Mark Lenzi, a Republican who was a State Department official. The files revealed that he asked Twitter to extinguish 14 accounts that he asserted were “some Russian controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
“A government official, writing from a State department email, asks to ‘delete’ 14 accounts that are engaged in legit speech and for which no evidence is shown they’re Russian controlled or bots (in fact, we at Racket know some of these people). A clear First Amendment issue,” Taibbi wrote.
Adam Schiff (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The mainstream media will ignore Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) campaign to ban a reporter or King’s spreadsheet but shriek to the heavens about Teigen, confirming exactly where their priorities lie. “Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives,” Taibbi stated, adding that that the federal censorship bureaucracy is not homing in on the left or the right but “at the whole population of outsiders” that these operatives consider “threats.”
Taibbi ended the multi-part thread by offering a sneak peek at the March Twitter Files. He announced that the upcoming stories will inform the public “how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect … ”
Media Silence Is Deafening
It is no secret that many of the cable news channels have devoted very little time or nothing at all to the Twitter Files since their initial release. For example, when one of the reports highlighted Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 presidential election, the three leading news networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – offered just 128 seconds of coverage, according to a study by Media Research Center’s NewsBusters. Of course, if these independent journalists published multi-tweet threads damning information about Trump and Republicans, the press attention would likely be as ubiquitous as pronouns on leftists’ Twitter profiles.
