Steve Krakauer is the author of Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, published today by Hachette. Fox News has posted his column on the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and James Clapper’s claptrap on behalf of the Deep State 51 leading the charge. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler took Clapper’s claptrap at face value. Kessler gave the letter of the Deep State 51 a weird line-by-line reading that belied its obvious meaning. Being of sound mind, Krakauer is not impressed:
Kessler proceeds to remove all culpability for the misinformation and lack of accurate media coverage at the time. He allows Clapper to slam Politico, which picked up the letter’s clear implication, to say that now, more than two years later, Politico “deliberately distorted what we said.”
Please. This revisionist history is embarrassing, serving to continue to cover the narrative-over-facts reality of that moment. As bad as so much of the Trump Era reporting was, what took place with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the New York Post censorship at the end of his presidency was perhaps the most egregious and obvious example of the elite censorship collusion racket between tech companies, government forces and the national media that we’ve ever seen.
We have seen now through the Twitter Files revelations that there was specific cooperation between Twitter and the FBI in the important months and weeks before the laptop story broke. But we must always remember how the media was a key cog in the racket – which allowed the censorship to take place, rather than jump to the defense of their New York Post colleagues.
“I tweeted a link to the NYP story right after it dropped yesterday morning. I immediately reached out to the Biden campaign to see if they had any answer. I wish i had given the story a closer read before tweeting it,” tweeted reporter Jake Sherman, then of Politico, who continued his misspelling-laden apologetic tweet for daring to link to the story at the time: “my goal was not to spread informatoin. my goal was to raise questions about the story—as i did in subsequent tweets—and see how the biden campaign was going to respond. They later did respond.”
It was utter panic. And why? The media wasn’t overly outraged about the egregious overreach from Twitter and other social platforms against a media outlet because it had journalistic PTSD from 2016….
Whole thing here.
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