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This is a relatively small thought. But watching more mainstream news being home for Christmas I see the supposedly moderate channels like NBC/ABC constantly running Santos lying about his resume and absolutely zero coverage of alphabet agency interference with twitters moderation. No mention that the fbi was paying twitter 3.5 million and suggesting who to censor.
The former I do think is bad that he lied. The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination. What is it WaPo declares that Democracy dies in Darkness? And there is nothing in the mainstream media about the scandal.
Perhaps it's...not actually the biggest scandal since a beloved president accessorized his wife's wardrobe?
No one died. No sympathetic face is available to cry on the evening news--Trump already did his best impression when he got banned. Unsympathetic faces are even in short supply, since Elon spends more time waving his hands at stock prices than drawing attention to censorship. You can't place the blame on a political figure and sink his career.
I'd go further and assume the average American was vaguely unsurprised by the news. There's already a sense that the NSA does whatever it wants; why not the FBI? They've even settled down from their gunslinging days of the 80s and 90s. It was vaguely directed at Foreign Influence™ and everything.
On top of all that, the exposé is delivered not as a bombshell...but as a series of threads on the very website it's skewering. Networks can run a segment on a thread on another journo's work, or they can run one on the southern border. Or on a lurid murder. Or on Christmas fluff. I picked all those from the Fox landing page. It "seems like" that's what viewers prefer.
The deal was that the reporters who got the documents had to do their initial reports on Twitter.
Weird. Deal...with whom? Whose interest is served by this drip-feed of ambiguously shocking revelations?
Complaining about the medium seems bizarre to me. It is a way to distract from the story. The story has documentary evidence heavily implicating the FBI amongst other intelligence agencies in an operation to silence damaging criticism of a political candidate because the FBI disliked the other major candidate. That is, the FBI interfered in a domestic election in a material way.
Is there a smoking gun? Not quite. But we are well past more likely than not (and probably clear and convincing evidence). Not quite to “beyond reasonable doubt.” But if the facts alleged are true (which they appear very much to be true) the FBI interferes in a US presidential election for political reasons and yes that is the mother of scandals. If further factual development confirms what appears to be obvious, then this scandal should end with the FBI no longer existing. It should end with numerous people in jail. It should end with Joe Biden resigning (and if evidence comes to light that he was working with the FBI it should end in him being impeached, convicted, and then tried).
Complaining about the medium in that context seems silly. But it reminds me of the aphorism “when you have neither the law nor the facts, pound the table.”
All this is true, but the NYT won't say it, so it doesn't matter.
...I appreciate that this might be seen as a low-effort statement, but it appears to me that it really is that simple. The majority of people, even the majority of people here, rely on information being delivered to them in specific formats through specific channels before it actually impacts their cognition.
Yes the format does matter. Leftist know that musks takeover of twitter means a lot more of the intelligentsia will be getting reasonable right wing takes to consider.
And in my origional post here I know if ABC nightly new runs a report on twitter files talking about whether it’s concerning the fbi was paying twitter and asking for censors (or cia asking for their accounts not to be censored) and considered it a big deal then my mom would suddenly be talking about the importance of the first amendment to Democracy. And there’s a large voter base that watches some dumb tv then 15 min of nightly news. Those people got a ton of RussiaGate is super serious. They are getting zero on the fbi/cia relationship with social media companies.
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