The Future of Objective Reporting
Thanks to bold journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, there is an objective resistance to the strongarm of corporate subjectivity.
[Above: Glenn Greenwald, who resigned from The Intercept today. Retrieved via Getty Images®.]
In modern journalism, we are seeing the pelicans differentiating themselves from the seagulls. The seagulls scatter in all sorts of directions in the sky, gliding on air, on seemingly nothing, squawking without a care in the world. All the while, down on the gentle shore, the pelican wades before rising and nose-diving back into the water to pull out a prized treat with it’s piercing, long beak. Somehow, the majestic pelican is hidden in plain sight behind the curtain of clamorous gulls.
Today, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, a publication he co-founded in 2014, citing the editors' intention to censor an article he wrote this week. The Intercept refused "to publish it unless [Greenwald] remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden." The publication also requested that Greenwald not to publish with any other news outlet, a violation of Greenwald's contractual rights.
Greenwald is well known for reporting on the global surveillance information Edward Snowden leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) back in 2013. He has since amassed respectable recognition, more recently with his reporting on Bolsonaro's bad actors down in Brazil.
The article in question, again, had to do with the Hunter Biden laptop reports regarding his time at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Over the last few weeks, if you have been paying attention, there has been a wide scale effort to censor and prevent circulation of articles pertaining to these reports.
The reports, which stemmed from a laptop never picked up from a Delaware repair shop, have certainly not brought us to any conclusions, yet the mainstream media is swatting away the story without a second thought.
The New York Post, the publication that broke these reports, has employees who have been locked out of their social media account for weeks because they tried to post the story. Even the White House Press Secretary, who is widely notorious for actual lies (no doubt, McEnany is a believer of the mantra: "I never told the truth, so I can never tell a lie"), was blocked from her Twitter account for merely posting the story regarding the Bidens. Despite there being individuals mentioned in various emails and business ventures (most notably Tony Bubolinski) who corroborate many of the leaked details, the media has not budged on their "stance." And the fact that the media has any kind of stance is the source of the problem.
Thanks to bold journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, there is an objective resistance to the strongarm of corporate subjectivity. As Taibbi and Greenwald, as well as others, have reported, many of the methods used to delegitimize or dismiss these reports are themselves illegitimate and misleading.
Not long after the Hunter Biden reports were released by The New York Post, which is the fourth largest newspaper and one of the nation's oldest, a public letter signed by former intelligence officials emerged citing "evidence" of a Russian disinformation campaign targeting the Trump campaign. Of course, that too is slipping behind the veil of time due to its inaccuracy.
We saw Facebook and Twitter, two of the biggest cats in Silicon Valley, shut the reports down. Jack Dorsey recently expressed some remorse for the way Twitter handled it, but it will be hard to get many Americans who glanced over the reports to dissociate it with the word "smear." Interestingly enough, this is Silicon Valley afterall, and it's not just this election cycle that they are cozying up to Biden. Think about his running mate. Kamala Harris was Attorney General in California while Silicon Valley ballooned into the cluster of money and power it is today.
There were also "credible," "independent" sources casting doubt on the reports. Perhaps the most notable, and easily the most moronic, was from Thomas Rid's Washington Post piece where he wrote: we have to "treat [these Hunter Biden reports] as if they were a foreign intelligence operation-- even if they probably aren't." (Yes, Rid actually wrote something so un-journalistic that Walter Cronkite is tossing in his grave.)
What's really in question here are the emails and messages found on the laptop's hard drive. People like Bubolinski have verified much of these ties, and their motives can be speculated separately (Bubolinski's motive, for instance, probably had to do with these leaked emails showing that he missed out on a side deal). The Delaware shop owner testified under penalty of prosecution to a Senate committee verifying various elements. The only people who have seemed to avoid commenting on the emails are the Biden's. If it's such a smear, why don't they take us for a ride along as they disprove this as Russian disinformation?
Oh, and let's not forget that in 2015 then-Vice President Joe Biden had Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor Viktor Shokin replaced with Yuriy Lutsenko out of concern for keeping an eye out for corruption. It's interesting that Biden would use his power as VP to do just that in that very country. Sure, the conclusions are not here yet, but ignoring the clear facts casts aside any chance at concluding with truth.
But I'll leave the big-boy reporting to Taibbi and Greenwald, and I encourage you to read their work, along with others', on these issues as well as on the hypocrisy of modern American journalism.
What I am interested in here is the ball-punching irony and the battle that will likely ensue. For the last five years the media has constantly shouted from the top of their lungs how much of a liar Trump is and how much misinformation emerges and is bought due to his influence. It seemed like, from that point on, it was a battle between virtuous journalists and Trump's all-out assault on facts.
Trump has countlessly called the media "fake," "the enemy of the people," as well as all kinds of other words, and much of the things he does and say are worthy of strong criticism. However, this is not the parameters by which we achieve objectivity. To pin media up against Trump is not effective-- it is popular, massively so. What is effective, and was widely agreed upon until recently, is to aim media at what lurks in the shadows.
Much of the crap we here about Trump is just that: crap. For one, when Trump does or says something he does it quite publicly, whether at a press conference, some summit, or on Twitter. They will cover the things the president does, and only that-- which is totally fine if they were not treating a mere drop as the extent of what's in the bucket. And yet, the news will cover it through the night like it's relevant and unheard of. Sadly, when you cycle through the same processes of reporting, you tend to get repetitive and with that, you neglect the massive reality within the bucket.
The media fits quite snugly into the top-down style of reporting. Whether its a soundbite, a headline, or a clip, every piece of knowledge that needs to get passed along is understood by merely hearing what all the fuss is about. There usually is no "story," just some fuss, a minor dispute that will be forgotten. And in the modern age of bite-sized information, this makes sense-- maximize the amount of information relayed relative to the time it takes to do so.
However, accessibility and convenience is only half of the business model. Of course, who ever is going to consume this "reporting" has to be interested in the subject matter in the first place. The subject matter is almost always Trump, either directly or by extension (to his family, administration, etc.) and that proves very appealing to a society where it seems all the malevolence, greed, and hatred is rooted in Trump's very place in the public eye.
As we know, Trump's influence is not that far-reaching, and even if it was, he does not have the mental organization to turn this nation into a dictator. Sure, I don't doubt that he would take the offer of being America's first dictator if he was given the opportunity, but I just don't think that will ever occur. Besides, his first stint in public office was becoming president, so we don't get to excuse the vast majority of our hollow and spineless leaders for letting us down for decades prior to 2016.
The lazy, bite-sized forms of "information" we have made available are clearly most successful in getting people to bite on the content rather than actually reporting something.
Whatever the real reason behind our partisan media's delusion is, we cannot deny the fact that the top-down style of reporting is only used when they know it will sell, not when something needs to be exposed. The top-down method as a whole is more of an entertainment model than an information model.
And for Trump's whole time in office, top-down reporting is all we hear about. From the Steele dossier to Schiff telling Chuck Todd that we pretty much know Trump colluded with Russia (both of which have disappeared from most memories because they were nothing-burgers), the media has sold stories rather than reported on them.
With election day coming up in less than a week, this calls into question: What will a post-Trump media look like? Will we see the media revert back to its proper functions seeing that their dragon has been slain? Will the media pursue the Hunter Biden story then, with Trump gone? What is the mainstream media's motives now that informing has been forgotten?
Answers to those questions can only come in time. But honestly, we are looking at a situation where mainstream media is ready to wage war on anything that challenges its editorial beliefs. Which would not scare me if the idea of objective reporting were not so hopelessly misconstrued these days.
All I can hope for is that when people are get rallied to resist Trump based on the premise that Trump endangers objective truth, that this same kind of enthusiasm for truth will remain with or without Trump in the picture. And guys like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and others are our biggest hope.
Just remember, we are seeing an exodus of journalists from their respective institutions of the corporate press. That should tell you a lot.
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