Matt Taibbi is doing something unusual for modern media, and maybe journalism itself: he's reporting on what he finds newsworthy and verifiable. One of the ways you can tell is the flurry of coverage about everything else but the actual story.
Example: I turned on NPR in the middle of an "All Things Considered" interview with "Meme Wars" author Joan Donovan, which turned out to be about the latest Twitter story, and "latest" should mean Matt Taibbi being given "the Twitter Files." But you wouldn't know it from the headline: "Elon Musk suspends, then restores, the Twitter accounts of several journalists"
It started out with a brief history, how Musk had bought the platform, and fired top execs and thousands of staff. Then, "But earlier this week, Musk was the one doing the banning..." It seems somebody who used public information to track Musk's private jet, along with several other journalists "including from prominent outlets like CNN and the New York Times, that had covered that story, or who had previously covered his business decisions" were all banned from Twitter on dubious grounds, "sharply" criticized by officials in the US, Europe, and even the UN. Then he reinstated them after conducting a poll on his own Twitter account. Said NPR: "It was another reminder, not just of Musk's idiosyncratic decision-making, but also of Twitter's outsized role as a tool for journalists and officials at getting information to the public. So we wanted to talk about that, with someone whose been thinking a lot, about that..."
So we called Matt Taibbi, who was just recently given carte-blanche access to Twitter's internal communications system by Elon Musk himself, with permission to tell all?
No.
They called Joan Donovan, author of "Meme Wars," to see what Professor Donovan made of all that. These latest developments. "Oh goody," I thought, "here we go: the astonishing revelations in the 'Twitter Files'!"
Nope. It was: "Elon Musk reinstating the accounts of some of the journalist who were banned on Thursday..."
No mention of Matt Taibbi's breathtaking reports on this extremely troubling story of government interference? No, nada, zip.
Donovan branded Musk's brand as "reactionary decision-making," and speculated on what "triggered" Musk in all this flapdoodle. "A lot of journalists deal with this every day." And "Now we know that content moderation is going to be subject to his (meaningful pause) whims."
Donovan then recounted how she had gotten journalists who were banned into a "Twitter space" (thanks to a "glitch"). And then, Elon got on! A journalist asked a question and Musk said if you dox somebody you get banned.
Now, Donovan had just informed us that "journalists have to deal with this every day," but now said drawing the line at doxing was "interesting" because journalists have had to deal with this over the years of using Twitter and other public platforms in order to protect themselves and their families.
I can hold two conflicting ideas in my brain at the same time, but the key word there is conflicting: either being doxed is a nothingburger, if you're a real journalist, or you have to use "Twitter and other public platforms" to keep your family from being terrorized. Which is it to be, Professor?
Then, Donovan went on, after Musk "stuck to the line" about being doxed, he hung up. And about twenty minutes later the platform terminated the meeting.
"Which goes to show how much control he exercises over the entire communal space..." This was followed by a kind of disclaimer about thinking of "social" media platforms more as a fast-food chain, with managers, codes of conduct, and "unfortunately the way Musk is targeting mainstream journalists, I think we're going to see more of these shenanigans and not less over the next couple of months."
NPR: "...Government officials rely on it, to let people know things they think they need to know, in real time..." and asked, "Do you have a concern that this reliance on this particular mechanism is making it easier for certain individuals and groups to manipulate and shape the public conversation?"
"Certain Individuals and Groups," not, as Musk (through Taibbi) has revealed, the FBI, DHS, and the rest of the acronyms for all the spook agencies spying on everybody. Well who else matters, when it comes to blanket surveillance of you and me and everybody we know? Apparently Donovan wants to alert us all to the news that "Certain Individuals and Groups" means Musk, and only Musk.
Answering, Donovan cited her book, and said: "Memes are starting to have a really important impact on how our politicians communicate, how celebrities communicate, as well as the way in which journalist are starting to understand information campaigns online, is through hashtags and other slogans, and so when we look at the rise in disinformation, it was impossible to subtract that from the changes in internet communication and the usefulness of these short quickie images and slogans."
Huh? Come again?
"He often talks in this coded language, he, you know, will say things like 'nothingburger,' it's not necessarily the kind of language befitting of a CEO," (Well excuuuse me!) "...he also will talk about NPCs, which in meme-language is 'Non-Playing Characters', which are essentially this idea that the right have, that the left are carrying out the status quo and can't think for themselves."
"Meme-language." ...Right.
Donovan concluded that with so many changes in the culture all happening at once, "...whether journalists like it or not, they're going to have to reckon with Musk and the changing nature of political communication, so that they can do their jobs..." And until there's a competing platform that would make space for news online, "We're kind of stuck with what we have right now."
No mention of Taibbi's heroic journalism. No mention of the FBI, DHS, ODNI, "handling" whatever Twitter accounts they find too funny or sarcastic in their literal-minded humorless bubbles. No mention of the hard, cold fact that Musk opened the books for Taibbi and tossed him the keys almost immediately as the dust of the acquisition cleared a little.
Nope, we're being told, the only government officials having anything to do with the platform are just trying to keep the public informed in a timely way...
The next day I turned on my local NPR station and there was an "update." Suffice it to say, it was a pig-pile. NPR had gotten responses from all the banned journalists, and the sharp criticisms from "even" the UN, and so on. It all sounded self-righteous and vindictive, rather than moral-highground-ish. It looks like the I-Hate-Elon Club is in Full Payback Smackdown mode.
Reading this stuff, what stands out, is none of it goes beyond the pathetic Donovan interview that wandered off into convoluted and irrelevant nonsense: your classic nothingburger. It's kind of like NPR loaded up the schedule for the week with this non-story placeholder Hollywood trope hoping the Twitter Files thing blows over. I almost want to listen to the rest of it. But I got stuff to do this week. Enough snow on the ground as it is.
None of it makes sense. Unless, that is, you have followed Taibbi's reporting over the past few weeks. Then, with some actual context and background, it absolutely makes sense that the mainstream media is in hysterics about the richest guy on Earth controlling their narrative, while it ignores, no, suppresses, blatantly, the actual proof that "social" media are anything but, and are hoovering up all your personal information and giving it to the government's spook agencies to play with to their cold hearts' content.
Of course they would freak, seeing that they were all working their Twitter accounts ("to do their jobs") and come to find out, The Man was calling the shots all along. Even before he bought the store. Meet the new boss.
Musk may be a horrible person, I don't know or care. Taibbi is going through the internal communications from years before Musk ever thought of buying the whole mess. He has released enough to show what the actual relationship was (is?) between the entire security/surveillance branch of the government and "social" media. And the media are caught with their scruples down, since they swallowed and amplified all that Hunter Laptop Hoax jazz and so much else, for so many years. So how are they going to frame this so they look good?
Low hanging fruit: Elon Musk. Eeew!
We're supposed, I suppose, to forget the rise of surveillance capitalism and all the leaks and warnings, and Cambridge Analytica, and Shoshana Zuboff's great scholarship, and get all offended that somebody actually paid attention to that little man behind the screen. OMG, you mean they were spying on us all the time? The FBI? Through our Twitters? Who knew?
Everybody who paid attention, that's who. Which leaves the media out, I guess. Their last best hope may be that supreme no-no of reportage: become the story yourself.
The Hunter's Laptop Russian Hoax, by the way, was like that mastodon skull that somebody's sled dogs chewed the scalp off, and they found an intact mastodon corpse. Now that global overheating is melting all the tundra they've become fairly common. You bay be able to buy the prehistoric meat. The ivory has been an issue lately, because it's legal, which complicates protecting the only living elephants. Anyway, Taibbi was lured into this whole story by the scalped laptop-hoax story, which the internal communications reveal was a frame, and then the tip of a really big iceberg: government using corporate media to manipulate and shape the public conversation, in spades.
So this is so much bigger than an obscenely rich playboy playing pingpong with the public mind, much less a clever researcher into new slang and symbolism on the internet with a book to sell. These may be stories, but they pale next to what's been dumped in Taibbi's lap, probably because of his reputation for old-school journalistic integrity, that he is faithfully, and responsibly, reporting. And the best our heavy-hitters in the retail information business can do now is attack the messenger.
Ok time out.
Step back just one more notch, into the wider context of our collective perceptions and correlated behaviors. Here we are, hurtling into oblivion, tearing our earthly home to shreds forever, destroying everything that had sustained us, because of a cultural structure we think of as natural law. The Law of the Jungle. Eat or Be Eaten. The Business of Business. In this context nothing can be done if investors don't anticipate enormous profits. Even getting off fossil fuels will have to make more money than drilling-baby-drilling. And with this global catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, burning up or flooding our homes, we're hollering "Boo!" and "Yay!" while the major-league information vendors fight over control of their unraveling narrative.
Whatever has the highest ROI gets all the media oxygen, to boost its ROI. A presidential candidate who brags about goosing women. A state governor who signs a law that any vigilante can call the cops on a woman who seeks reproductive healthcare. Another governor threatens to boot Mickey Mouse out of town. On and on. Why? Because the media giants are corporate entities too, and like all such, committed to profit above all else. Shareholder Value demands that they focus on the spectacular. Otherwise, they will be replaced by a more ruthless and voracious corporate predator. "Shareholders" are not your granny's penny stocks, and there are not many of them. The economic logic behind this only counts people as things.
So the name of the media game is spectacle, not information, and the biggest attention-getter is anything worse than the last horror. And the only profit in getting your attention is getting your information.
So it's pointless to blame the Musks, or the Spooks, or Big Oil, or Big Pharma, or reds (whichever kind), or blues, or the Lizard People. Because they are just culturally-selected tokens that get replaced automatically if they fail. Meanwhile, as Caitlin Johnstone put it, "we're busy barking and snarling at one another instead of the people in charge."
This is the behavior of abused, traumatized, addicted people in denial. We're hooked on screens driven by algorithms that feed us whatever we bought last time. Our captured and isolated attention has divided society.
It has to change. Otherwise, "We're kind of stuck with what we have right now."
And not much longer.
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