The Mediaverse by Dennis Kneale, TruthDAO opinion columnist
Please help me, Elon, you’re my only hope.
My worry is that your Twitter Files exposé is dying, buried by the biased media. Surely there must be some way we can coax them—or force them—into telling this story.
So far, only conservative outlets like Fox News and Newsmax are covering this story. The New York Times and The Washington Post, once great newspapers, are ignoring it to an embarrassing degree. The Times has run just one story on Dec. 4. The Post has been silent since Dec. 16, after running three stories (a debunker, a glowing profile of a Democrat), and an \”analysis\” calling it “hypocrisy”).
By contrast, this is my eighth Mediaverse column on the #TwitterFiles since the first one on Dec. 9. Plus a few columns on Newsmax.com, and several appearances on Newsmax TV. As well as my podcast, \”What\’s Bugging Me,\” every week since early December.
Frankly, Elon, some of my friends think I may be getting a little obsessed. And it’s not enough! It is as if nobody is hearing any of it. Am I being shadow banned—or does no one care?
Most people never have heard of the Twitter Files, I would bet. Some who have heard of it see it as no big deal—in part because of stories that tell you “What you need to know.”
Last Wednesday, I was having lunch in a Cuban restaurant near Times Square with a lifelong friend, an incisive lawyer whose parents fled Castro’s Cuba, and he tells me the Twitter Files are a “nothingburger.” A favorite one-word dismissal in the media, lately.
Then on Twitter the next morning, an account with 45,000 followers, @CALI4AZ, tweeted this: “I’m starting to think the Twitter Files is actually a distraction, we’ve known for a long time what’s really been going on, nothing new. Am I wrong?”
Yes, CALI4AZ is wrong. Most Americans don’t yet know that the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and dozens of other agencies set up shop at Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. That they were pushing Twitter to silence even tiny accounts with little activity, and promote others that carried messages they preferred.
One big PSYOPS campaign. And they are getting away with it, Musk Man!
In Davos this week, at the World Economic Forum, FBI Director Christopher Wray gave you the finger, basically. On a panel, he said, as seen in this tweet:
“And I think the sophistication of the private sector is improving, and, particularly important, the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI, has, I think, made significant strides. Pretty much every technology we could talk about today, we see both opportunity but great, great dangers in the wrong hands.”
The tech already is in the wrong hands: those of the FBI and the CIA. The utter gall, Mr. Musk: the “sophistication” of the private sector? He means “obedience.” “Collaboration”? Try “collusion,” and “quid pro quo,” government censorship in exchange for less competition.
What to do, Elon? How can we shake the media and the people out of their blasé, cynical stupor and make them wake up to the dangers revealed by the Twitter Files? Do all of these:
• Crowdsource it! Release to the public all of the thousands of Old Twitter documents in the #TwitterFiles exposé and let the people have at it. Thousands of Taibbis.
• Set up separate, exclusive document releases with the Times and the Post, on a topic they are more likely to cover: how the Trump administration demanded Twitter silence 5,500 accounts that supposedly were in cahoots with China on Covid-19 news; how the Trump State Department set up fake accounts to influence foreign affairs.
• Find any shred of evidence that a government agency or conservative group pressured Old Twitter censors to mute publicly available information on abortion referral services. Leak it through Planned Parenthood, and the media will go crazy with it.
• Reveal all Old Twitter emails and Slack conversations involving the Times, the Post, and any other media outlets that were in touch with Twitter censors and the FBI about election “misinformation” and anything else.
That last move might be worth doing first, Elon, given their uncharacteristic lack of interest in a government plot to censor Americans’ free speech on a massive scale.
Dennis Kneale, @denniskneale on Twitter, is a media strategist and writer in New York. He spent more than 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC, and Fox Business. His podcast is called \”What\’s Bugging Me.\”