The New York Times’ Ben Smith has a bombshell column today revealing that the White House and some other political operatives thought they had the Wall St Journal news pages all teed up with a story about Hunter Biden and his emails. The idea that people from the White House counsel’s officer were involved in a campaign smear job is shocking and there’s not much left that shocks these days.
The Journal ended up publishing a small story which stated there was no proof that Joe Biden had done anything wrong after Rudy Giuliani spilled the dirt in the New York Post. It’s one of the rare occasions in which the mainstream media refused to accept the juicy, hand-fed tid-bits of scandal and gossip the right wing feeds them.
Smith goes on to say that this represents the return of the “media gatekeeper” which those of us in the early days of blogging and internet journalism were fighting against. I disagree. This is an example of the mainstream media refusing to allow the right wing to work the refs and accept their narratives and story angles for fear of being called “biased.” It’s a return to journalism.
Anyway, Josh Marshall had a good twitter thread on this topic that speaks for me:
This is a very good column. And it includes details of what sounds like yet more White House lawbreaking. But I disagree with Ben that this is a reassertion of an elite media gate keeping role. There’s hardly a blackout of the purported hunter biden hard drives. There are lots of stories about it in msm publications. Not to mention the fact that I think it’s dubious to say that fox, wsj, nypost et al aren’t part of the elite press. The key is really who decides what the story is.
For decades the elite political press has been wired for the GOP. This has been true for a number of reason. But the upshot is a pattern that right media defines what the question and then more elite corporate media engages that question, even if their conclusions are sometimes different.
The fact that the gaming rogue Bannon was able to fund a deeply tendentious, error-riddles loaf of poo by this clown Schweitzer and have it run in the countries two most influential news publications as hard news was the ultimate example of this pattern. [He’s talking about “Clinton Cash” which ran in 2016 “in partnership” with the NY Times and the Washington Post, an egregious example of this practice.]
The Wikileaks drama is a different sort of example. It’s not just we now know that it was the product of a Russian intelligence operation which involved the Trump campaign. It’s more that there really wasn’t anything in them that was remotely controversial. That didn’t stop most elite media from being transfixed by them as if they were. That’s largely because the right media ecosystem said so. And elite media was scared to say otherwise. With this laptops story the two examples collide. What’s the story?
Well, the story seems pretty obviously to be another dirty tricks operation either run by the Presidents pals in Russia or stateside criminals working on his behalf. So do reporters explode with yada yada! Hunter Biden yada! It’s probably all fake but it raises question and how will it effect the horserace?
Or do they see whether the basic facts are confirmable (they aren’t) and look to the fairly obviously story: an almost absurd attempted replay of the 2016 games. This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s reporting.
This isn’t like the news media that simply refused to report on jack Kennedy’s numerous affairs because it wasn’t suitable for print. That’s gate keeping. The Journal story at the center of Bens piece really tells the tale. They published a story. They didn’t hide anything or sit on anything.
They just embarrassed the Trump team because they reported it out and didn’t just repeat credulous what Bannon brought them like the Times and WaPo did in 2016.
We see it as gatekeeping because again elite media has been largely wired for the gop for three or four decades. That breaking down seems like gatekeeping. It’s not.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on October 26, 2020.