Damned By Their Silence

A private company colluded with a major political party to suppress damning news in order to influence a Presidential election.

Times past, such would be hundred-point, above-the-fold newspaper headlines worthy of special editions, or in a digital world, worthy of immediate email blasts to subscriber lists and occupying top spot on websites.

While anyone who cared to dig in even a bit already knew that this occurred, the depth of the story, the players involved, and the in-your-face irrefutability should be enough to drag even the most skeptical into acknowledgment and condemnation.

However, my quick survey of the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and other prominent "news" sources found... nothing. Nary a peep about the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression that took place at Twitter, as revealed by Matt Taibbi's deep-dive into a trove shared by Elon Musk.

Are there other stories of significance out there?

Sure.

But...

As of my typing this article (Sunday, 12/4/22, 9AM), these were the most prominent headlines on major news organization websites:

• NYTimes: "The Chinese Dream, Denied: Harsh Measures Shake Beijing’s Social Contract"

• CNN: "China operates over 100 police stations across the world"

• WaPo: "From chicken wings to used cars, inflation begins to ease its grip"

• MSNBC: "Kevin McCarthy’s GOP extremism problem is a very bad omen"

• Reuters "Russia says it won't accept oil price cap and is preparing response"

• BBC: "Iran disbands morality police - attorney general"

• NPR: "In the hunt for a male contraceptive, scientists look to stop sperm in their tracks"

Earth shattering.

The couple of these sites that do mention Musk or Twitter on their front pages offer stories that have nothing at all to do with the Hunter Biden matter.

The silence speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi, who along with Bari Weiss is notable for a recent break from the increasingly censorious orthodoxy of the Left, is being excoriated by people who play on the same left side of the political sandbox for having the temerity of outing an inconvenient truth.

Really, the response - a wave of derision and personal attacks - is utterly disgraceful, as is the distance the press has traveled from its role as watchdog over government excess - a role considered so vital by the Founding Fathers that they gave the press its own protection in the First Amendment.

In contrast, consider this anecdote from a man who was fired from the New York Times by A. M. "Abe" Rosenthal, for the sin of adding a rather trivial bit of fiction to a news story. From 2006, for context.

In those days, The Times published excruciatingly long lists of commencement awards presented by City College and Columbia University. As I typed away, growing progressively more bored, I committed what would soon seem an act of career seppuku. I invented a fake prize. The Brett Award, I called it, "to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap — Jake Barnes." You can read, or reread, Hemingway's "Sun Also Rises" to catch the salacious reference.

The bogus award took up three lines of tiny type in the newspaper, the kind you see in baseball box scores. But everything, no matter how insignificant, is bound to be read by somebody. My prank certainly was. When he learned about it, Abe lost no time summoning me to the office.

That day, the various Abes were on display. The Old Testament Abe thundered about how I had made "a jackass" of him and the newspaper. Never would I write for The Times again.

Many ... said Abe had overreacted, that he had been too harsh with a young fellow just starting out.

But he wasn't harsh. He was right. The correctness of his decision becomes ever more clear with the grievous wrongdoings of the Blairs and the Kelleys and the other journo-fabulists who, bizarrely, keep popping up.

Journalism is obviously not a religion, and newsrooms are hardly cathedrals. But the concept of sin exists nonetheless. If there is a mortal sin, it is the willful publishing of an untruth (emphasis added). Sure, we get things wrong, but it is generally as the result of human fallibility, not deliberate transgression.

You don't make things up and put them in the paper. It's as simple as that. And so Abe had no choice but to let the fabricator go. People, he said to me then, his voice turned soft, should be able to believe what they read in the news columns.

The incredible thing is that there are still a few in this business — not many, but a few — who can't grasp this concept. For Abe Rosenthal, it was as natural, and as essential, as breathing.

Rosenthal was by no means a perfect man (as one acquaintance noted, he forever carried the stigma of the Kitty Genovese reporting debacle, and deservedly so), but he built the paper's reputation into a juggernaut with his iron-willed insistence that news and opinion stand apart. That, in turn, created the mythos of "journalism," where reporters were deemed the sharp-eyed guardians of the people, speaking truth to power. This myth - and it is a myth, newspapers have throughout history filled their pages with bias, half-truths, and opinions posing as fact - is what salves the cognitive dissonance of those who, if they don't see a story in the NYTimes or CNN, assume that there's nothing to see.

A free nation needs a Fourth Estate to challenge government at all turns, and to do so with at least an endeavor towards truth. Failure to report on government efforts to suppress a story that'd hurt a preferred candidate is a gross dereliction of duty, and anyone who, after this incident, trusts any of those organizations for news is a fool. It is only when consumers of news demand "news," rather than echo-chamber opinion, that such entities might make an effort to institute a modicum of journalistic integrity.

Too few people want that, unfortunately. Modern politics, to them, is war, and all's fair. One day, when they wake up and find their liberties gone and an unrestrained and wanton government riding roughshod over their lives, they'll only have themselves to blame.

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Peter.