NYT Man About the Media Ben Smith has a column up, Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer that goes off on quite a bit of a tangent while discussing the first of a series of meetings organized by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy intended to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.”
To his (eventual) credit, Mr. Smith suggests that what many of the Harvardians are complaining about is really their frustration over the fact that the American people just don’t seem to be listening to Harvard as much as they ought:
If only responsible journalists and technologists could explain how misguided Mr. Trump’s statements were, surely the citizenry would come around. But these well-meaning communications experts never quite understood that the people who liked him knew what was going on, laughed about it and voted for him despite, or perhaps even because of, the times he went “too far.”
The only trouble is, before getting there, Mr. Smith engages in a little misinformation himself regarding the case of whether the Hunter Biden laptop story that emerged late in the 2020 presidential campaign was a case in point of “misinformation and media manipulation”. Here’s how Ben tells it:
The Hunter Biden laptop saga sure is instructive about something. As you may recall, panicked Trump allies frantically dumped its contents onto the internet and into reporters’ inboxes, a trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name. The big social media platforms, primed for a repeat of the WikiLeaks 2016 election shenanigans, reacted forcefully: Twitter blocked links to a New York Post story that tied Joe Biden to the emails without strong evidence (though Twitter quickly reversed that decision) and Facebook limited the spread of the Post story under its own “misinformation” policy.
But as it now appears, the story about the laptop was an old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign, and describing it with the word “misinformation” doesn’t add much to our understanding of what happened. While some of the emails purportedly on the laptop have since been called genuine by at least one recipient, the younger Mr. Biden has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his. And the “media manipulation campaign” was a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal, an attempt at an October Surprise that has been part of nearly every presidential campaign I’ve covered.
“[A] trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name”? No, Ben. “[A] trove that most definitely included embarrassing images and emails clearly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name”. And “the younger Mr. Biden has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his”? Again, no. “[T]he younger Mr. Biden has said the laptop in question could be his”. So, quite a bit of difference there, Ben. Almost like, you know, motherfucking night and day!
Oh, and “Wikileak shenanigans”? You mean “Wikileaks accuracy”? No one has questioned that the emails obtained, most probably, through Russian intelligences, “purporting” to be from the Democratic National Committee were genuine, genuine office backbiting and scuttlebutt that any good-natured cynic like myself would recognize as par for the course in any real time political organization but were unsurprisingly regarded as utterly outrageous by the Bernie boys and girls and surely contributed to poor Hillary’s loss.
Mr. Smith had himself a scoop of sorts when the New York Post ran the Hunter Biden story, reporting that the Wall Street Journal had an opportunity to run it before the Post did, but declined to, on the grounds that what the Trump folks pushing the story wanted it to say was that Joe Biden had been aware of the fact that his son was trading on his name—which he surely was—and had personally profited from his son’s business ventures and had indeed used his power as vice president to shape government policies in ways that benefited his son’s clients. Instead, all the emails accomplished, presuming that they were true (which was not well established at the time), was that poor Hunter Biden, if he in fact deserves such a kindly adjective, was a pathetic/repulsive four-dimensional train wreck.
Further furthermore, Mr. Smith blithely passes over the real story of media manipulation—the outrageously partisan decision of both Twitter and Facebook to ban the story from their sites—as quickly as possible, and ignores completely the ridiculous mainstream media campaign that ran full blast until the election and even after on CNN, MSNBC, et al., featuring a massive cast of “liberal” intelligence “experts”, explaining, over and over again, that this is exactly the sort of thing the Russians would do, despite the lack of even a scintilla of evidence showing that they had done it, or even purporting to show that they apparently had done it.
Let’s try a little harder next time, shall we, Ben?
Afterwords
If you’d like an earful, or ten, on the matter from the frequently accurate, and frequently rabid, Glenn Greenwald, go here. Mr. Greenwald, perched vituperously somewhere on the “socialist populists who hate international capitalism and Rachel Maddow” portion of the political spectrum, often rubs me the wrong way, as you might have already guessed, but not the same wrong way as Mr. Smith does.
