The Twitter Files deserve to go down in American journalistic history. These revelations, posted on Friday via a lengthy Twitter thread (of course), lay out in stark detail how one Big Tech platform became a weapon of political censorship. It makes for chilling reading, confirming what many had suspected for some time. …

And yet much of the American media is still trying to downplay this debacle, and has responded to the Twitter Files with a mix of silence and derision.
The New York Times didn’t touch Taibbi’s story for a few days, before publishing a couple of questionably framed pieces – one reporting on the ‘debate’ around the Twitter Files, rather than the claims themselves, and one writing up Trump’s typically unhinged response to the revelations (he called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution).

On Twitter, elite journalists have gone after Taibbi, often using the same attack line – that he is ‘doing PR’ for Musk, who has been keen to expose the Hunter shenanigans since he took control of the company. Elsewhere, the story has been dismissed as a ‘nothingburger’; the suppression of the exposé painted as ‘regular comms work’ on the part of Twitter.

Where to start with all this. First off, if these people genuinely think that a story alleging that one of the two main parties successfully lent on a tech firm to censor its critics isn’t anything to worry about, they shouldn’t be in journalism.