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Did the president merely tap into this simmering sentiment, or did he inflame it? Recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the reluctance of large news organizati

by aazaa 6y ago

Did the president merely tap into this simmering sentiment, or did he inflame it? Recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the reluctance of large news organizations to even mention the Hunter Biden laptop story. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int... As someone who sees this story as hard to believe for a number of reasons, the broad resolve among large news organization to avoid that story raises some serious questions in my mind. This is not how the press is supposed to work. And it's definitely not how the press reacted to the Steele Dossier, which has similar problems with provenance of information and motivation. That kind of environment in which the press seems to take sides makes fertile ground for conspiracy theories. If you can't trust the press to be unbiased, then how can you believe anything they say? Along comes someone who claims to have all the answers and away you go, full speed to QAnon Station. A lot of people believe the Russia investigation was in fact its own form of conspiracy theory, cooked up by a party outraged that it lost an election it thought it had in the bag.

zamalek 6y ago
The conspiracy theory for the conspiracy theory is that his campaign owns/runs Q. Q is responsible for many of the other conspiracy theories following that. In my opinion everyone needs to cool down. America is polarized over being correct, not being happy.
- koboll 6y ago
  Q is Jim Watkins, or perhaps someone close to him. He's the one who owns the site that Q (now, after the Christchurch shooting) posts "drops" on. I seriously doubt anyone from Trump's orbit is involved. Qanon was a huge thorn in their side.
sagichmal 6y ago
I'm confused as to your intent here. The Hunter Biden laptop story was one of those QAnon conspiracy theories.
- toomim 6y ago
  And thus the problem: There's no objective distinction between a "conspiracy theory" and a legitimate investigation. So we have one side saying "You're caught up in conspiracy theories!" and the other saying "You're censoring the truth!" How do you solve that?
  - Bjartr 6y ago
    You teach effective critical thinking in schools nationwide for a couple of decades. You encourage empathy for those you disagree with. You tolerate intolerant people (but not their intolerant views)
  - Guvante 6y ago
    You dig deeper and tell everyone what you found. For the laptop story there was nothing to be found. Verification takes time, when someone dumps a ton of information publicly and exclaims it is true there is no avoiding some people believing it no matter what happens. If we are afraid about censoring that being transparent about what is censored and verifying it afterwards can help with that. However I don't think there is a true solve to misinformation. Lies are catchier than the truth after all.
  - lwhi 6y ago
    As terms, 'conspiracy theory' and 'fact' both feel loaded today. I wonder whether reverting to more neutral labelling would held create a less heated dialogue? Founded and unfounded, for example.
- throwaway84195 6y ago
  I think of the Hunter Biden laptop story as being a lame Swiftboating slimy character assassination that isn't exactly a new thing in politics. Qanon is a different beast altogether because it stokes this really paranoid "they're all against you" mentality that a large portion of the population seems to have been increasingly susceptible to in recent years.
  - cle 6y ago
projektfu 6y ago
For one thing, the Steele dossier was hinted at but not actually released during the election. That's understandable, as it was a piece of opposition research. I read that the Steele dossier was delivered to the press for a while before Buzzfeed leaked it. Then it was discussed as news. The news organizations were sitting on the document and afterward they said they were verifying its claims.
jgoewert 6y ago
So, why should news organizations give credit to a story whose primary source is a very out of scope Rudy and even the editor who wrote the initial story wouldn't pen their name to it because when they even tried doing basic preliminary journalism to confirm any part of the story that they were left with zippo and the only reason it had to be written is that their bosses wanted it? The only serious question about it would be that who in their right mind would believe a story that Hunter flew across the US from CA to NY to use some shifty $35 hole in the wall laptop repair place, drop off a pile of laptops, fly home, completely forget about them, the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things", instead of taking them to the FBI or police, decided that Rudy Giuliani needed them, which then Rudy sat on them for a few months before letting anyone know. Oh, and the mere possession and non-reporting of the "bad things" on the laptop are a felony in and of itself. Wow... interesting that actual journalists wouldn't even give the story the time of day. Do you expect CNN to do daily breaking news segments on how Sandy Hook wasn't fiction because some right wing radio opinionist is still spouting off daily that the dead kids were actors? The Steele dossier came from an information agent with a background of competent and viable information and journalists worked on vetting the information before sending any out.
- rzz3 6y ago
  Er except we’ve DKIM validated some of the emails, and they’re concerning in their own right. It’s worth the media at least asking some tough questions about Hunter. If you ignore the conspiracy theory aspects of all of this, the raw facts themselves are still concerning enough to ask questions.
  - Craighead 6y ago
    Where is the DKIM validation evidence?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    They've validated 1. of the emails, not "some": https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim And frankly, possession of a single legitimate email's source text, for an intermediate-profile individual from a corporate account, doesn't somehow prove anything else (which again: is zilch - nothing else about this story is verifiable - it reeks of an intelligence op, especially since Rudy Giuliani is known by the FBI to be routinely in contact with known Russian intelligence operatives).
Guvante 6y ago
So the core problem with most of the complaints about it is that nothing substantial ever came out implicating Joe Biden in any way. Some people claimed there was evidence but none was presented. The news as a whole shrugging off a story about Hunter Biden makes perfect sense, it wasn't about Joe except in so far and Hunter might have name dropped him.
mythrwy 6y ago
Even worse the people have been watching the media fibbing to them nonstop for 20+ years, since Iraq at least. This is how you get people like Alex Jones. People see the lie, start looking for the truth and here is guy saying "I'll tell you what is really going on!" and if they weave a coherent soundings story (which the media fails to do... they just move on to the next talking point) people take it as reality. No matter how you feel politically the media is a big part of the divide issues in the U.S today. They have behaved horribly irresponsibly.
- loopz 6y ago
  You cannot hold the media accountable for the lies of republicans? Modern media is profit-based and just reports on who said what. Unfortunately, this is not enough to keep people informed. And nobody can claim absolute truth anyways, though facts do exist and need to be recognized.
  - mythrwy 6y ago
    Who said anything about Republicans? I specifically mention the Iraq war. No, that's not what media has been doing. And these are the results we get. This isn't a partisan statement but a simple statement of cause and effect.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Iraq war was initiated by Republicans, despite world-wide protests and lack of evidence of WMDs.
      - mythrwy 6y ago
        True, but entirely irrelevant to the point being made. Did you not read the post you respond to or are you just engaged in shallow partisan trolling? I can't decide. If you'd like to ignore my point it's fine. But it's how it is. It's reality.
        6y ago
Angostura 6y ago
> This is not how the press is supposed to work. It really is. As a former journalist, I can tell you a lot of crackpot stories come across our desks. We look at them, will see if the evidence can ‘stand up’ the story - if not, it gets spiked.
senux 6y ago
I think you raise a good point here, but one that is essentially invalidated by years of journalism that's mostly funded and managed by people with a lot of interest in the political discourse. Very little of "the press" or "journalism" that reaches the true majority of people can be considered much more than entertainment television. Not only that, they have very clear goals, partisan alignments, and deals to own up to. My point being, this picture of "the press" is not new nor is it simple to unravel, especially because a lot of the coverage we see, and how it's done, depends on a multitude of factors. Let's take, for example, your point about the Hunter Biden story and let's allow ourselves to conjecture for a moment. In a "press" state such as the one I described above, a big part of the "news media" is running amok with the story regardless of having little to no evidence to back it up. On the other hand, the world is still spinning and news that are noteworthy are still coming out. One might even say people should know about these things. What's one to do in face of such situation? Do we expect that the "news media" devote all focus to arguing the conspiracy theory, which will most likely boost the conversation around it, or should we expect the "news media" to focus on things that can actually be proven, assessed, researched? Of course, this is one narrow example that only scratches the surface of something that, like I said, is very complex. But I do believe that, considering the current environment, it's more harmful to debate the conspiracy stories than to ignore them. Consider any other conspiracy theory that you ever heard of. Would it be beneficial for anyone to have constant debate on television about whether or not the Earth is round, or if men have been to the Moon, etc.
sharken 6y ago
I’d say Trump tapped into the sentiment of conspiracy theories by adding many of his own. But in Europe, America have always been bigger and crazier, so it’s not a big surprise to hear about the conspiracy theories. Hopefully the US can now move forward in a positive and constructive way, but the two-party system does seem to get in the way of improving things. Either you’re for or against, without any real middle ground. If Biden can overcome that he is already on his way to become a great president.
datway 6y ago
What is coverage of the Hunter Biden story supposed to say? Rudy Guiliani claims he has a laptop that has some emails but refuses to produce the laptop. There is no way a news organization can verify the claims, and the claim itself is just hearsay. The reason it hasn't been covered is because there is nothing a news organization can publish about it. Fox News passed on it. It is most likely simply bullshit.
dkarl 6y ago
Large news organizations did run stories. They investigated, found no corroborating evidence, and ran boring stories to that effect. Glenn Greenwald also investigated and found no corroborating evidence, but he hated that some people might take the lack of a smoking gun as evidence that there was no corruption connected to Biden, so he thought the media should use this shady, unlikely, as-yet-unsubstantiated story as a titillating hook to talk really loudly about all the possible ways that Biden and his son might be corrupt. I can kind of see his point, since everybody in Washington seems to regard Hunter Biden as a completely unexceptional person of no particular merit who makes huge amounts of money because of who his father is, and that should be a scandal, though more a general scandal about the system than about the Bidens specifically. On the other hand, that's no excuse to make a huge news story out of an unsubstantiated story fed to the media by partisan operatives a few weeks before an election. If they did that, these stories would arise before every election, and part of the political contest between the parties would be competing to come up with the best juicy lies. Considering what a free buffet that would be for the media, I'm honestly surprised that they managed to refrain.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
> Glenn Greenwald What is going on with him? I started following him in ~1997 when Salon.com was a burgeoning news site. He's taken some pretty extreme views since (essentially) expatriating.
xenadu02 6y ago
Hunter Biden wasn't running for president. He's an adult responsible for his own choices. If he were trying to profit off his father he'd hardly be the first child to attempt to do so - that probably applies to a third of congress. For some reason I just can't get the thought out of my head that if this were a kooky story about a rando laptop repair shop in San Francisco that claimed it had Ivanka's laptops with proof she was doing something nefarious you wouldn't have any of these same qualms about the news media treating it skeptically.

by aazaa 6y ago

zamalek 6y ago

The conspiracy theory for the conspiracy theory is that his campaign owns/runs Q. Q is responsible for many of the other conspiracy theories following that. In my opinion everyone needs to cool down. America is polarized over being correct, not being happy.

koboll 6y ago
Q is Jim Watkins, or perhaps someone close to him. He's the one who owns the site that Q (now, after the Christchurch shooting) posts "drops" on. I seriously doubt anyone from Trump's orbit is involved. Qanon was a huge thorn in their side.

sagichmal 6y ago

I'm confused as to your intent here. The Hunter Biden laptop story was one of those QAnon conspiracy theories.

toomim 6y ago
And thus the problem: There's no objective distinction between a "conspiracy theory" and a legitimate investigation. So we have one side saying "You're caught up in conspiracy theories!" and the other saying "You're censoring the truth!" How do you solve that?
- Bjartr 6y ago
  You teach effective critical thinking in schools nationwide for a couple of decades. You encourage empathy for those you disagree with. You tolerate intolerant people (but not their intolerant views)
- Guvante 6y ago
  You dig deeper and tell everyone what you found. For the laptop story there was nothing to be found. Verification takes time, when someone dumps a ton of information publicly and exclaims it is true there is no avoiding some people believing it no matter what happens. If we are afraid about censoring that being transparent about what is censored and verifying it afterwards can help with that. However I don't think there is a true solve to misinformation. Lies are catchier than the truth after all.
- lwhi 6y ago
  As terms, 'conspiracy theory' and 'fact' both feel loaded today. I wonder whether reverting to more neutral labelling would held create a less heated dialogue? Founded and unfounded, for example.
throwaway84195 6y ago
I think of the Hunter Biden laptop story as being a lame Swiftboating slimy character assassination that isn't exactly a new thing in politics. Qanon is a different beast altogether because it stokes this really paranoid "they're all against you" mentality that a large portion of the population seems to have been increasingly susceptible to in recent years.
- cle 6y ago

projektfu 6y ago

For one thing, the Steele dossier was hinted at but not actually released during the election. That's understandable, as it was a piece of opposition research. I read that the Steele dossier was delivered to the press for a while before Buzzfeed leaked it. Then it was discussed as news. The news organizations were sitting on the document and afterward they said they were verifying its claims.

jgoewert 6y ago

So, why should news organizations give credit to a story whose primary source is a very out of scope Rudy and even the editor who wrote the initial story wouldn't pen their name to it because when they even tried doing basic preliminary journalism to confirm any part of the story that they were left with zippo and the only reason it had to be written is that their bosses wanted it? The only serious question about it would be that who in their right mind would believe a story that Hunter flew across the US from CA to NY to use some shifty $35 hole in the wall laptop repair place, drop off a pile of laptops, fly home, completely forget about them, the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things", instead of taking them to the FBI or police, decided that Rudy Giuliani needed them, which then Rudy sat on them for a few months before letting anyone know. Oh, and the mere possession and non-reporting of the "bad things" on the laptop are a felony in and of itself. Wow... interesting that actual journalists wouldn't even give the story the time of day. Do you expect CNN to do daily breaking news segments on how Sandy Hook wasn't fiction because some right wing radio opinionist is still spouting off daily that the dead kids were actors? The Steele dossier came from an information agent with a background of competent and viable information and journalists worked on vetting the information before sending any out.

rzz3 6y ago
Er except we’ve DKIM validated some of the emails, and they’re concerning in their own right. It’s worth the media at least asking some tough questions about Hunter. If you ignore the conspiracy theory aspects of all of this, the raw facts themselves are still concerning enough to ask questions.
- Craighead 6y ago
  Where is the DKIM validation evidence?
- XorNot 6y ago
  They've validated 1. of the emails, not "some": https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim And frankly, possession of a single legitimate email's source text, for an intermediate-profile individual from a corporate account, doesn't somehow prove anything else (which again: is zilch - nothing else about this story is verifiable - it reeks of an intelligence op, especially since Rudy Giuliani is known by the FBI to be routinely in contact with known Russian intelligence operatives).

Guvante 6y ago

So the core problem with most of the complaints about it is that nothing substantial ever came out implicating Joe Biden in any way. Some people claimed there was evidence but none was presented. The news as a whole shrugging off a story about Hunter Biden makes perfect sense, it wasn't about Joe except in so far and Hunter might have name dropped him.

mythrwy 6y ago

Even worse the people have been watching the media fibbing to them nonstop for 20+ years, since Iraq at least. This is how you get people like Alex Jones. People see the lie, start looking for the truth and here is guy saying "I'll tell you what is really going on!" and if they weave a coherent soundings story (which the media fails to do... they just move on to the next talking point) people take it as reality. No matter how you feel politically the media is a big part of the divide issues in the U.S today. They have behaved horribly irresponsibly.

loopz 6y ago
You cannot hold the media accountable for the lies of republicans? Modern media is profit-based and just reports on who said what. Unfortunately, this is not enough to keep people informed. And nobody can claim absolute truth anyways, though facts do exist and need to be recognized.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  Who said anything about Republicans? I specifically mention the Iraq war. No, that's not what media has been doing. And these are the results we get. This isn't a partisan statement but a simple statement of cause and effect.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Iraq war was initiated by Republicans, despite world-wide protests and lack of evidence of WMDs.
    - mythrwy 6y ago
      True, but entirely irrelevant to the point being made. Did you not read the post you respond to or are you just engaged in shallow partisan trolling? I can't decide. If you'd like to ignore my point it's fine. But it's how it is. It's reality.
      - 6y ago

Angostura 6y ago

> This is not how the press is supposed to work. It really is. As a former journalist, I can tell you a lot of crackpot stories come across our desks. We look at them, will see if the evidence can ‘stand up’ the story - if not, it gets spiked.

senux 6y ago

I think you raise a good point here, but one that is essentially invalidated by years of journalism that's mostly funded and managed by people with a lot of interest in the political discourse. Very little of "the press" or "journalism" that reaches the true majority of people can be considered much more than entertainment television. Not only that, they have very clear goals, partisan alignments, and deals to own up to. My point being, this picture of "the press" is not new nor is it simple to unravel, especially because a lot of the coverage we see, and how it's done, depends on a multitude of factors. Let's take, for example, your point about the Hunter Biden story and let's allow ourselves to conjecture for a moment. In a "press" state such as the one I described above, a big part of the "news media" is running amok with the story regardless of having little to no evidence to back it up. On the other hand, the world is still spinning and news that are noteworthy are still coming out. One might even say people should know about these things. What's one to do in face of such situation? Do we expect that the "news media" devote all focus to arguing the conspiracy theory, which will most likely boost the conversation around it, or should we expect the "news media" to focus on things that can actually be proven, assessed, researched? Of course, this is one narrow example that only scratches the surface of something that, like I said, is very complex. But I do believe that, considering the current environment, it's more harmful to debate the conspiracy stories than to ignore them. Consider any other conspiracy theory that you ever heard of. Would it be beneficial for anyone to have constant debate on television about whether or not the Earth is round, or if men have been to the Moon, etc.

sharken 6y ago

I’d say Trump tapped into the sentiment of conspiracy theories by adding many of his own. But in Europe, America have always been bigger and crazier, so it’s not a big surprise to hear about the conspiracy theories. Hopefully the US can now move forward in a positive and constructive way, but the two-party system does seem to get in the way of improving things. Either you’re for or against, without any real middle ground. If Biden can overcome that he is already on his way to become a great president.

datway 6y ago

What is coverage of the Hunter Biden story supposed to say? Rudy Guiliani claims he has a laptop that has some emails but refuses to produce the laptop. There is no way a news organization can verify the claims, and the claim itself is just hearsay. The reason it hasn't been covered is because there is nothing a news organization can publish about it. Fox News passed on it. It is most likely simply bullshit.

dkarl 6y ago

Large news organizations did run stories. They investigated, found no corroborating evidence, and ran boring stories to that effect. Glenn Greenwald also investigated and found no corroborating evidence, but he hated that some people might take the lack of a smoking gun as evidence that there was no corruption connected to Biden, so he thought the media should use this shady, unlikely, as-yet-unsubstantiated story as a titillating hook to talk really loudly about all the possible ways that Biden and his son might be corrupt. I can kind of see his point, since everybody in Washington seems to regard Hunter Biden as a completely unexceptional person of no particular merit who makes huge amounts of money because of who his father is, and that should be a scandal, though more a general scandal about the system than about the Bidens specifically. On the other hand, that's no excuse to make a huge news story out of an unsubstantiated story fed to the media by partisan operatives a few weeks before an election. If they did that, these stories would arise before every election, and part of the political contest between the parties would be competing to come up with the best juicy lies. Considering what a free buffet that would be for the media, I'm honestly surprised that they managed to refrain.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

> Glenn Greenwald What is going on with him? I started following him in ~1997 when Salon.com was a burgeoning news site. He's taken some pretty extreme views since (essentially) expatriating.

xenadu02 6y ago

Hunter Biden wasn't running for president. He's an adult responsible for his own choices. If he were trying to profit off his father he'd hardly be the first child to attempt to do so - that probably applies to a third of congress. For some reason I just can't get the thought out of my head that if this were a kooky story about a rando laptop repair shop in San Francisco that claimed it had Ivanka's laptops with proof she was doing something nefarious you wouldn't have any of these same qualms about the news media treating it skeptically.