After the initial rush of parroting its Media Research Center parent on hyping the selectively released “Twitter files” that Elon Musk gave to handpicked reporters, CNSNews.com slowed the pace and move toward reaction pieces/. A Dec. 9 article by Craig Bannister featured a right-wing radio host:
After proof that Twitter had shadow banned him was revealed, conservative commentator Dan Bongino said the liberal media, that had adamantly denied the censorship, will never apologize.
“The press completely lied about this. Now, they’ve got this whole, ‘All of this is a big nothing- burger; Twitter can do what they want’ That’s not what they said,” Bongino noted an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Friday:
[…]On Thursday, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk released tweets showing that Twitter had previously censored and suppressed the posts and accounts of conservatives, including Dan Bongino. “When’s the apology come for me? The answer is never,” Bongino said, explaining that apologizing is not what communists, fascists, and others who relish in the abuse of power, do:
A Dec. 13 article by Bannister noted that “Three-fourths all U.S. likely voters think that social media companies like Facebook are censoring content because of political bias, and three-fourths of Democrat voters [sic] agree, but Democrats are much less likely to want Congress to do anything about it – and much more concerned about so-called ‘misinformation’ posted on social media sites.” It w as a biased Rasmussen Reports poll, so “misinformation” was in scare quotes throughout without an explanation of why.
Bannister cheered the mean-spirited crassness from a Fox News host in a Dec. 16 article:
On Tuesday, late-night television Host Greg Gutfeld defended the decision by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, to end the social media company’s $13 million dollar a year free lunch program for employees.
While Musk has been vilified by liberal media for cancelling free lunches, comedian/commentator Gutfeld sided with him, while simultaneously taking a shot at Joy Behar, co-host of the rabid, left-wing talk television show, “The View”:
“On Sunday, he announced plans to end free lunches at Twitter headquarters, saying the meals cost the company $13 million bucks a year. That’s still $2 million less than ‘The View’ spends on feeding Joy Behar.”
It says a lot about Bannister as a person that he thought Gutfeld’s ugly smear was worth amplification.
The Musk stenography cobntinued as well. A Dec. 12 article by Susan Jones hyped that “Before the 2020 election, Twitter executives were ‘clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content,’ according to Friday’s dump of the ‘Twitter files,’ as reported by Matt Taibbi.”
The fluff continued: A Dec. 18 article by Patrick Goodenough noted that Musk “posted a poll asking users whether or not they want him to stay on at the helm, and promising to accept the outcome,” then updated it to show that a majority of users want him gone. A Dec. 21 article by Bannister noted another poll Musk posted on whether Congress should approve an omnibus spending bill, adding that “more than seventy percent of the 3.1 million Twitter users who voted said ‘No.'”
Jones returned to Musk stenography for a Dec. 27 article hyping how “The latest edition of the “Twitter Files,” a saga of censorship and shadow-banning, shows that Twitter, with input from the White House, ‘rigged’ the debate over COVID — a debate that continues to this day.” Managing editor Michael W. Chapman did stenography for Republicans in an article the next day:
Two prominent House Republicans, who will be in the majority come January, sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray stating that new information shows the agency “coordinated extensively with Twitter to censor or otherwise affect content on Twitter’s platform.”
The letter also demands that the law-enforcement agency turn over all records, communications between FBI agents and Twitter employees or contractors, as well as “all documents and communications” between FBI agents and 23 specific Twitter employees who are named in the letter, such as Yoel Roth, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde.
CNs’ “commentary” side weighed in as well. A Dec. 15 column by R. Emmett Tyrrell gushed over Musk for being the richest man in the world and, thus, brilliant, which somehow means we should trust whatever he does with Twitter. A Dec. 16 column by Josh Hammer was similarly gushy over the “promising new path forward” Musk established and how he is “answering the call of his civic duty as the world’s wealthiest man,” but also argued that “concerted public policy and legal changes are still needed to wrest control away from powerful Silicon Valley bureaucrats and to restore that control to its rightful place: with the American people.” We thought conservatives opposed the taking of private property.
Ron Paul, meanwhile, decided in a Dec. 20 column that the FBI working with Twitter to counter extremism and misinformation means that the FBI must be dismantled:
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.
[…]We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Tyrrell penned a Dec. 22 column again fawning over Musk:
As of this week, Musk is proving himself to be quite possibly the most refreshing force in American politics in years. All he really has to do is keep Twitter — as he has said — really neutral. That means open it to conservative voices that have been shut out of Twitter for years.
[…]One of the aspects of modern-day America is that it is so boring. Musk quite possibly could make it lively again. Let us give him a chance.
Tyrrell did not mention that Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of people who made fun of him and of journalists who reported on him, so fairness and neutrality is clearly not on the guy’s agenda.