MRC Censors Taibbi’s Bad ‘Twitter Files’ Reporting, Split With Musk

Elon Musk stenographer Matt Taibbi had a rough April. First he came out on the losing end (“smoked like a salmon,” as one observer noted) of a contentious interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in which he was called out for falsehoods in his “Twitter files” stories (you know, the selectively edited “files” Musk gave to hand-picked writers like Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) and his refusal to criticize Musk for censoring content in India at the apparent request of government officials. The interview ended up exposing and destroying the entire “Twitter files” narrative.

Shortly afterward, he split acrimoniously with Musk because Twitter was blocking links to Substack — where Taibbi had an account and which had just announced a Twitter-esque platform of its own — complete with back-and-forth allegations about who was telling the truth , Musk posting (and then deleting) screenshots of said feud, and Musk shadow-banning Taibbi’s tweets, and ultimately, Taibbi removing his “Twitter files” tweets from Twitter. (It got so bad that not only did Musk reportedly stop following Taibbi’s Twitter account, he also stopped following accounts of Shellenberger and another early “Twitter files” stenographer, Bari Weiss.)

Because the Media Research Center is a part of Musk’s PR operation, you read nothing about this at any major MRC outlet. Instead, there was an April 9 post by Tim Graham that touted Taibbi opining about somethjong else entirely:

One article hotly circulating in conservative media circles is Matt Taibbi’s breakdown of MSNBC’s complete collapse of journalism standards under Trump in a piece titled “Eat Me, MSNBC.” 

Taibbi begins by describing a January 13, 2017 appearance on the Chris Hayes show to talk about the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory in its infancy. His opponent was Malcolm Nance.

That’s right — Graham and Taibbi are commiserating about six-year-old stories. Graham didn’t mention that Taibbi’s post began with noting that he was about to be interviewed by Hasan — indeed, there’s no mention of Hasan at all — which suggests that Taibbi’s post was intended to be a prebuttal of sorts in case the MSNBC interview went south for him (which it did). Instead, Graham tried to insist that Taibbi was not a right-wing hack despite pushing right-wing narratives:

Leftists can claim that Taibbi switched sides, and it’s certainly true that all his fans now are largely on the right. But if people cared about journalistic accuracy first and ideology second, they’d do more to consider how much the “mainstream” media distorted the 2016 election throughout most of the Trump presidency.

Graham, of course, is much less concerned about journalistic accuracy when right-wing outlets like Fox News are the ones not engaging in it.

Hasan’s interview with Taibbi finally got (briefly) mentioned by the MRC a couple weeks after the fact — in an April 21 column by Jeffrey Lord complaining that a Democratic congresswoman reminded Taibbi that false testimony to Congress (based on errors in his “Twitter files” work) could be considered perjury. Lord declared that this was a “threat” and that Taibbi had simply made a “typo” (it was actually much more), going on to uncritically repeated a claim from the right-wing Daily Caller that the claim was based on a “debunked allegation” by Hasan, then rushed to impose the tired right-wing victimhood narrative on the situation:

Taibbi’s offense? As Fox News reported, Taibbi had merely made a typo in a Tweet, in which he cited an MSNBC journalist, which Taibbi corrected. And note? The irony here is that Taibbi is famous as a left-leaning journalist. No matter.

[…]

They want to threaten a journalist with jail, have the government “regulate” Fox – read: silence – or simply set about “trashing (‘redecorating’) the offices of legislators who resist” their policy proposals. 

[…]

For silencing both conservative media and conservatives anywhere, using government when possible or flat-out threats of violence if needed. They are, in fact, the real threat to democracy.

If the whole Elon Musk Twitter files episode has revealed anything it is the massive degree to which the U.S. government colluded with lefties running Twitter to silence conservatives, whether former President Trump or just Joe Average. Whether it is conservatives on social media or college campuses or in Hollywood or on woke corporate boards (hello, Budweiser) and more, the instinctive response of those on the Left is not to debate it is to silence.

Lord didn’t actually discredit anything Hasan said in that interview, nor did he mention that Taibbi split with Musk over his censorship of Substack links.