The Presidency of the Joes, part II: lol documents

[ChrisV]

It’s been obvious for some time - like since the election campaign itself - that 1) the emails supposedly recovered from the laptop were genuine and 2) the claimed laptop source was almost certainly not the actual means by which they were obtained. I think the press did a good job in ignoring the story in a context in which they were obviously being manipulated. Here I am in Oct 2020, in fact:

@ChrisV

We live in a world of information asymmetry, where the intelligence services of powerful states have access to virtually limitless information, while the powerless have access to very little. If you simply report whatever subset of “facts” is provided to you, it’s very obvious you will become a pawn of powerful interests, which is precisely what happened with Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign, something still unacknowledged by Glenn [Greenwald]. If you are provided with a subset of facts curated by a powerful interest from a larger pool of information, you frequently lack the context required to decide whether the public good is being served or not.

But the reason for this “cone of silence” is that the story is fundamentally bullshit. Contra Greenwald, it is actually the job of journalists to decide this. Take 9/11 conspiracy theory. If I was just to report, without context or explanation, a whole bunch of the “weird facts” at the center of the theorising - the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” stuff - is that job done, as a journalist? Just bukkake the audience with facts and hope they can work out what’s true? Or is my job to decide that the story is bullshit and either make a report explaining why, or not report the story at all? Put another way, what is the most important thing to report about 9/11 conspiracy - a) jet fuel can’t melt steel, which is factually true, or b) the conspiracy story is bullshit?

So the responsible thing to do is to start by saying - the content of the emails isn’t very impressive, this is an attempt to create confusion before the election, this is the latest in a line of ginned-up non scandals created by Republicans, give a couple examples. THEN, fine, you can get into “btw Schiff is a pathological liar”, fine.

The content of the emails was suggestive of Hunter wanting to peddle his father’s influence, but it was far from conclusive that his father was willing to go along with this, which is the ingredient required to make it a genuinely big story.