The notoriously left-wing Washington Post revealed much of its worldview this week in a report on the ongoing release of the Twitter Files. That the paper is even covering the story at all is perhaps a miracle. But in the spirit of “conservatives pounce,” the Post either deliberately misled its readers or made a ridiculously wrong assumption about the independent journalists enlisted by Twitter CEO Elon Musk to share the internal communications of the platform during the 2020 election and its aftermath.
In a story about Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, and his direct involvement in the decision to create a justification to ban Trump from Twitter, the paper described Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss as “conservative journalists.”
As head of trust and safety at Twitter, Roth was involved in many of the platform’s decisions about what posts to remove and what accounts to suspend. His communications with other Twitter officials have been posted in recent days as part of what Musk calls the Twitter Files, a series of tweets by conservative journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Taibbi shared the first installment of the Twitter Files, which focused on Twitter’s internal discussions leading the platform to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, despite many objections to the justification that it fell under the platform’s “hacked materials” policy. The second installment, shared by Bari Weiss, exposed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of notable conservatives, including Fox News personality Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, and Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Of course, neither Weiss nor Taibbi can be considered conservative in any way, shape, or form. Both journalists lean to the center-left of the political spectrum and have extensive bodies of work that easily prove this.
Also for our VIPs: Head of Twitter’s Censorship Team Shadowbanning Conservatives Worked for Both FBI and CIA
It was actually a brilliant move by Musk to use independent-minded liberal journalists to publish the Twitter Files, and the Washington Post likely understood this. Are we really expected to believe that none of the three journalists who contributed to the article — Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn, or Naomi Nix — knew Taibbi and Weiss are liberals? Or is it more plausible that they were attempting to create a narrative that Musk (who is also not conservative) has been conspiring with conservative journalists to release damaging information about Twitter? And therefore, the information being released is part of a partisan effort and cannot be trusted?
“‘Conservative’ is just a smear to the MSM. It has no other meaning except to brand someone as unworthy. To signal to its readership that such a person can be safely ignored,” journalist and author Abigail Shrier tweeted.
“Conservative” is just a smear to the MSM. It has no other meaning except to brand someone as unworthy. To signal to its readership that such a person can be safely ignored. https://t.co/SEyb6ebMPw
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) December 13, 2022
The Washington Post was quickly called out on social media for the false label. After an inquiry from Fox News Digital, the article was updated to omit the word “conservative.” However, they did not acknowledge the correction in the article, choosing instead to perform a “stealth edit” and pretend the error never existed — which tells us that it was likely a deliberate deception and not an accidental error.
Taibbi found the situation amusing.
“That is hilarious,” he told Fox News Digital. “Anyone who steps out of line in any way is labeled conservative or pro-Trump now. It’s automatic and predictable.”
