Before we dive in, quick backstory. Gay resigned in the wake of allegations of plagiarism that @FreeBeacon (particularly @aaronsibarium) has reported on extensively. You can read the ones that immediately preceded her resignation here: freebeacon.com/campus/harvard…
A number of outlets wanted to blame anything but Gay for her own academic fraud.
@nytimes blamed “a proxy fight over campus politics” for her resignation.
It isn’t clear how this proxy fight could have caused her to commit plagiarism.
@politico did the same, blaming conservatives for doing journalism about a powerful person who had committed fraud.
And @CNN’s @MattEganCNN included perhaps the most head spinning word salad to explain how it wasn’t actually plagiarism. (H/t @SteveGuest )
That Gay could have been the victim of her own bad behavior wasn’t something some folks in the media could accept.
Instead, many blamed racism. Here’s @ibramxk, who perhaps thinks that racism did the plagiarizing.
You’ll never guess what @MSNBC’s @TheRevAl blamed it on.
And I’m sure you’ll be equally surprised to hear that @nhannahjones did the same thing.
Her coworker @MaraGay did the same thing in this mind melting interview. (H/t @tomselliott)
@NBCNews convened a panel to figure out if racism was the culprit and — you’ll never believe this — @SymoneDSanders said that it was.
Perhaps the best take, by my lights, was @AP, who is outraged that conservatives appear to have discovered the new “weapon” of journalism.
Luckily, AP and the rest of the gang have largely abandoned that mantle.
And as @peterjhasson and others have pointed out @AP took some creative liberties with their history, too.
More examples in the piece. The media didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory today. Link again is here: freebeacon.com/media/harvards…
And fear not. Gay still has a job…teaching at Harvard.
Media reaction summed up:
They haven’t stopped. Was waiting on something ridiculous from @washingtonpost and they didn’t disappoint.
No mention in the tweet about what actually caused Gay to resign: her penchant for plagiarizing
@washingtonpost One thing that I think this coverage makes clear: the mainstream media views themselves as in a pitched battle to defend not just Gay but any other powerful person who’s wrongdoing was exposed by conservatives.
That’s a horrific miscarriage of journalism.
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Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”
I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.