Press Corps Fails to Challenge White House Over Plan to ‘Keep a Close Eye’ on Elon Musk’s Twitter
This week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made an eye-popping and alarming statement.
During Monday’s White House press briefing, Reuters White House correspondent Andrea Shalal asked Jean-Pierre about disinformation spreading on the Elon Musk-owned Twitter:
There’s a researcher at Stanford who says that this is a critical moment, really, in terms of ensuring that Twitter does not become a vector for misinformation. I mean, are you concerned about the — you know, Elon Musk says there’s more and more subscribers coming online. Are you concerned about that? And what tools do you have? Who is it at the White House that is really keeping track of this?
Jean-Pierre responded:
So, look, this is something that we’re certainly keeping an eye on. And, look, we — you know, we have always been very clear and — that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation, when we — when it comes to the hate that we’re seeing, that they take action, that they continue to take action.
Again, we’re all keeping a close eye on this. We’re all monitoring what’s — what’s currently occurring. And we see — you know, we see it with our own eyes of what you all are reporting and, just for ourselves, what’s happening on Twitter.
But again, social media companies have a responsibility to prevent their platforms from being used by any user to incite violence, especially violence directed at individual communities, as we have been seeing. And the president has been very clear on calling that out. He’ll continue to do that. And we’re going to continue to monitor the situation.
This response – that the administration will be monitoring how the private platform is handling its policies – should have prompted a torrent of questions from journalists on the reasoning, the ethics, the wisdom, and/or the practicality of the endeavor. And it would have prompted them, were this a Republican administration.
Instead, to Biden and KJP, not one member of the White House press corps challenged the major policy remark. The same mainstream media that referred to Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s comments about Apple as a “threat” were unconcerned by the leader of the free world singling out one company — an American company — for special monitoring.
Reporters have had more than enough time since the briefing to follow-up and confront the White House about what amounts to a warning to Musk they want a say in what’s kosher or not on Twitter.
This demonstrates bias by omission, much as the way they ask (or don’t ask) politicians about the actions of the posing party demonstrates it.
They almost always ask Democrats to react to what Republicans are saying or doing, but only rarely the other way around. It once again reveals cable networks CNN and MSNBC especially are overtly friendly to Democrats and their messaging, and naturally hostile to Republicans and theirs.
It falls to one journalist, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, to buck that system. He was the only reporter to ask House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) about the Biden White House’s Twitter monitoring that ought to have raised more than just these few eyebrows.
Regardless of where one stands politically, the comment by Karine Jean-Pierre stating an intent by the Biden administration should warrant intense scrutiny from the press — which again would have been enormous and long-lasting were it a Republican. Not because of a duty to parity or “both sides-ism”, but because of the role of the press as a check on power.
Remember that role, journalists? Because Elon Musk isn’t the government. Joe Biden and the Democrats are.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
