QUESTION ASKED: If Elon Musk Is ‘Targeting’ Twitter Employees, Isn’t The Washington Post ‘Targeting’ Elon Musk? If there is a headline, it should probably be: “Elon Musk Agrees With Twitter That Censoring the Hunter Biden Story Was Wrong.”

If Dwoskin and the Post reject that analogy, this is what they are saying: when the media industry holds people to account, it’s noble and justified; but when people outside media hold people to account, it’s an act of targeted harassment. The media then insist these acts of targeted harassment (as they define it) are newsworthy, and the cycle repeats itself.

This was the subtext of last week’s Washington Post expose on Libs of TikTok, which revealed the name of the woman behind the influential rightwing Twitter account. Libs of TikTok collects and republishes videos depicting progressive teachers and activists making comments that attract mockery from conservatives; by exposing the account, The Washington Post sought to shed light on the inner workings of the rightwing outrage machine. But the woman’s identity wasn’t particularly important to the story, and revealing it undoubtedly subjected her to considerable opprobrium.

In response, fans of Libs of TikTok relentlessly assailed the story’s author, Taylor Lorenz. Much of the anti-Lorenz campaign was itself creepy and vile. But it’s getting somewhat difficult to delineate legitimate reporting that serves the public interest from malicious spotlighting of political foes, unless one takes the clearly dubious position that exposes crafted by journalists are de facto legitimate.

To be fair, that is the view of the DNC-MSM: Taylor Lorenz is simply following the new rules of journalism.