FREDDIE DE BOER ON The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw.
While I’m not really interested at all in the Twitter files as such, I am always interested in the meta-discursive details of how the media talks to itself. The large majority of our media that is not explicitly conservative seems to have fallen into almost total unanimity that the Twitter files are not worth paying attention to, that Musk’s leadership is bad, and that the people reporting on the Twitter files are bad as well. And I’m interested in how these orthodoxies develop within media. I’m interested, in other words, in the Maw.
The Maw is, broadly speaking, the expression of the culture war as operationalized by the consensus opinions of media. The Maw is the aggregate of opinions of paid-up journalists and writers and pundits and, specifically, the opinions they will allow. When a big story breaks, there’s an initial feeling-out period where the media talks to itself and decides what the consensus opinion will be. As time has gone on, this process has gotten faster and faster, so that now the media consensus and the expectation that all decent people will glom onto it develop in a matter of minutes. What’s interesting about the Twitter files is that both an inciting incident (the Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship by Twitter) and an eventual consequence of it (the release of the Twitter files) fell into the Maw with incredible speed. Immediately, in 2020, the enforced consensus within media was that there was no story to speak of regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was not only not worthy of influencing the election, it should not have been reported on at all, and Twitter’s decision to artificially limit its spread was justified. So too with the Twitter files: as soon as Matt Taibi started tweeting about them, it seems, most in newsmedia were convinced they were unimportant. This is the Maw at work – it’s the expression of culture war in what the media sees as a respectable position to hold. In the Maw, nothing independent survives. . . .
Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.
Think of them as paid Democratic Party operatives and you won’t go far wrong. In fact, you won’t go wrong at all.