COLLUSION: Matt Taibbi: FOIA Files: Clemson University: The FOIA request we sent Clemson University reveals a tight-knit relationship between university professors, federal law enforcement, and the news media.

What is the Media Forensics Hub? Described as “an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to study and combat online deception,” the project kicked off in 2017. That was the year communications professor Darren Linvill and economics professor Patrick Warren joined forces to “uncover and expose” millions of tweets they attributed to Russian trolls. Sponsored by the taxpayer-funded South Carolina Research Authority, the Hub was officially launched in May 2020. Two years later, along with the University at Buffalo and several other institutions, it received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Last May, Racket filed a FOIA request with Clemson. Our search produced a series of emails that make explicit reference to the university’s dealings with federal law enforcement agencies (providing Clemson “help with resources,” among other things), social media companies, and the news media. The Clemson files are difficult to summarize, but offer probably the most comprehensive portrait we’ve gotten yet of the role such ostensibly non-governmental “anti-disinformation” research institutions can play as middleman organizations. These emails also document the high degree of influence the school had with federal agencies and media, even if Twitter was not always as cooperative.

A summary of key communications is listed below, while three new batches of documents have been uploaded to the Racket FOIA library, where as always, they’re not paywalled.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Urgent warning to change all of your logins NOW as hacker leaks 10BILLION passwords from dozens of popular websites.

‘Xmas came early this year,’ ObamaCare wrote on the forum.

‘I present to you a new rockyou2024 password list with over 9.9 billion passwords.’

The hacker added that they ‘also cracked some old ones with [their] new 4090,’ – a high-end Nvidia graphics card – containing ‘actual new real passwords from users.’

The file was released in a 45.6-gigabyte .zip archive using leaked records from sites like X (formerly Twitter), AdultFriendFinder, MyFitnessPal, LinkedIn and Adobe.

The top two impacted brands are Chinese-based companies that far surpass other online companies.

They include 1.5 billion from Tencent – a tech company that provides internet services – and 504 million from social media platform Weibo.

No better time than now to update your password for Twitter, Adobe, LinkedIn, Evite, and others.

FINALLY: Japan declares victory in 20-year ‘war on floppy disks.’

Japan’s government has declared victory in a 20-year war to eliminate the widespread use of floppy disks.

The move is a key milestone in the Japanese government’s painstaking efforts to modernise its old-school office practices, with fax machines still ubiquitous in many departments.

“We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” Taro Kono, the digital minister, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, said on Wednesday.

A charismatic figure with 2.5 million followers on Twitter, Mr Kono formerly headed the defence and foreign ministries as well as the Covid vaccine deployment, taking up his current role in August 2022 after a failed bid to become prime minister.

The Digital Agency was set up during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 when a scramble to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination revealed that the government still relied on paper filing and outdated technology.

Last year, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece headlined, “Here are 10 ideas San Francisco can import from Tokyo to save downtown.” So perhaps the above news might encourage a bit more modernization in the Bay Area: San Francisco’s Train System is Still Running on Floppy Disks.

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files: Is it Okay to Lie About Trump Supporters? Brandon Straka was smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to “#WalkAway” from the Democratic Party. Internal Twitter documents suggest he and his followers were set up.

HEY HEY OH OH, THE THREE LETTER SPOOKS GOT TO GO:  Twitter Files, CIA edition.

STATE SPONSORED CENSORSHIP AND INTIMIDATION: The Overlooked Twitter Files Scandal: How the Intelligence Community Wore Down the Platform.

MATT TAIBBI:

Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.

If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.

Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).

We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.

Turn on the lights and watch the roaches scatter. And stomp on any that don’t.

DISPATCHES FROM PATIENT ZERO IN THE DISSEMINATION OF FAKE NEWS: Netflix’s Rather Celebrates Disgraced CBS News Anchor.

This is the perfect time for a documentary honoring Dan Rather. Really.

We’re watching the collapse of NPR as a trusted news source in real time thanks to Uri Berliner’s withering expose on the far-Left platform. Most mainstream journalists are covering up the fact that the U.S. President is in obvious mental decline.

Media outlets have yet to account for promoting the Russian Collusion hoax, one of many Fake News stories that eroded trust in the Fourth Estate.

Reporters now all but cheer on free speech repression, burying scandals like The Twitter Files.

What better moment to honor an anchor who still won’t cop to getting a massive story wrong?

The Washington Examiner, citing an internal CBS investigation into the scandal, sums up Rather’s work:

“an attempt by a prominent organ of the mainstream media to influence the outcome of a presidential election with a false and fraudulent story just two months before Election Day.”

Today, Rather might be given a promotion.

We’re still waiting for a single media outlet to apologize for burying the Hunter Biden laptop story. In the 2000s, the media was both left-leaning and willing to criticize itself.

Flashback to then-Washington Post-owned Slate in September of 2004: Dan Rather: The anchor as madman.

In an era where the DNC-MSM have fixated on their hatred of Bad Orange Man and their supporters as the cause of everything wrong in America, it’s difficult to see anyone in the guild attack their own in 2024.

ALMOST ALWAYS A VERY HARD DECISION: Reflections of a Newsman.

I saw this article where country singer Ashley Judd talked about being on the “other side” of coverage of tragedies. It made me take pause and reflect.

As a former photojournalist turned newsroom lawyer, I’ve had to wrestle with this from time to time. My watch-words (especially in the Media Law and Ethics classes I teach) has always been “good taste and common sense win the day.”

But it’s always a tough call. My dear friend, the late Hal Buell was the long-time Photo Chief for the Associated Press. A truly decent guy in every way. When the legendary Nick Ut made the iconic news picture below, Hal told me years later that they debated for several hours about whether they should move the file on the wire.

(Credit: Nick Ut/AP under Creative Commons license)

They decided that despite its somewhat gruesome and certainly invasive nature, it depicted a moment too important to keep from the public. IIRC, some newspaper members simply chose not to run it.

Flash forward a few years to the wild and wooly ’80’s. The standard became “if it bleeds, it leads.” Little thought was given to the sensitivities of the victim’s families, let alone the readers. Photographs like this were common:

(Credit: Paul DeMaria/NYDN via Wikimedia Commons)

As a shooter myself, I was guilty of making pictures that today might be “insensitive.” I made the photo below after hearing a police call of a shooting outside an elementary school:

(Credit: Charles Glasser/Miami Beach Sun)

Apparently this fellow was a Marielito who owed about $50 to another drug dealer. Without warning, the murderer (never caught) simply walked up behind this guy and pumped a few .38 rounds into the back of his head. (FYI: Years later, Facebook blocked this photo from view for violating “community standards.”)

Did I consider anyone’s “privacy”? Hell, it was on a public sidewalk (in front of a school, no less) and the guy wasn’t a “somebody.” No relatives to complain, no objections from readers, I even won a Florida Press Club in Spot News award for it.

Let’s flash forward to my being a newsroom lawyer a decade or so later. I’m the Global Media Counsel for Bloomberg News. In the early days of the Enron collapse, one of the top executives — a real Boy Scout — committed suicide. An outstanding reporter named Loren Steffy, got a hold of his suicide note from the Sugarland PD. What to do?

The family’s lawyer begged us not to publish it. The note itself revealed nothing personal, and didn’t name names about Enron. I had a long, deep discussion with the Editor-in-Chief. If we didn’t publish, I argued, the family would be subjected to endless conspiracy theories. By publishing, we could put the matter of his suicide to rest. He knew bad things were done, as an honest guy he couldn’t deal with it, and it was going to get worse: He wanted to apologize to his family.

We ran the note. Thoughts?

UPDATE (From Ed): 50 years on: Revisiting the myths of the ‘Napalm Girl,’ a photo ‘that doesn’t rest.’

The napalm attack was carried out by propeller-driven Skyraider aircraft of the South Vietnamese Air Force trying to roust communist forces dug in near the village – as news accounts at the time made clear.

The headline over the New York Times report from Trang Bang said: “South Vietnamese Drop Napalm on Own Troops.”

The Chicago Tribune front page of June 9, 1972, stated the “napalm [was] dropped by a Vietnamese air force Skyraider diving onto the wrong target.”

Christopher Wain, a veteran British journalist, wrote in a dispatch for United Press International: “These were South Vietnamese planes dropping napalm on South Vietnamese peasants and troops.”

The myth of American culpability at Trang Bang began taking hold during the 1972 presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate George McGovern referred to the photograph in a televised speech. The napalm that badly burned Kim Phuc, he declared, had been “dropped in the name of America.”

McGovern’s metaphoric claim anticipated similar assertions, including Susan Sontag’s statement in her 1973 book “On Photography,” that Kim Phuc had been “sprayed by American napalm.”

(The Associated Press, in an article posted online yesterday, erroneously described the aerial attack at Trang Bang as “an American napalm strike on a Vietnamese hamlet.” See screenshot nearby. The news agency later in the day corrected the error after it was noted on Twitter.)

Read the whole thing.

MAKE THEM PAY: UT Austin Administrators Tried to Punish Professor over Anti-DEI Crusade. He’s Fighting Back.

University of Texas at Austin finance professor Richard Lowery has annoyed the university’s administration by publicly criticizing its embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion and suggesting that administrators exploit their positions for their children’s admission.

Lowery’s crusade did not go unnoticed: Several university administrators — and the university president, Jay Hartzell — responded with a “campaign to silence” the professor, which included threatening his job, salary, professional affiliations, and research opportunities, according to a lawsuit Lowery filed against the administrators.

Lowery embraces the fact that his views are unpopular on campus. His bio on his now-private Twitter account reads: “All opinions are mine and almost certainly diametrically opposed to those of my employer.”

Lowery became unpopular on campus by criticizing the UT Austin’s sprawling DEI bureaucracy, which costs $13 million annually in salaries alone. The UT Austin “Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Strategic Plan” requires that “all members of faculty search committees must participate in diverse hiring training” and invests $3 million over four years to support “recruitment and hiring of faculty contributing to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The focus on DEI is exemplified by a UT Austin research program that offers a voluntary four-week study for white four- and five-year-old children and their white caregivers to learn about “anti-Black racism.” Lowery criticized the project in an op-ed for the College Fix, writing, “Imagine if such training were to be focused only on black preschool-aged children, a subset the researchers deemed deficient in patriotism.”

In response to Lowery’s public criticism of the university, Hartzell and several senior administrators pressured his supervisor at the Salem Center — a research center at the business school of UT Austin — to discipline him, according to the lawsuit. (While he likely couldn’t be fired from his tenured position as a professor, Lowery’s role at the Salem Center came with a $20,000-a-year stipend and is renewed annually.)

Possibly related: Sources: At least 20 UT employees linked to DEI to lose their jobs.

Add a zero to this and we’ll get somewhere.

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: “They got covid 100% wrong,” Don Surber wrote on Boxing Day of 2022:

On April 3, 2020, the Daily Breeze reported, “Malibu surfer in handcuffs after enjoying empty, epic waves.”

Los Angeles County sheriff deputies arrested a man who was by himself in the ocean, in the name of stopping the spread of covid. The deputies were unmasked. It was a crazy time in which authorities erred on the side of authoritarianism to stop the spread of a virus.

The experts sided with closing down the world.

[On April 2nd, 2020], The LA Times reported, “Kim Prather, a leading atmospheric chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wants to yell out her window at every surfer, runner, and biker she spots along the San Diego coast.”

She told the paper, “I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now.”

Why?

Covid is a virus. Viruses spread from person to person — or according to those covering up for Red China, from bat to person. And yet the government ordered everyone inside.

That was dumb. But it is worse. We now know by staying indoors and vegetating, people made themselves weaker.

NPR reported two days before Christmas, “A regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19, recently published research shows.

But so much for aquatic exercising in the once-Golden State. As Jack Dunphy noted at the PJ Mothership on April 6th of 2020: Crackdowns on Lone Surfers and Paddleboarders Threaten to Erode Respect for Law Enforcement Even Further.

Despite, as Surber noted, their getting covid 100% wrong, corporatists on both sides of the equation weren’t afraid to use their power to bend reality: The Twitter Files show the unholy alliance of state and corporate power.

Even if social media content is not protected by the First Amendment, and even if Twitter, as a private company, can create its own “terms of service” and just decide to banish whomever they want, a key question posed by the Twitter Files is: what if the government is telling this private company to do so?

Isn’t that just an end run around the First Amendment’s protections of our right to free speech? I’m no lawyer but it sure seems so.

And, even worse, what if the cozy relationship between government and social media evolves to the point that platforms censor users without needing to be specifically asked to do so by the government? Like a Mafia don ordering a hit with a sideways glance, no words are ever spoken, but the order is made clear.

Just like that, an unholy alliance has been created, with government and private companies working in lockstep to censor our guaranteed right to free speech.

There’s a name for when private companies and the government work hand in hand: fascism. Benito Mussolini said that “fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

As indicated in the Twitter Files, access to Twitter’s bureaucratic censors, de-boosters and outright platform banners was equal opportunity — Republicans could make a call just as easily as Democrats. But what is also made clear is that the Democratic Party loyalties of Twitter employees are close to 100 percent.

So who was being censored? Anyone who challenged Democrats. Which goes a long way towards explaining why those 11,000 people who questioned Covid lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates and vaccine effectiveness were given the boot.

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” to coin a phrase.

Related: Additional bonkers moments from 2020 here: Greater Exercise Activity is Tied to Less Severe Covid-19 Outcomes, a Study Shows.

UPDATE:

Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate "experts" as "crazy people".

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) March 31, 2024

(Updated and bumped.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Real Clear Politics’ Samizdat Prize, Behind The Scenes Stories Of Censorship: Matt Taibbi, Jay Bhattacharya, And Miranda Devine.

MATT TAIBBI: I grew up as a traditional ACLU liberal type. I remember the day after the first Twitter Files story came out, the Washington Post described me as a “conservative journalist.” That’s where we are, in this bizarre realignment. When I grew up, I didn’t know anybody who was for censorship. There was nobody among the liberals I knew… who had any feelings in that direction. I think as recently as ten years ago, 95% of journalists would have been in agreement on this issue. We saw this after Glenn Greenwald broke the Snowden story., In the last ten years or so, there has been this dramatic realignment where suddenly free speech is coded as a right-wing issue. I think that is basically a strategy to try to delegitimize the issue and to try to scare a certain demographic into not paying attention to what this story is all about.

If you actually pay attention to Missouri v. Biden or the Twitter Files, it is not a partisan story. It is more about the exercise of government power and the decision to make sure the government has the ability to place leverage wherever it wants at a moment’s notice. That doesn’t have anything to do with politics, it is big vs. small and government vs. ordinary people.

Remember when Trump first took office, and the left displayed a newfound interest in Orwell’s 1984? In 2024, we can see the efforts of those who read it as an instruction manual.

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: How the “Censorship Industrial Complex” Case Was Built. “Three separate investigations took over a year to nail down the case that government agencies were improperly censoring by proxy. Forced by courts to stop, they’re desperately trying for a reboot.”

MATT TAIBBI: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece: Correcting the record after a desperate slam job on the Twitter Files, published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court.

MATT TAIBBI: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece: Correcting the record after a desperate slam job on the Twitter Files, published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court. “Michael, Bari, Lee, David Zweig and others involved with the Twitter Files project have been subject to a lot of silly smear jobs in the last year-plus, but this piece of deep state fan fiction in the Times is low even by their standards. It’s clearly intended to re-cast the outing of federal censorship initiatives as Trumpian conspiracy theory before oral arguments begin in Murthy v. Missouri tomorrow.”

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: How Moderna Came Up With a Vaccine Against Vaccine Dissent. “Like the Twitter Files, the Moderna Reports highlight the push by powerful entities – especially government, Big Tech, and Big Pharma – to identify and brand dissenting opinions about establishment narratives as risky forms of speech. The growing network these efforts rely on shows the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex. Moderna’s faltering financials also suggest, at least for now, the limits of that project.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT THE GRAUNIAD: Guardian sacks their own cartoonist Steve Bell who had worked at the paper for over 40 years over ‘anti-Semitic’ Benjamin Netanyahu cartoon.

Steve Bell has this cartoon pulled by the Guardian tonight. pic.twitter.com/kUx4IlP9Om

— Political Cartoon (@Cartoon4sale) October 9, 2023

He has insisted it is a reference to a 1960s cartoon by David Levine, who drew US President Lyndon B. Johnson with a Vietnam shaped scar on his torso. The cartoon he submitted last week has the words ‘After David Levine’ written on it above the artist credit.

Writing on Twitter on Monday, October 9, Mr Bell claimed said he had submitted the artwork but it had been ‘spiked again’, before saying it was becoming ‘pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject [Israel] for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying “antisemitic tropes”‘.

He later suggested the cartoon didn’t make sense if it was a reference to the Shakespeare play, given Netanyahu is ‘wearing boxing gloves’.

Tonight a spokesman for the Guardian confirmed the newspaper would not be renewing his contract.

The artist claimed after filing it he received a phone call from the newspaper ‘with the strangely cryptic message “pound of flesh”.

Strange things happen at the Grauniad after a terrorist attack: After the 7/7 London tube bombings by radical Islamists in 2005, the paper ran a column written by a “trainee journalist” who used the word “sassy” in an article full of moral equivalence over the attacks:

Today’s Guardian gives space to Dilpazier Aslam, a “Guardian trainee journalist” who suggests that one shouldn’t be shocked by Thursday’s suicide bombings – such a reaction would be inappropriate because, among other reasons:

“Shocked would be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen – we bear responsibility for the murderous actions of maniacal members of a religious cult. An apology is certainly called for – the queue forms to the right.

Needless to say, there are other reasons why shock is inappropriate. Mr. Aslam explains:

“Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this.”

Fortunately for those who still don’t quite follow, Mr. Aslam provides an explanation immediately, in the very next paragraph – which reads, in its entirety:

“The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.”

Suicide bombing …. sassy!

Aslam was sacked a couple of weeks later, after an intense campaign from both sides of the aisle.

JASON WHITLOCK: Michael Oher is every bit as broken as the media members selling his Blind Side lie.

The 2009 movie “The Blind Side” does not state or imply that the Tuohy family adopted Michael Oher. Neither does Michael Lewis’ 2006 book that inspired the film that won Sandra Bullock an Oscar.

In 2011, when Michael Oher published his first memoir, “I Beat the Odds,” he stated directly that the Tuohys secured a conservatorship when he was a senior in high school. He wrote that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy insisted that he maintain a relationship with his biological mother and 11 siblings. Oher wrote that his mother participated in the procedures necessary for the Tuohys to become conservators.

Somebody’s attended the Colin Kaepernick School for racial grievances and financial shakedowns.

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: The Democrats’ War on RFK, Jr: After Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. faces contentious questioning in the House, a look back at requests to Twitter involving the presidential candidate.

THERE GOES BIDEN AGAIN, RESTORING OUR PRECIOUS NORMS: Biden’s FTC Punished Twitter For Seceding From The Censorship Complex.

The Federal Trade Commission inappropriately pressured an independent third-party auditing firm to find Twitter had violated the terms of its settlement agreement with the FTC, a motion filed last week in federal court reveals. That misconduct and the FTC’s own repudiation of the terms of the settlement agreement entitle Twitter to vacate the consent order, its lawyers maintain.

This latest development holds significance beyond Twitter’s fight with the FTC, however, with the details providing further evidence that the Biden administration targeted Twitter because of its owner Elon Musk’s support for free speech on his platform.

I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency.

Read the whole thing.

SHELBY STEELE’S FILMMAKER SON BLASTS SAN FRANCISCO POLICE AFTER $30K IN CAMERA GEAR STOLEN IN CAR BREAK-IN:

Filmmaker Eli Steele first tweeted that he had lost around $15,000 worth of camera gear after his rental car windows were smashed at around 11 a.m. near the famous winding street.

Upon further inspection, he said $25,000 to $30,000 worth of filming equipment was taken in the theft. He told The Standard via text message that a total of $30,000 worth of equipment had been stolen.

HMM: Is this why Tara Reade fled to Russia?

We received a response from Reade’s attorney, Dr. Levy. He provided us with a copy of a subpoena that Twitter’s Trust and Safety office received from a U.S. District Court in California in June of 2020. (The pdf file is attached.) The Justice Department was seeking all of Tara Reade’s personal information associated with her Twitter account. They believe this move by Twitter (pre-Musk) was meant to intimidate her.

Further, the attorney revealed to us that Reade had been in talks with Matt Gaetz of the House Weaponization of the Government Subcommittee as recently as May of this year. She was informed that her arrest could be “imminent.” A search is currently ongoing to see if INTERPOL has issued a Red Notice, allowing any nation to arrest her and extradite her. Reade has applied for asylum via the United Nations and awaits a response.

Real banana-republic stuff, if true.

THINK OF THEM AS WILLING TOOLS OF THE REGIME AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Matt Taibbi: Press Silence on Latest Twitter Files Scandal a New Low.

CHRIS GETS LICHT: Jeff Zucker’s inmates still run the CNN asylum.

The irony of so many at CNN still dedicated to Jeff Zucker’s shadow campaign is that there is no other human being alive on the planet more responsible for Donald Trump’s cultural resurrection, and political career, than Jeff Zucker. He leaned into the political war and attempted to position CNN as Trump’s heel, just as he did with guiding Trump to the number-one-rated television show in the country with The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. Jeff Zucker knows how to make stars — and that’s what network infotainment “journalists” fancy themselves to be these days. Jake Tapper will yuk it up with Stephen Colbert. Anderson Cooper will get completely shitfaced on New Year’s Eve and Jim Acosta will cry at the border wall.

Everyone Jeff Zucker hired at CNN was playing a part that he wanted them to play — and it led to record ratings, book deals and talk show appearances. Under Licht, that all sort of disappeared, and it’s back to reading the teleprompter with cause. Much was made of CNN’s decision to host former president Donald Trump in a town hall format, and the usual theatrics followed. CNN, however, needs Trump, now more than ever. That is why Chris Licht is out of a job, and why Jeff Zucker’s inmates are still running the asylum.

Related: CNN Honcho Chris Licht Is Out. Will His Corporate Overlords Now Clean House?

It demonstrated Licht’s biggest problem, as reported by former CNN anchor Brian Stelter and nearly every other media reporter eager to jump on the — mostly correct — narrative that the boss had “lost the room.” But there are a lot of very unpopular CEOs that don’t get written up in their own company’s newsletter.

So while CNN’s rank and file are likely thrilled that their nemesis is out as CEO, it doesn’t change the WBD mission for the network. WBD CEO David Zaslav and lead shareholder John Malone have made abundantly clear that they see CNN as a nonpartisan news outlet willing to treat all news as nonpartisan.

Good luck with that in 2023 — viewers want to know the worldviews of who they’re watching on TV; and it’s impossible for journalists not to express those worldviews when preening on Twitter.

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: How the World’s “No-Kidding Decision Makers” Got Organized. “The Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/0S Summit at RightsCon this week, and Twitter Files documents tell us more about how this VIP-room-within-a-VIP-room was formed.”