“Tapping The Wires”

     The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch will probably already know what I’m about to say, yet its significance might be greater than any of us have yet imagined. Even so, I shall eschew large font for it. I’ll restrain my desire to shout. This once, anyway.

     The mainstream media are largely the mouthpieces of the wire services.

     The three major wire services – Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters – provide many if not most of the stories “reported” in the mainstream media. The “reporters” at work in mainstream media newsrooms largely take wire-service stories and reword them for publication in their employers’ organs. That gives the wire services at least as much influence as the media over the transmission of information to the American public.

     Yes, mainstream media editors select which stories will be run, how they’ll be “framed,” and their priority-placement as well. However, the “raw material” is largely the wire services’ product. So he who wants to track the development of media “narratives” is well advised to keep a close watch on the wire services.

     That having been said, have a look at this AP piece about Elon Musk:

     This week Musk is again keeping people guessing. First he embraced a European measure to keep hate speech and misinformation off social media. Less than 24 hours later, he announced that he’d reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump, who was kicked off the platform for inciting violence….

     But if the 50-year-old Musk’s gambit has made anything clear it’s that he thrives on contradiction.

     Musk boasts that he’s acquiring Twitter to defend freedom of speech. But he has long used the platform to attack perceived foes who dare to disagree with him….

     Musk did not respond to an interview request for this story. But speaking briefly with AP at New York’s Met Gala, he reiterated his pledge to rid Twitter of spam bots and trolls spreading junk messages online.

     “That’s obviously diminishing the user experience,” Musk said. “I’m on the warpath, so if somebody is operating a bot and troll army, then I’m definitely their enemy.”

     But a University of Maryland researcher recently concluded that such bots have been used to generate hundreds of thousands of positive tweets about Tesla, potentially buoying its stock in years when it was under pressure.

     Neither the company nor its supporters has taken responsibility for those bots. But Musk has said that for real people who use Twitter, most anything is fair game….

     Musk, who waxes about preserving Twitter as the public square of the internet, hasn’t addressed what he’d do if his efforts to open it to more voices wind up jeopardizing its accessibility.

     There’s a lot of verbal offal in that story: unsubstantiated insinuations, misuse of words, and baseless attributions of motivations and character defects to Elon Musk. The overall tone of the thing is negative. We are unsubtly being told to doubt Musk’s true intentions, especially as they concern Twitter. It’s hard to believe that’s unintentional.

     Might you conclude that the Associated Press isn’t happy about Musk’s intent to purchase Twitter and take it private?

     Now that the wire services operate their own news Websites, we can see their product quite as plainly as do the mainstream media. We might not be seeing all of it. Indeed, I’m sure there are “premium” pieces that only paying subscribers get to see…or report. But what’s visible suffices to draw some disturbing conclusions.

     Keep an eye on the wires. Compare what you see on their pages to what appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media institutions. There’s a lot of information there – much of it “between the lines.” It might help us to predict where the “narratives” are headed next. That’s information we in the Right could definitely use.