The NBC article is focused on an anonymously drafted report, which was mostly a dump of open source intel. The article criticizes that report for using a fake persona as its author. The initial disseminator of the report (who may or may not be the author of it as well) cites privacy and fear of retribution as reasons for publishing anonymously.
What the NBC article does not do is address or refute any of the facts in the report. It also ignores a lot of relevant back story and fails to make connections between this report, Hunter's laptop, and Tony Bobulinski.
If you want/need to publish anonymously, you use an obvious pseudonym (for a famous example, see The Federalist Papers). If you use a fake identity that's not obviously a pseudonym, people can reasonably suspect fraud.
Nothing against you or GP, but this illustrates my personal difficulties with "the news" perfectly. As most of us here know full well, in modern application development, most of the time, there are MANY ways to accomplish particular "thing" that will WORK, but I want to find the most-efficient and most-maintainable way. So when I need to find an approach to something new, I'll search and read many things about it, until I find consensus. I've approached news like programming, looking for consensus. The problem is that no one agrees on anything any more. There is no overlap between the two sides. Each side just says the other is completely wrong.
As the intelligentsia discuss what Greenwald's move implies about the state of American journalism, and even what the facts are about Hunter Biden's laptop, people in the middle, like me, despair of ever getting to the truth in these matters any more. We are forced to simply forget about it, because we have no hope of reading enough materials, and spending enough time on it, to sort out what the most-probable conclusion is. Every article argues the complete opposite of the other. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE JOB OF THE JOURNALIST.
Oh I agree 100%. My mind has been completely hijacked for the past week as the election comes to a crescendo. My priority when consuming information is to get some idea of the known and unknown truths. Unfortunately, the current climate makes this difficult to ascertain in real time. There is an absolute onslaught of new info every hour (not just from the Bannon/HB “drip” campaign, but also more general news), and nobody is objectively summarizing it.
The only choice is to immerse myself in this deluge of information and try to sort out the truth from propaganda myself. It’s infuriating that so few journalists are doing this for me.
I’ve never seen anything like this, on both sides. On the right, we have a carefully managed PR campaign that is, despite its agenda, appearing increasingly credible but also manipulating our attention. On the left, we have a unification of the media apparatus, the DNC and the FBI, actively suppressing information and misdirecting our attention.
I’m so glad Glenn Greenwald has staked out a position in this environment, because it really is an existential fight for truth. Now that Greenwald is on the case, I hope it forces the left and the Biden campaign to respond to this story. It’s not going away.
You are correct that it doesn't address the laptop emails directly. The issue here is that this provably false dump that NBC identified is pushing the same basic story the laptop email attempted to expose. You're seeing domestically coordinated smear campaign. It was organized by a domestic PR firm and wrongly characterized as Russian disinformation. Certainly foreign assets (its not just Russia)have amplified it like anything else that is divisive, but at its core it was a plot to make an October surprise. NYPost broke embargo on the story and published ahead of the plan, and that kind of threw everything into chaos. They've been trying to get something out of it, but there is nothing but outrage over supression of a non-story. Emails are a remarkably verifiable thing, and ones these just aren't.
Tony Bobulinski's tale has not been corroborated, even by Murdock's own WSJ journalists.
I find this whole thrust rather remarkable anyhow. If true, Biden's family committed nepotism and would do so again if they were put into power. Really? Coming from an administration which is openly profiting from the office and giving insane amounts of power to their family members?
Thanks for sharing, I’ve been eager to see what the raw headers revealed. That’s pretty ninja to dig up the 2015 Gmail DNS records. DKIM spoofing is a thing, but its not all that likely. Its hard to know what actually happened given the chain of custody of the laptop. https://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-ch...
I think we should be more careful about deflecting criticism of official with foreign or now domestic influences. Even if the material is authentic, it doesn't mean it has to hurt Biden. But the conspiracies from official sources get out of hand. NBCNews was careful here, but it is transparent that they didn't want to neutrally inform people.
These are real bad journalists compared to Greenwald.
Not a single line of the NBC article seems to be refuting a single fact from the 64-page document. They do try very hard though to smear the anonymous publisher for trying to be anonymous, and imply without any evidence that somehow this document is tied to Hunter’s email story.
What the NBC article does not do is address or refute any of the facts in the report. It also ignores a lot of relevant back story and fails to make connections between this report, Hunter's laptop, and Tony Bobulinski.