Access journalism is Beltway access, whether to the President, an executive branch Cabinet agency, or in the case of Joan Biskupic, to the Supreme Court. I suppose that with a Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, there's some sort of access journalism there, too.
Access Twitter is a riff on that, but it's an intra-journalism angle.
I was blocked by Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat two weeks ago. I discovered that when Jeet Heer was quote tweeting over just how bad of hasbara he was spouting:
I remember when the hasbara was better. They're not even trying anymore. https://t.co/nKCvUmi9h5
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 2, 2024
And realized I couldn't see just how bad it was.
Obviously, Higgins hadn't blocked Jeet. I don't know if he's yet blocked Mark Ames, who, in my blog post a few weeks ago about the Texas Observer jumping in bed with Bellingcat, had two Ames tweets about Bellingcat, though neither was a quote-tweet of Higgins or other top brass. That said, per the official Bellingcat Twitter account, yeah, as of the start of March, it was radio-silent indeed. Plenty to say about Russia, naturally, with the likes of Fukuyama being advisors. Nothing about the Gaza Genocide. One post in the first half of February about Rafah and .... using tools adapted from Ukraine to track bombing in Rafah. No moral comment at all. A post at the start of February about a Beeb show talking about the "disinformation war" in the Middle East. No use of the word "hasbara" in the tweet. The Beeb podcast itself at least tilt toward he said, she said twosiderism.
And, that's the only two tweets about Israel-Gaza going back to before Christmas 2023. Before that, on Dec. 20, there was a tweet with the gist of the Feb. 13 tweet about Rafah, but before the creation of the Rafah pocket. A Dec. 18 tweet talked about the "environmental damage" Israel was causing in Gaza. No, really.
Before that? A Dec. 12 tweet about "unraveling" the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Her death had been unraveled well before that, given that she had been killed seven months earlier. The piece itself has a big data cram, lots of videos, analysis, etc., then says, in essence, "it appears," without making a call. This itself looks like hasbara, in that somebody prodded Bellingcat to do "something.
