I Was Disappeared
But not by ICE or the FBI
Today I woke up to the realization that I had been disappeared.
Not by ICE or the FBI (whom I expect a third visit from at some point — maybe I should ask them for a punchcard so I can win a prize at number five?), but by my own colleagues!
NBC News did a story today about a Justice Department directive signed by Pam Bondi targeting “radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism…[and] anti-Christianity” — all a part of NSPM-7, as I’ve been covering for months. NBC’s initial story acknowledged that Bondi’s order was “first published by journalist Ken Klippenstein,” but the sentence that was swiftly (and silently) removed.
You can see for yourself, thanks to Google’s caching of the initial version of NBC’s article, shown below. NBC’s current article now says only that the memo was “obtained by NBC News,” with no explanation given for why the sentence was quietly and intentionally removed.
And for all its preening, NBC didn’t even enclose a copy of the memo it’s bragging about having “obtained”! (You can read the memo, which I published in full last December, here.)
I’ve been purged!
In all seriousness, it’s more amusing than anything and, I won’t lie, gratifying that to see a multibillion dollar media conglomerate have to follow up on something I reported weeks ago. But the reason why NBC and other big media types do this kind of thing is interesting and worth thinking about.
There’s the usual bitchy reasons: ‘Why are we crediting a nobody?’ ‘He’s an activist.’ And my personal favorite, ‘He’s just a blogger’. This particular diss resulted in the funniest update to an article citing my work that I’ve ever seen.
It’s a good question: what does “blog” even mean these days? As far as I can tell, it’s just a word for reporting that wasn’t sanctioned by the lumbering dinosaurs of legacy media.
All of this is a good reminder of not just how lame these old school media outlets are, but also the reality that they see themselves as the gatekeeper of what you get to know. They intentionally ignore what wasn’t “invented here” or doesn’t fit with their vanilla view of the world. That can just as much mean that they’ll miss the Mamdani phenomenon or the emergence of another Donald Trump (if it happens) or, say, all of the leaked ICE documents I’ve been publishing here exclusively this past week.
Legacy media’s dereliction is by design. That’s sad but also an affirmation of the importance of what I’m doing here. The only downside to not being a big media reporter is not having big media money; but I do have you guys. I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber (or chipping in via our GoFundMe here) — I’ve got a lot more ICE documents to report on this next week and could use your support.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
They don’t want too many folks looking at your other work.
You will never be acknowledged as a peer by those hacks. Wear it like a badge of honor.