Democracy dies in darkness (I’m sorry, it’s never getting old). Over the past few weeks, as news surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter coup evolved, overwhelming opposition from the institutional press itself became part of the story. But there were, and continue to be, a few outliers in terms of their total, delirious, and frankly confusing levels of rage. Perhaps most notably, even beyond the toxic waste dump op-eds, the Washington Post coordinated a month-long partisan assault on Elon’s ambition, tactics, and character. At first, I found the behavior confusing. What did these editors have to gain in so obviously abandoning neutrality? Then, I remembered the Post was Twitter’s official “fact check” on the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, a crucial bit of history lost to recent noise. With censorship of that story now a central focus of the broader conversation surrounding Twitter’s political bias in “content moderation,” criticism of Twitter’s platform integrity is likewise a criticism of the press outlets the company relies on for truth arbitration. In other words, Elon represents a powerful critique of the social media status quo, which by extension includes the Post. In this way, he’s not only challenging the concept of political censorship on social media, he’s challenging the privileges our largest social media companies afford the press; yes, editors are frustrated at the thought of people they don’t like talking, but they also correctly perceive a threat to the unearned, undeserved, top-down amplification of their own voices.

Let’s take a quick look at their least favorite story.

In October 2020, just weeks before our last presidential election, the New York Post reported on a laptop they claimed belonged to Hunter Biden. A number of emails saved on the laptop were framed by the Post as smoking gun evidence of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s corruption. Roughly, the dots connected like this: Hunter sat on the board of a Ukranian energy company called Burisma, where he made around $1 million a year until 2017, problematically spanning his father’s time in the White House. In emails obtained from the laptop, there was indication, but not confirmation, that Joe Biden, while serving as the vice president, met with a Burisma executive at the request of his son. Later, Joe Biden pressured the Ukranian government into firing a prosecutor who was targeting the company. Biden only did so because the prosecutor was declining to target corruption in the Ukranian government, his team argued, but we see the uncomfortable picture this begins to paint.