There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself.
This narrative has been seen a lot, and often times it is invoked as the default narrative whenever things are being claimed in a particular political direction.
I would like to question this at a fundamental level. At what point does the information itself become pertinent? Shouldn't the information itself, if true, always be the focus of the story? If the information is unverified, shouldn't there be some attempt to verify it? If it cannot be verified - then it's probably best to dismiss it, but if people involved in the situation start coming forward to verify the context of the information, shouldn't it merit further investigation?
There is this guy - Tony Bobulinski. He's a navy veteran from a family of veterans and he's pretty much coming forward to say that the emails are all true. In his absence, it's ambiguous, but now that's come forward, why is there still hesitation to take this story seriously?
Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there is no coordinated media attempt to silence this story because at a personal level many of them want to cover up anything that makes one candidate look bad.
>There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself.
You're absolutely right, and it is frustrating to no end.
Imagine all politicians have at least a bit of dirt in secret, documented in some email, text, or photo, on a computer somewhere. Also suppose each politician has varying degrees of dirt, from minor mistakes, not in bad faith, to full on treason.
Then suppose there's an adversary capable of hacking any of the politicians' aforementioned secret media. This adversary can now pick and choose which politician they release damaging evidence of. They don't need to release all of it, implicating the politician with the most severe grievances. Just the one the adversary decides they disfavor.
In this case, your argument is saying "let's focus on this small mistake, because that's all the info we have."
I'm not advocating that in the real world, the bigger story is about who's releasing the info, rather than the info itself. However, there are issues when not taking both into account.
This requires your imagined scenario to be true. It also requires that the selective release of information is weighed in the opposite direction to what you are seeing.
In specific terms this is equivalent to saying "Russians showed us proof of Dem corruption" and the response by the media is "well imagine that there's worse GOP corruption that they haven't leaked"
The point is that there are plausible cases where you run into these kinds of issues where it’s not as easy as just saying “let’s evaluate the situation solely on the basis of what the info is.” This ignores the who, when, why, that are extremely relevant in this case, as they were this time 4 years ago.
Is your stated standard ever applied for other negative stories?
There are military generals who have served under multiple administrations. When they decide to go to the media and talk about some negative story about one administration, by your reasoning, it means they're telling a selective truth - unless you choose to believe that they only ever had differences with one administration.
There are whistleblowers from the State Department, DOJ, EPA and all kinds of bureaucracies. Are their stories ever met with this standard - i.e. "you're saying the W. Bush administration did this unethical thing, but you aren't telling us what the Clinton administration did". Was there ever a "I'm sorry Mr Deepthroat you may be right about Nixon but you have not told me what LBJ did, and for all we know, that may be worse"
The obvious point is that for a country to have a democracy that's free from manipulation by foreign entities it needs to strongly act against foreign influences attempting to interfere. If media publications credulously publish explosive accusations in the month before an election then you have a very easy way for foreign entities to influence elections.
Even if you buy Bobulinski as a credible witness it's difficult to discount the fact that his allegations have been deliberately timed to be as politically damaging for the election as possible, whilst giving the smallest amount of time to fact check his story. Specifically since the allegations could've been brought to light years ago. We don't have to be credulous - we all know that the unsubstantiated accusations can be damaging even if they turn out to be utterly baseless (which is what seems to be the case given the lack of coroborating evidence).
To put this in context - the 2016 relevation of Hilary Clinton's emails in the last weeks before the election coincided with a shift in the polls that pushed that election into a tossup, and when actually investigated, were found to be duplicates of emails that she had already been investigated for.
It seems natural given that we know about this dynamic, the reasonable thing is to raise your threshold for publishing accusations in the last weeks before an election.
If it is true that these accusations really are as damning as Bobulinski claims then they'll be coroborated and investigations will start, and frankly we've got 3 months before Biden even takes office. But those should be real criminal investigations, not baseless accusations made in the 2 weeks before the election - or more reasonably, made at the time that Bobulinski claims these conversations took place over a year ago.
He's clarified the timing in his interview with Tucker. The only reason he's coming forward is because the campaign dismissed his presence as Russian disinformation, which hurts his reputation. He is under no obligation to wait till after the election to repair his reputation.
The timing is definitely suspicious for the laptop contents to be released, but as for Bobulinski, I think his timing came down to two things:
1) He only had part of the picture to begin with. It was the release of some of the laptop's contents that made it clear (in his mind) that Joe Biden was in fact receiving bribes from foreign governments through his son.
2) Given his own involvement in Sinohawk, the leap to portraying the emails as part of "Russian disinformation" cast a shadow over his own reputation, and he asked the Biden campaign to issue a retraction of that characterization. I think many people naturally don't want to be involved in controversies like this because of the personal costs, but he felt it was necessary in part to protect his own reputation.
This narrative has been seen a lot, and often times it is invoked as the default narrative whenever things are being claimed in a particular political direction.
I would like to question this at a fundamental level. At what point does the information itself become pertinent? Shouldn't the information itself, if true, always be the focus of the story? If the information is unverified, shouldn't there be some attempt to verify it? If it cannot be verified - then it's probably best to dismiss it, but if people involved in the situation start coming forward to verify the context of the information, shouldn't it merit further investigation?
There is this guy - Tony Bobulinski. He's a navy veteran from a family of veterans and he's pretty much coming forward to say that the emails are all true. In his absence, it's ambiguous, but now that's come forward, why is there still hesitation to take this story seriously?
Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there is no coordinated media attempt to silence this story because at a personal level many of them want to cover up anything that makes one candidate look bad.