During Thursday's episode of CNN This Morning, co-host Don Lemon said that Elon Musk selecting specific individuals to report on the content of the Twitter files was "not the spirit of free speech" while CNN Contributor Oliver Darcy said he would have "loved" to get the files and Donie O'Sullivan said he wished Musk would "slide into our DMs."
During a segment titled "CNN Examines the truth behind the 'Twitter files'," Darcy and O'Sullivan were talking to hosts Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlin Collins about the Twitter files and Darcy said, "I think a lot of the Twitter files—I mean more transparency is great. I think Donie and I would have loved to receive a cache of files exposing or revealing—" O'Sullivan then said, "Our email is out there. Slide into our DMs. With the files."
"Please," O'Sullivan added.
On November 16, O'Sullivan leaked via CNN the internal email Musk sent to Twitter staff telling them that, in order to "succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore."
The Twitter files have been a series of reports made by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, detailing the behind-the-scenes conversations at Twitter over several years concerning the company's efforts towards censorship and information suppression.
The files have shown that previous Twitter leadership, including CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey as well as Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter lead counsel, lied about shadow-banning conservative voices for years. The files have revealed the deliberate efforts to censor stories around Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" and have detailed how Twitter executives, especially former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, devised a justification to ban the sitting president.
"I think the problem here though is that Elon Musk is effectively serving as a gatekeeper for this information. He is not giving it to newsrooms. He is giving it to handpicked journalists who are then agreeing to the condition or at least one condition of tweeting out the files instead of posting the news stories," Darcy said.
"That's not the spirit of free speech," Lemon replied.
Leading into the segment, Poppy Harlow said, "With the so-called Twitter files, Elon Musk has claimed he wants to bring transparency to Twitter. And well, not totally what's happening, but cue the birth of the Twitter files."
"Let me tell you more," Harlow added. "Musk selected a handful of journalists unaffiliated with major credible news organizations with whom he has shared internal Twitter systems and communications that seemed to focus on some of Twitter's most high profile and sometimes controversial content moderation decisions."
The Washington Post published a story claiming that Matt Taibbi was a "conservative" journalist and then stealth edited the piece to remove that moniker.
On Twitter, several noticed the move.
Walter Kim tweeted, "This is baldly inaccurate. @mtaibbi is not a conservative journalist, as anyone familiar with his work knows."
Michael Tracey said, Hilarious… 'conservative journalist' now just means 'anyone whose journalistic practice doesn’t revolve around parroting standard left-liberal pieties 24/7'."
