CNN anchor Jake Tapper injected himself into the middle of the New York Post and social-media censorship controversy by seemingly taking the side of the censors. Tapper has been criticized for essentially ignoring the Hunter Biden controversy on-air, and Friday he didn’t exactly come to the defense of his fellow journalists.

Tapper tweeted out, “Since twitter has locked out the NYPost for violating rules that no longer stand as rules (but twitter won’t revisit past enforcement decisions) the NY Post COULD end this standoff by deleting the tweets that broke the rules (thus unlocking its account) then tweet them out again. I asked a twitter exec if this was possible, he said yes and it would end the whole thing. Probably take 15 seconds.”

New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari quickly jumped on Tapper’s comments, saying that the Post had never violated Twitter’s policy since they never published hacked material. In subsequent tweets, Ahmari wrote, “Jake: We have more honor and principle than others, I suppose. Our reporting was never based on hacked material to begin with.” He then added, “Under oath, Twitter’s CEO, @jack, mumbled through his Rasputin/hobo beard that his firm had — and still has — zero evidence we used hacked material. @jaketapper, as a reporter, why don’t you show an iota of solidarity with America’s oldest daily?”

Social media lit up following the exchange as journalists pounced on Tapper taking the side of big tech over journalism.

Tapper then responded in a series of tweets and actually acknowledged, for the first time, that he didn’t feel Twitter blocking the report was justified. “I agree twitter enforcing defunct rules makes no sense. Zero. I also don’t think twitter should have blocked them to begin with,” Tapper said in a series of five tweets addressing his comments.

Now that Tapper has admitted that Twitter never should have blocked the tweet, it will be interesting to see now if he finally addresses Hunter Biden’s hard drive on his show.

Add comment