What is news? Not that

Few clichés strike listeners more tiresomely than that of the old guy telling people how much better things were in his day.

I risk that tiresomeness to share an anecdote relevant to a modern political and journalistic dynamic.

When I was 23 and left alone in charge of the state desk of the late, great Arkansas Gazette on Saturdays, the state editor always called early afternoons from the golf course to make sure I hadn’t made a mess of anything.

Once I told him that the state Associated Press wire had moved a short story about the teenaged son of a Democratic gubernatorial candidate getting a DUI in South Arkansas. I said I’d killed it.

The editor asked why. I said this was a case of just another kid making a sadly common mistake who didn’t deserve to be singled out in a statewide newspaper only because his dad was about to get creamed in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

The editor asked what I’d do if his dad was governor. I said I’d run it because the case would bear public scrutiny to see how it was handled.

The editor said that was right and headed back presumably to tee off and, I was later told, remark to his golf buddies on the new kid’s excellent news judgment.

Note that good news judgment in 1978 was not publishing something.

They now say no one can exercise that kind of restrictive news judgment. The Internet puts everything on universal public display, fair or not, and the mainstream media must accept, adapt and react, they say.

But Twitter and Facebook tried a little restrictiveness last week, blocking or otherwise reducing links to a New York Post story seeking to smear Joe Biden that was planted by the dubiously ubiquitous Rudy Giuliani.

Right-wingers have been crying foul and liberal bias. Ted Cruz tweeted that Facebook and Twitter do not have the right to censor political speech.

But they have every ownership right to do as the Arkansas Gazette state desk tyro did in 1978 and edit their own platforms in an effort to uphold standards and behave responsibly.

Republicans have QAnon, Brietbart and Fox News for their partisan conspiracy theories and contrivances.

I’m going to go ahead and write about this report for several reasons.

One is that Facebook and Twitter eventually relented and allowed some linkage. Another is that Donald Trump is near-certain to talk about the report to millions in the regrettably un-canceled debate Thursday night. And the third is that, in view of the report’s wide dissemination, it’s important to explain that the story, while of questionable validity, doesn’t amount to anything even if valid. Giuliani, suspected separately by U.S. intelligence sources of making dubious foreign political contacts in service to Trump’s political interest, delivered to the New York Post, a not especially serious right-wing tabloid, emails said to have been found on a hard drive copied in behalf of a computer store operator from a laptop left at the shop by, the proprietor thinks, Hunter Biden.

In one email, a Burisma gas company official thanks Hunter, who was inappropriately cashing in on his dad’s name as a member of the company’s board, for setting up for him a chance to meet with his dad, the American vice president.

Aha, say Trumpians, the gun is thus smoking: Joe Biden used his presidency to help a foreign company and thus help his son, which, they say, explains why Biden would hold up American aid to Ukraine until a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating that gas company was fired.

Why, say Trumpians, the Democrats impeached Trump for the same or lesser thing.

So, first: There is no record of any such actual meeting between the vice president and the Burisma executive taking place.

Second: Hunter Biden tells an official in another email that he has no idea what his dad will say about matters of their interest.

Third: Biden was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukrainian issues (which he shouldn’t have been owing to his son’s activity, in my view) and was relaying an official American position shared by much of the progressive world when he spoke not privately, but publicly, to declare that, to receive aid, Ukraine needed in America’s view to clean up certain corruptions including that of the disreputable prosecutor in question.

Fourth, Trump’s impeachable act wasn’t expressing American foreign policy but defying it to advance personal political benefit.

This was less news than a teenager’s DUI in rural Arkansas. It was not validated information. It didn’t relate anything not already known. It didn’t lay a glove on Joe Biden even if valid.

Foiled, Fox News and right-wing Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin pivoted to engage in ominous-sounding rank speculation on air Sunday that maybe there was child pornography on the laptop.

Perhaps we can agree that news just ain’t what it used to be.