It turns out that a major player in the NLMSM, Reuters, had some dirt on Robert Francis O’Rourke a year before his Progressive-Democratic Party campaign for Senator in Texas in the 2018 season—and spiked the story rather than publishing it in real time, or during the campaign, because the information, in Reuters‘ view, could have hurt O’Rourke.

It seems that a teenaged Ol’ Beto was a member of the

“Cult of the Dead Cow,” a famous group of hackers credited with inventing the term “hacktivism….”
The group is responsible for a variety of shady activit[ies] like stealing credit card numbers to pay for long-distance telephone service, violating copyright laws, and hacking into computers, according to [Reuters], which stressed that O’Rourke himself never “engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity.”

What’s of import today is not that misspent youth—Ol’ Beto isn’t the first misbehaving teenager who subsequently grew up—but the fact that this news outlet spiked a story because exposing the information might hurt their Chosen One.  This is the rationalization of Joe Menn, the “journalist” who hid the information with Reuters‘ approval [emphasis added]

“While he was on leave from Reuters and writing a book on the Cult of the Dead Cow, Joe Menn made an agreement regarding the embargo date of his interview with Beto O’Rourke. This is a common arrangement between journalists and sources, which we described in detail in a Reuters Backstory article on Friday,” a Reuters spokesperson told Fox News.

That just shows how pervasive and long-standing the dishonesty in what passes for today’s journalism is.  It’s OK to spike an unfriendly story, and it’s equally OK to go in real time with no hard facts on a story that destroys the lives of other teenagers—Catholic high school students, for instance.

These guys aren’t even capable of recognizing dishonesty any more.