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Do You Remember What Journalism Looks Like?
I’m having a hard time recalling. In pursuit of nailing Brett Kavanaugh and selling some books, some New York Times reporters have shed any semblance of honesty. You know the story by now: They wrote a teaser article for the paper about an unreported assault on the part of Justice Kavanaugh thirty years ago, neglecting to mention a key detail: the “victim” has no memory of it! That seems like a pretty crucial fact, and it wouldn’t have come to light without Mollie Hemingway blowing the lid off of story.
The authors of this new anti-Kavanaugh book sat down for an interview today, and whoa boy, they likely had no idea what they were signing up for. This is how it was teased:
Kavanaugh authors stopped by to talk about their book. I asked them why they appeared to blaming Fox News for their errors, why they didn't include Max Steier's democratic work history in their book, and more on Leland Keyser. You can watch it here: https://t.co/a7gCA2eHoQ
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) September 19, 2019
They’re still barrelling full-steam ahead, blaming the controversy on Fox News, of course.
Still in shock that Pogrebin tweeted this after everything these last few days.
We haven't heard any kind of satisfactory explanation from her, the editors, or the @nytimes, and blaming Fox makes it feel like they're fine with the perception that they're just partisan players. https://t.co/rwi6JrqMiT
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) September 18, 2019
And when they aren’t doing that, they’re blatantly lying about just about everything else:
I get that Alyssa Milano might not know what an off the record/on background interview is, but shouldn't the editors at the Huffington Post? https://t.co/y2FztSK6qn
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 19, 2019
In a sane world, the publishers of this book and the reporters’ own paper would have words with them about how their actions are damaging their credibility. Alas, that was already long gone.
Published in General
Well, that’s what journalism looks like. Mollie Hemingway and Byron York are two of the few keeping the old profession alive.
Journalism has always had something of a “Change the World” ethos behind it, which has been the whole push behind advocacy journalism. But in the past 25 or so years it has corroded on the national level to “Change the World by Any Means Necessary”, which is where you don’t go out and try to change things by getting facts to put into a major story that stand up to scrutiny — you now have too many people trying to simply create a narrative to Change the World.
That means stories that either slant information to fit the story they want people to believe, leave out key details that would negative affect the narrative, or simply make stuff up in order to sway readers or viewers. And it’s really, really bad at the national level, because too many people carry the title reporter, when it reality they’re spin doctors, working with their preferred politicians and political groups while still claiming to be totally unbiased.
It’s no fun for them to report on bad things that are done by people they support, so they simply don’t, while for the people they hate, they attempt to turn nothingburgers into major constitutional crises. But the more partisan and hyperbolic the get, the easier it is for the public to see that they’re partisan and hyperbolic, and then instead of showing any introspection, they double down with some Wile E. Coyote-like self-defeating obsession that the next story is the one that will finally turn the tide.
The Wile E. Coyote news media. I like that.
I thought about “Army of Fredos” for the narrative shapers in the media but Chris Cuomo deserves that moniker by himself.
(And while you do see some similar things at the local level in the larger metros, the desire there to push a narrative over just reporting the story is far far less, as some recent incidents like the Stoneman Douglas shootings or the Jussie Smollett hoax showed. The national media in both cases came in and were chomping at the bit to use the stories to fit their already-created narratives — it was the Miami Herald and other South Florida media that revealed the failures of Sheriff Israel and his Broward County deputies, and it was the local media in Chicago that didn’t simply accept Smollett’s hoax without question, and started finding out all the holes in the story, even if that did mean going against the narrative that there were Trump supporters in Chicago who were so racist, they’d go out on the coldest night in a third of a century to attack a celebrity black man. The closer your readers and viewers are to a story, the harder it is to spin a narrative as facts, because more people will have first-hand knowledge of the information. So it’s easier to get away with that in Washington that it is in local markets, even when there are some local willing to push the narrative over reality.)
From a WaPo syndicated column, aimed no doubt at those who are too busy to get all the deets:
Max Stier, non-partisan, neutral observer. Okay.
Obama Administration, scandal free. Okay.
I blame Ted Turner..no seriously. He is the father of shock journalism – if it burns it earns.
Facts be damned everything is now about how to get more clicks and views.
They keep referring to this ‘incident’ . Let’s write an entire book about an ‘incident’ that both the victim and the perp agree never happened.
…whose wife was rejected for a federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate late in the Obama Administration. That totally unimportant detail took a few more days to come out.
You need to possess some actual credibility in the first place before you can worry about it being damaged.
I reject the basic assumption, which was a self-serving self-creation of a guild. “Journalism” has never been a profession. The false mask of objectivity was always intended to cover the left’s agenda.
I believe the press, throughout our own nation’s history, and even stretching back into the colonial era, was partisan. Naturally. You knew what you were getting.