Junk
Journalism
What the MSM calls “reporting” is often just activism,
careerism, and narcissism to advance the Democrat agenda.
By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
Once upon a time, Dan Rather — the
fallen CBS celebrity anchorman from the evening news and at 60 Minutes –
was the master of “gotcha” journalism. Rather would play up his populist
credentials, do ambush interviews with supposedly self-important grandees, and
then pull out an unknown memo, an embarrassing quote from one’s past, or some
sort of previously unexamined hypocrisy. And, presto, down went the high and
mighty, as Rather grinned that he had taken down another enemy of his
middle-class viewers without power and influence.
Rather became a multimillionaire
celebrity himself, and forgot the very rules of ethical journalism that he so
often preached to his victims. Nemesis finally — she is often a slowcoach
goddess — caught up with him at 73, in the heat of the 2004 campaign and furor
at the Texan-twanged, evangelical, Iraq War promoter George W. Bush. Rather’s
producers got hold of faked memos purportedly proving that the
commander-in-chief had once gone AWOL while serving as a twenty-something pilot
with the Texas National Guard.
Rather’s story of Bush, the
privileged hypocrite, made a big splash, especially in the age of Cindy Sheehan
and Michael Moore. When the truth came out that the memos were not only not
true but could not be true, given their computerized format from
the pre-Microsoft age, a red-faced CBS hierarchy fired a few of its marquee
producers and eventually eased Rather out.
Rather sued. He denied. He
blustered. He pleaded. He cajoled. He would not go away. When he was all
through, he had become the sort of hapless prey caught in a web of
contradictions that he once had enjoyed teasing before stinging on air.
Rather’s defense was finally reduced to “the means justify the ends” argument
that the memos could have been fake but his charges were still accurate.
NBC anchor Brian Williams was a less
abrasive persona, but no less smug and privileged a celebrity tele-journalist.
He too imploded when his Rather-like ego convinced him that Rule One of
journalism — to demand the truth from others, first one must always tell the
truth — no longer applied, given Williams’ omnipresence, big money, and
colossal sense of self.
So Williams began making stuff up
live in front of millions of listeners, as if he were the story and as if the
audience were the amazed bystanders. Given his progressive faith, his celebrity status, and his nice-guy image, Williams
apparently mythologized for quite some time without audit. His yarns were
pathetic, in the sense that they characteristically placed Williams, as a
self-inflated version of Forrest Gump, in a danger zone perhaps at risk of his
life, but always cool, forever professional in conveying inside drama to
Americans on their couches. A sort of journalist version of Hillary Clinton
flying into the Balkans braving gunfire.
Like Rather, Brian Williams is now
gone, at least for a while. He may be back,
given that he made his network far more money than did Rather in his waning
years. But who could ever believe his personal-voice psychodramas again?
George Stephanopoulos was a
Clinton-era flack who effectively bullied would-be investigative reporters, did negative research, and massaged liberal journalists to
convince America that Bill Clinton was not a philanderer and slave to his
appetites who habitually lied to escape the serial messes he got himself — and
his family and friends — into. And Stephanopoulos was good at spin apparently,
in that Clinton won his election and the country ignored the various females
whom he had bullied, groped, cajoled, and sometimes smeared.
Stephanopoulos wrote a memoir that
served as a kind of mea culpa, as he transitioned into the limelight of New
York-D.C. corridor journalism. Yet Stephanopoulos never severed his
valuable Clinton connections,
even as he went from partisan political analyst to supposedly disinterested
anchor. Like Rather and Williams, his hubris got the best of him and he too
ended up calling down Nemesis.
Stephanopoulos could not just
question Peter Schweizer, author of an exposé on the Clinton Foundation. He had
to go for the jugular, in ironic tu quoque fashion, suggesting that
Schweitzer was a partisan hack and his book political mudslinging because the
author had worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush for four months.
That paradox was a bridge too far —
given that Stephanopoulos had been no mere speechwriter or a four-month
employee, but a recent donor to his old employer’s pay-for-play family
foundation. The closer that Hillary Clinton got to announcing her bid for the
presidency, the more, it seems, Stephanopoulos started giving money to the
Clintons’ foundation and participating in their “charity.” He said he wanted to
promote AIDS relief and save the trees, but there were plenty of foundations
that did both without raking off 90% of their income for administration and
travel or paying Chelsea over a half-million dollars to hang around.
The Clintons and Stephanopoulos were
birds of a liberal feather. Hillary and Bill raked in $30 million in speaking
fees in just the last 16 months (about $62,500 per day). Their left-wing
politics supposedly gave them immunity from the obvious conclusion that they
were con artists who had created a huge family racket (Chelsea gets $600,000 a
year to help run it; Sidney Blumenthal got $10,000 a month in consulting fees)
to shake down corporate grandees and foreign governments.
The motive seems unapologetic greed:
the savvy dealmakers could donate to a former president’s and likely future
president’s shell organization that hired their former, out-of-work flacks,
provided the Clintons with free jet travel, and still funneled 10% of the cash
to charities as progressive cover — as they looked for insider concessions like
cell phone contracts or uranium acquisitions. To the extent one added to the
pot through half-million-dollar fees directly to Bill for a few minutes of
lecturing, there might be even more grants of most favorable-person status.
Stephanopoulos donated with time and
money to all that, again only when it seemed wise to reinvest in Hillary as she
hit the 2016 campaign circuit — when blue-chip access makes or breaks celebrity
journalists. Like the Clintons, Stephanopoulos is a man of the left who likes
to be paid in supposed right-wing fashion for his journalistic caring: $105
million for seven years at ABC, or $41,000 a day — for the next 2,555 days.
Unlike Williams and Rather,
Stephanopoulos still works. But how could he ever interview a presidential
contender given the doubts about his motives, whether corrupt or reformed? When
he interviews Hillary, what will he ask: “Did my $75,000 get through OK?”
Add up all junk journalism — the Rolling
Stone’s serial lies about false rape stories from Sabrina Erdely, the
Jayson Blair myths, the New Republic stable of fabricators, the Fareed Zakaria plagiarism — and one can see why the public distrusts the news in
general and those who provide in particular.
The problem with current reporting
is not the bogeymen of the free-for-all internet, where there are no laws in
the arena, but the blue-chip grandees who suffer the additional wage of
hypocrisy.
Titles and associations, not
character or talent, created a sense of entitlement that so often leads to
overreach. Not all, but most of our junk journalists are progressives, given
the creed that sometimes a memo, a story, an angle might have to be stretched a
bit too far for the noble aim of helping the people, or for assuaging one’s own
guilt of becoming well-off and celebrity-conscious from muckraking journalism.
On a minor endnote, not long ago
journalist Kate Linthicum from the L.A. Times called me for “comment” on
the California drought and “immigration.”
I avoid the L.A. Times. In
2006 their former San Joaquin Valley reporter, Mark Arax, called me to
“comment” on a “civil war” in the San Joaquin Valley between an alliance of
Jewish neocons and Christian zealots who were supposedly pushing the Iraq War
down the throats of the proverbial people, who did the dying.
His Jewish angle was borderline
anti-Semitism. I told him there were few Jews in the Valley to begin with, and
most Christians were apolitical, albeit the Valley was a far more conservative
place than elsewhere in California and anti-war protests were rare. From that,
Arax wrote that I had told him “great nations needed to wage war to remain
great,” and that I wanted “a call for war against Islam.”
He offered no citations for those
quotes, and never returned my calls. I offered the correction to his fabrications here.
Linthicum had seen a column in which
I mentioned a number of causes of the drought dilemma: (1) lack of rain
and snow; (2) failure to finish the envisioned California Water Project; (3)
unwise release of reservoir water to the ocean for various green causes; (4)
much greater California population today than during the last major drought, in
part due to immigration (one in four current Californian residents was born in
a foreign country). After five minutes of conversation, it was clear that she
was interested only in point four, or rather a likely suggestion that I was
scapegoating immigrants for water shortages.
I went through the four causes
again. I added that I was not scapegoating immigrants, but noted the irony of
policies that encouraged open borders yet no commensurate investments in
infrastructure needed for population growth. For example, the paradoxes of
welcoming immigrants to California while not improving highways, building more
reservoirs, canals, and dams, or promoting more job-creating manufacturing,
agricultural, oil, and mineral industries to handle them.
I reminded her that I knew what her
preconceived narrative was, and I wanted no part of it. I referred her to
quotes from the National Review article she was drawing from. (“A record
one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according
to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one’s view
on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in
the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in
water supplies and infrastructure. Sharp rises in population still would not
have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice
to continually increase water storage.”)
She denied an agenda, and to ensure
her fides, promised to email the quotes she would use to run it by me
for approval.
When she hung up, I concluded four
things: 1) She knew nothing about California climate, weather, water policy,
the California Water Project, agriculture, immigration, or even demographic
statistics; 2) she saw a muddled story line in a sort of nativist scapegoating
of poor immigrants; 3) she was not telling the truth when she promised to
email me her use or non-use of quotes before publication.
The story came out with the quote:
In an article in the National
Review, Stanford academic Victor Davis Hanson argued that while
California’s current dry spell is not novel, “What is new is that the state has
never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more
than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s.”
That bit supposedly summed up my
long essay and Linthicum’s over 30 minutes of interviewing.
Turn on Brian Williams, read the L.A.
Times’ lead stories, catch NPR on the radio, and it is often just liberal
activism, careerism, and narcissism on the part of an elite who believes that
their own activism exempts them from the contradictions of their own lives, as
if privilege is not privilege if you crusade 9 to 5 on behalf of the
unprivileged.
Poster’s
comment: Just how vulnerable are you to propaganda?
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