The Press Doesn’t Learn Things, Unless Those Things Are About How Great They Are.
Many members of the media are now out there defending their profession against criticism they don’t even feel they should be facing, indulging in the tantalizing persecution fantasy that after all, Trump abuses and demeans them, and his base is openly hostile, so therefore surely the media are blameless and professional and it’s you people who are the real problem, right?
To paraphrase their white (or orange?) whale, WRONG!
The pivot, the caveats, the reluctance, the defiance. They suggest Barr is under pressure from above, without any evidence, and imply his character is questionable without anything questionable about his character being raised. Especially note the choice of guests, and that those guests not only speculate still that there is collusion yet to be revealed, but actually use the same reasoning and arguments they’ve presented all along, for months and years, as if there were no intervening major event like, I don’t know, a concluded investigation to alter their talking points.
The word we’ve heard for what seems like a lifetime is “collusion”. Here, just a day and a half after the
biggest investigation in the history of time that was
definitely going to finally expose that Trump colluded with Russia actually said that
no one colluded with Russia–and despite
Morning Joe‘s latest spin, it
did say that–the new ad is focused on “obstruction of justice.”
Look, that is not just following the new angle, and it’s not just focusing on the unsettled charge. It’s not even merely moving the goalposts. It’s a fundamental dodge of the honest person’s responsibility to review their own behavior. It’s a complete disregard for having had the story wrong.
Do not doubt they had the story wrong. They were not simply posting updates to an ongoing investigation. There is simply no way to compile all of the video clips or the articles written, that have been all but certain about collusion. Beyond the winks and nudges, of which there were many, and beyond the innuendo, they brought on guest after guest to say that
without a doubt the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and no question about it. They are still doing that this week, post-report.
So they weren’t just reporting that the story was happening, they led viewers to believe that it was going a particular way, and that there would be a particular result, that it was all but certain.
Media critic Stelter asks two open-ended questions in his
proffered mix of vigorous defense and minor critique of the media: “What did the sheer volume of the coverage signal to viewers?” and “Do Maddow’s viewers feel misled right about now?”
These are not questions that require an open end for pondering. The “sheer volume” signaled “Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election from Hillary.” That is also what their opinion hosts and guests have explicitly and implicitly communicated every day. Do Maddow’s viewers feel misled? This also has an answer.
Maddow viewers absolutely had the expectation that Mueller would find that Trump colluded with Russia. And now, they don’t feel that she led them astray. They believe that, because reality did not meet expectation, reality must have been tampered with.
Because that is how conspiracy theories work. It’s dot-connecting and innuendo and ultimately more theory to explain the theory. Exactly what happens in the clips above.
There isn’t enough virtual ink in the world to enumerate each of these points against the coverage to date, and it would be a futile exercise anyway. When a fact is contrary to the conspiracy theory, you either ignore the fact, claim the fact is not a fact, or make the theory even more sophisticated and complex enough to involve disinformation aimed specifically at your own ideas. That’s what Rachel and her viewers are doing right now.
And to those who remember the chariots racing to the collusion finish line bearing their standards and blaring their trumpets in righteous fury, it is also futile to list every point. You already know.
For those who know, and for those guilty, the problem isn’t proving what you’ve done, it’s convincing you that you shouldn’t have done it, and not to do it again.
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It
“A fool think he needs no advice, but a wise man listens to others.” Bible, Proverbs 12:15
The fundamental issue that created the mess is the same one creating the unwillingness to correct it. The inability to do it properly is also the inability to judge that you’re doing it improperly. Because it comes down to a core belief about the profession that is simply wrong.
Journalists believe, and are taught, that they are righteous. That their job is to be righteous. They buy their own PR about being the last line of defense, the noblest and most self-sacrificing profession, speaking truth to power.
Being a check on power is the distilled value of the profession of journalism. The fourth estate does not just act collectively as the voice of the people popularly to the voice of the people electorally, it also acts as a bulwark against massive untruth. Recording, repeating, telling, putting in context, challenging…these are the tasks of the profession, the group. Perhaps impolitic historically to call it noble, considering the connotations of nobility, but it is admirable.
But that is not
your job,
Don Lemon. It’s not
your job,
Mika Brzezinski (and good thing, too). It’s the overall job, not the individual.
That belief in one’s own nobility and righteousness, and unquenchable thirst to display it and be seen as it, is the biggest problem of all.
When a story breaks, and there is a report of a hate crime with salacious, politically-charged details, and few facts are known, and you’ve just been given the live report from the scene by a reporter, and the camera cuts back to you, News Anchor, if you shake your head and say “and this is 2019 in America” in earnest dismay, emoting your sadness at the injustice of the world and your commitment to finding justice: You’re. Doing it. Wrong.
If you’re a news anchor, do
your job.
Of course, that’s just one aspect of the problem with the coverage. It is an impossible task to give a picture of the totality of two years of news and reporting. There are, though, some important and specific points being made in the wake of this major story that they are now trying to say they never hyped.
This article, from
Charles Cooke at National Review, should be required reading for every journalist.
No skepticism, or at least reservation in reporting and writing about so monumental a thing as the installment of a U.S. President by a foreign intelligence operation in collusion and cooperation with that politician and his entire party. To claim “we simply reported what happened” is a gross misrepresentation.
Skepticism, or at least circumspection, isn’t a big ask, but asking it two weeks ago, or two months ago, or two
years ago made you an outsider in journalism.
Rolling Stone‘s
Matt Taibbi made the
somewhat objectionable but eye-catching comparison of Russia-gate to the WMD story of the first decade of the millennium.
His provocative subhead, ‘The Iraq war face-plant damaged the reputation of the press. Russia-gate just destroyed it” certainly drew a lot of readers, but the meat of the story is staggering in scope.
For example, referencing
this article from
Peter Baker at the
New York Times which lightly conceded that there is some question about the validity of coverage to date, Taibbi wrote:
This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”
The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.
“The story hyped from the start was espionage,” said Taibbi, accurately characterizing coverage. The narrative was that there had been or continues to be “a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.”
That is still the argument being made on MSNBC this week.
The betrayal narrative was not reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “
will die in jail.”
This effort, which is not merely spontaneous in liberal media but also pushed relentlessly by activist sites such as Media Matters for America and purported fact-checkers like Snopes, is a fatal flaw in the design of the new media age. Even the most basic logic of it is obviously lacking.
At the
Washington Post,
Paul Farhi wrote about a particularly amazing take.
Among the theories commentators advanced was one by New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, who speculated in a cover story in July about whether “the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper.” He suggested that “it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the then-upcoming summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.”
You may recognize
Jonathan Chait from his many, many, many appearances on cable news as an expert on the collusion story, where he served in the role of telling viewers the certainty of criminal treason so the nodding host or anchor didn’t have to say it out loud, but that’s not why we’re looking at this excerpt.
Also from the story:
“Russiagate” has been a news media obsession since Trump’s victory in November 2016. The nonpartisan
Tyndall Report pegged the total amount of time devoted to the story on the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC last year at 332 minutes, making it the second-most covered story after the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. According to
a count by the Republican National Committee released Sunday, The Post, the New York Times, CNN.com and MSNBC.com have written a combined 8,507 articles mentioning the special counsel’s investigation.
The cable news networks, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have added hundreds of hours of discussion about the topic, too.
The story undoubtedly was an important factor in shaping voters’ perceptions before the 2018 midterm election, in which Democrats won control of the House.
They will answer “no, we did not mislead,” and that is, in fact, precisely the answer they are giving. CNN’s
Jeff Zucker, the
NYT‘s
Dean Baquet, dozens of individual writers including Frum, and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC are saying that very thing. We were not wrong, or even overwrought, and have nothing to be sorry for.
