Jeff Zucker didn’t want his journalists to report like neutral witnesses. He wanted them steering events like advocates. Repeat a narrative (or lie) often enough, especially with the appearance of authority and knowledge that TV news anchors possess, and you may make it reality, or at least shape perceptions of whatever events do come to pass. Meme the dream.
You can sense the reluctance with which news operations surrender their grip on a narrative when it bumps up against facts that don’t fit their preferred story. Journalists often become angry at both their political foes and the stubborn facts that prove those foes know better than the media.
Witness the scandal—brief yet revealing—over a Miami Herald columnist wishing Trump supporters would die from coronavirus.
The thought that some unruly beachgoers might end up having fun during such an important crisis was more than the Herald’s Fabiola Santiago could bear, and she tweeted, “[P]acked beaches should work nicely to thin the ranks of Trump/DeSantis/Gimenez supporters in #Florida who value money over health.”
She was soon rightly shamed into deleting the tweet and then brayed a phony non-apology apology, as has become all too common: “I deleted the tweet commenting on people at the beach because it didn’t accurately convey my sentiment and I want to apologize for the phrase I used that offended many people. Regardless of political differences, I would never wish any harm on anyone.”
Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she wished.
At least she apologized, but the Miami Herald as an institution didn’t. They don’t feel the need to because, ultimately, they hate those they cover who don’t see the world as they do. Sometimes, individual reporters, on rare occasions, have to fall on their swords, but the biased organizations employing them keep on going. Bad as government is, at least when we legislators screw up, we get voted out. Not journalists, unless people get so fed up they stop watching. Then the media company seeks a bailout, as many did during coronavirus. Maybe they should produce a product worth buying?
Even when journalists have to apologize for being a little too blatant in their bias, it doesn’t seem to change their subsequent behavior. They aren’t really sorry. ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd had to apologize to me in November 2019—after tweeting that the only reason I’m not a “tool” is that “[t]ools are useful”—then had to apologize again to another political figure just two weeks later. He called New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik “a perfect example why just electing someone because they are a woman or a millennial doesn’t necessarily get you the leaders we need,” then deleted the tweet as critics condemned it as sexist.
Dowd later promised to be “better,” but I’ll believe it when I see it. Be best, as the First Lady says.
The more Americans think of themselves as a single nation, the more the media strategy of pitting groups against each other fails, which, counterintuitively, helps explain their obsession with Russia. Their goal wasn’t to unite America against a serious foreign threat, as was the case back in the days of the Cold War. The media’s goal, on the contrary, was to convince some Americans that other Americans weren’t really their countrymen, to convince Democrats and moderates that Republicans were dancing on strings pulled by foreign meddlers. Dissent is no longer patriotic if you don’t dissent the way we want you to!
The Left claimed that the 2016 election was stolen from Hillary Clinton by a Russian disinformation campaign, but what is the U.S. media if not a massive disinformation campaign itself, one plainly aimed—as Zucker’s comments make clear—at certain political outcomes? The irony, of course, is that James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas head who the left-wing media say is not a journalist, makes real news about the fake news. They can’t handle it when O’Keefe turns the camera on them.
We accept reporters’ official titles, whether bestowed by themselves or the equally self-promoting organizations they work for. But shouldn’t some of them be called public relations officers of the Democratic Party?
Take Michael Isikoff, who would prefer you call him Yahoo! News’s chief investigative correspondent. Has he really been unearthing buried secrets or is he just an expert mouthpiece for the Democrats’ talking points? Is he a stenographer for power or does he hold power to account? Yahoo is barely a search engine, and Isikoff is barely a journalist.
Conservative journalist Sara Carter notes that Isikoff announces events as if they are exciting scoops, but they are more like press releases the Left wants disseminated. Isikoff recently filed an “exclusive” about Obama fretting in a “private” conference call about the “rule of law” being at risk if charges against former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn are dropped. Do we really think Obama was unaware Isikoff would report on Obama’s damning pronouncement? Do we really think Isikoff thought he was exposing Obama’s secrets to the world?
Flynn, as noted earlier, was entrapped into uttering minor inaccuracies about Russian contacts, then pleaded guilty to misleading the FBI in exchange for other charges against his son being dropped. The anti-Trump crowd would have us believe they were not personally threatened by Flynn’s attempt at reorganizing the intelligence establishment away from its obsession with Russia, but a lot of these people wanted a Cold War with Russia to go on forever because Russia expertise is good for the pocketbooks of the folks in Washington. Chinese is a hard language to learn, man.
The process of stealthily (and sometimes illegally) leaking the establishment’s point of view out via superficially objective stories is par for the course in what passes for journalism, but it’s less like good reporting and more like a CEO telling his PR flacks what to do. A Democratic politician of Obama’s stature can dispense (implicit) marching orders to the journalist-troops as easily and effortlessly as Zucker does to his CNN staff.
