{"id":8454,"date":"2015-06-03T05:26:53","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T12:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8454"},"modified":"2015-06-03T05:29:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T12:29:29","slug":"junk-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/junk-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Junk Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What the MSM calls \u201creporting\u201d is often just activism, careerism, and narcissism to advance the Democrat agenda.<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via PJ Media<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once upon a time, Dan Rather \u2014 the fallen CBS celebrity anchorman from the evening news and at 60 Minutes<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 was the master of \u201cgotcha\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rather became a multimillionaire celebrity himself, and forgot the very rules of ethical journalism that he so often preached to his victims. Nemesis finally \u2014 she is often a slowcoach goddess \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Rather\u2019s 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<\/em> not<\/i>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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s defense was finally reduced to \u201cthe means justify the ends\u201d argument that the memos could have been fake but his charges were still accurate.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 to demand the truth from others, first one must always tell the truth \u2014 no longer applied, given Williams\u2019 omnipresence, big money, and colossal sense of self.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> [1]<\/sup>, 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.<\/p>\n

Like Rather, Brian Williams is now gone, at least for a while. He may be back<\/a> [2]<\/sup>, 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?<\/p>\n

George Stephanopoulos was a Clinton-era flack who effectively bullied would-be investigative reporters<\/a> [3]<\/sup>, 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 \u2014 and his family and friends \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> [4]<\/sup>, 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.<\/p>\n

Stephanopoulos could not just question Peter Schweizer, author of an expos\u00e9 on the Clinton Foundation. He had to go for the jugular, in ironic tu quoque<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

That paradox was a bridge too far \u2014 given that Stephanopoulos had been no mere speechwriter or a four-month employee, but a recent donor to his old employer\u2019s 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\u2019 foundation and participating in their \u201ccharity.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The motive seems unapologetic greed: the savvy dealmakers could donate to a former president\u2019s and likely future president\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 for the next 2,555 days.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cDid my $75,000 get through OK?\u201d<\/p>\n

Add up all junk journalism \u2014 the Rolling Stone<\/i>\u2019s serial lies about false rape stories from Sabrina Erdely, the Jayson Blair myths, the New Republic<\/i> stable of fabricators, the Fareed Zakaria plagiarism<\/a> [5]<\/sup> \u2014 and one can see why the public distrusts the news in general and those who provide in particular.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own guilt of becoming well-off and celebrity-conscious from muckraking journalism.<\/p>\n

* * * * * * * * * * * *<\/p>\n

On a minor endnote, not long ago journalist Kate Linthicum from the L.A. Times<\/i> called me for \u201ccomment\u201d on the California drought and \u201cimmigration.\u201d<\/p>\n

I avoid the L.A. Times<\/i>. In 2006 their former San Joaquin Valley reporter, Mark Arax, called me to \u201ccomment\u201d on a \u201ccivil war\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgreat nations needed to wage war to remain great,\u201d and that I wanted \u201ca call for war against Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

He offered no citations for those quotes, and never returned my calls. I offered the correction to his fabrications here<\/a> [6]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Linthicum had seen a column in which I mentioned a number of causes of the drought dilemma:<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> article she was drawing from. (\u201cA record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one\u2019s 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\u2019 advice to continually increase water storage.\u201d)<\/p>\n

She denied an agenda, and to ensure her fides,<\/em> promised to email the quotes she would use to run it by me for approval.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> her use or non-use of quotes before publication.<\/p>\n

The story came out with the quote:<\/p>\n

In an article in the National Review,<\/i> Stanford academic Victor Davis Hanson argued that while California\u2019s current dry spell is not novel, \u201cWhat is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought \u2014 well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That bit supposedly summed up my long essay and Linthicum\u2019s over 30 minutes of interviewing.<\/p>\n

Turn on Brian Williams, read the L.A. Times\u2019<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

URLs in this post:<\/p>\n

[1] progressive faith: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2010\/08\/24\/no-one-understands-this-nascar-nation-more-than-brian-williams\/<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[2] He may be back: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2015\/02\/11\/brian-williams-resurface\/<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[3] bullied would-be investigative reporters: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/eddriscoll\/2015\/05\/16\/stephanopoulos-democrat-operative-posing-as-objective-journalist\/<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[4] never severed his valuable Clinton connections: http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2015\/05\/17\/abc-colleague-george-stephanopoulos-really-isn-t-a-journalist.html<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[5] Fareed Zakaria plagiarism: https:\/\/ourbadmedia.wordpress.com\/2014\/09\/16\/fareed-zakaria-never-stopped-plagiarizing-how-dozens-of-episodes-of-his-cnn-show-ripped-others-off\/<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

[6] the correction to his fabrications here: https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=4137<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the MSM calls \u201creporting\u201d is often just activism, careerism, and narcissism to advance the Democrat agenda. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media Once upon a time, Dan Rather \u2014 the fallen CBS celebrity anchorman from the evening news and at 60 Minutes\u00a0\u2013 was the master of \u201cgotcha\u201d journalism. Rather would play up his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[145],"tags":[989,1002,704,1006],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2cm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11819,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/journalism-is-dead-long-live-the-media\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":0},"title":"Journalism is Dead\u2014Long Live the Media!","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 13, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on. Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12632,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-american-journalism-died\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":1},"title":"How American Journalism Died","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 21, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review In\u00a02017, the liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University found that 93 percent of CNN\u2019s coverage of the Trump administration was negative. The center found similarly negative Trump coverage at other major news outlets. The election year 2020 has\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9917,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/talk-radio-cable-news-the-mainstream-media-and-the-news-revolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":2},"title":"Talk Radio, Cable News, the Mainstream Media, and the News Revolution","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review In the hubbub over Trump\u2019s attack on the media, we sometimes forget that Barack Obama et al. customarily went after talk-radio and cable-news conservatives \u2014 whose job, after all, was opinion journalism \u2014 as biased, whereas Trump went\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-brief-history-of-media-bias\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":3},"title":"A Brief History of Media Bias","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Who said that newspapers are supposed to report the news in an objective and fact-based way? by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The revelation that the Department of Justice acquired and read the phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters does not change the obvious fact that the mainstream\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3034,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-media-morality-tale\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":4},"title":"A Media Morality Tale","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The putative Caroline Kennedy candidacy for senator has had the odd effect of reopening the media can of worms treatment of Gov. Palin. Compared to Sarah Palin's almost immediate immersion into crowds and public speaking, Kennedy seems like a deer in the headlights before\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9546,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9546\/","url_meta":{"origin":8454,"position":5},"title":"Comment from an Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"Megan Ring","date":"October 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from an Angry Reader: Dear Sir, \u00a0Maybe if Trump wins, you can be one of his pet intellectuals, whom he will despise and humiliate. \u00a0Sincerely, Kurt Lipschutz \u00a0 Victor Davis Hanson's Reply: Dear Angry Reader Lipschutz, I voted against Trump in the primaries and am on record that he\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8454"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8459,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8454\/revisions\/8459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}