Democracy Dies in Darkness, the Washington Post’s newish motto, was adopted a month after Donald Trump was inaugurated, but the paper’s turn from respected paper of record to partisan screed has been gradual. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s coverage of the Watergate break-in and unraveling of the Nixon administration was the legendary achievement of the Post as a national newspaper, and they have been living off that reputation for fifty years. In the past five years, a commitment to seeing the world through the lens of racism, social justice, and related ideology has undermined its credibility, undoing this heroic brand, for many discerning readers.
Meanwhile over at the New York Times, a young reporter apparently told executive editor Dean Baquet in a 2019 staff meeting that “I just feel like racism is everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” There has since been a discernible effort at the Times to see more stories through a heuristic where race or gender is the most central, all-important attribute of individuals, and a pervasive miasma of white supremacy is taken as fact. Crime reporting elides the identity of perpetrators of color and highlights that of white civilians. Police officers are given zero benefit of the doubt. Concerns about Critical Race Theory and gender ideology being taught in schools are dismissed as nonsense at best and bigotry at worst. Coverage of Florida’s Parental Rights law has entirely lacked objectivity. The last Republican presidential candidate the Times endorsed was Dwight Eisenhower, and remarkably less even-handedly, the Post has never endorsed a single Republican presidential candidate.
Donald Trump’s assertion that the press was the “enemy of the people” and calling everything “fake news” was so egregious at the time that it obscured the fact that he had a valid point. A Reuters survey last year showed that only 29% of Americans trusted the media, half the number in Finland and last of the 46 countries surveyed. The Times, Post, and other national dailies have taken on a crusading, ideological position that has spread from the editorial page into the wider paper, from culture to sports. Both papers’ editorial writers are interchangeable and predictable, from Jennifer Rubin’s Biden boosterism to Perry Bacon’s race essentialism, but each retains one or two contrarians for form’s sake.
One remaining speaker of truth to media power is the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who wrote in January that “trust in the news media lies in tatters,” citing a Gallup poll where only 7 percent of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” of trust in the media.” He lists the reasons, including the failed attempts to link Trump to Russia, and the press embargo and government dismissal of the Wuhan lab leak theory. Early on in Covid, even the suggestion that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan, China coronavirus research laboratory instead of a bat sandwich from a wet market was enough to get someone banned from Twitter. Legacy media would not touch the story. Now, this theory is regarded as likely as any other for how our two-year nightmare began.
Thiessen also cites farcical press reports describing riots, looting, and burning in the wake of George Floyd’s death as “mostly peaceful” protests, and the complete suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, a scoop by the New York Post. No other media outlet took the story up, and Twitter even banned the paper altogether for some time, claiming that it had violated their policy on using hacked data. That the son of then Vice-President Biden was being paid $80,000 a month by a Ukrainian gas company when he knew next to nothing about either Ukraine or the energy industry, indicated the obvious possibility that he was being paid only for access to his father. Ditto the lucrative Chinese deals Hunter was party to, again with little evidence of personal value he added. Both were stories are at least worth looking into, but they were buried for nearly two years, and even now reporting seems grudging at best. Hunter Biden’s personal struggles with hookers and drugs, evidence for which videos were allegedly on his laptop, were perhaps less of public interest but had they been about the Trump boys, we know they would have been closely covered.
The recent Libs of TikTok (LoTT) affair is a case study of how the legacy media has lost the trust of over 90% of Republicans, and why even most Democrats believe that “news organizations report news they know to be fake” according to another poll by Axios. LoTT is Twitter account run by an amateur who collects clips people post of themselves on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-clip application, saying and doing things that are, in general, from the extreme political left. Many of the videos LoTT posts are of rather sad teenagers deluded into believing both that they have a unique gender identity and that they are in any way interesting. These rainbow-haired youths explain, in great detail, what pronouns anyone kind enough to interact with them in person would have to use. Nose rings are obligatory. LoTT’s more controversial clips are of public-school teachers, usually in elementary schools, obsessed with teaching gender ideology and sexual variance to their pupils rather than anything actually on their curriculum, like how to add or read.
Taylor Lorenz covers the tech world, including social media, at the Washington Post. Last week, she took it upon herself to “dox” LoTT in an article. Doxing, for those readers over 40, is the social media equivalent of ‘outing’ a homosexual a generation ago and generally just as well-intentioned. There is a moral argument against doxing a private citizen with a Twitter account, but Lorenz would counter that LoTT’s author has become a public figure and outing her was in the public interest. I won’t argue the pros and cons of that angle here; the real problem with Lorenz’s article is that it is terrible journalism that should never have seen print in a reputable newspaper. She cites only proponents of woke ideology with no attempt at balancing with other sources, makes contentious statements of opinion, and overall her piece carries the polemic charge of an editorial and not straight reporting.
Lorenz quotes only two sources: Media Matters, a partisan progressive media watchdog that makes no pretense of objectivity, and a “media strategist for the ACLU,” an organization that seems to have shifted from supporting civil liberties and free speech to full-time transgender activism. She calls Glenn Greenwald, an actual journalist who won a Pulitzer prize for his work, an “online influencer.” Outing LoTT’s real name, Lorenz then claims “she minimized covid, cast doubt on the election results, and promoted a dubious story about a child sex trafficking ring.” If you click the embedded links to the actual tweets or stories about them, you can see that Lorenz is either willfully misinterpreting the source material or hasn’t bothered to read it at all.
Lorenz damns LoTT by her association to “right wing news sites like the New York Post, the Federalist, and the Post Millennial,” and more horrifying, having a fan in Joe Rogan. Having doxed the author of LoTT, Lorenz ends her piece without a hint of irony by saying that “the popularity of Libs of TikTok comes at a time when far-right communities across the Internet have begun doxing school officials and calling for their execution.” Tit-for-tat is her implied argument. Lorenz’s editor made no effort to slow her roll or inject a countering point of view. The paper has stood behind her reporting without reservation.
Sadly, this is typical for the legacy media and much of television. Some of us remember when CNN began as a 24-hour news report permanently on in hotels, airports, and offices. It was boring, repetitive, but mostly reliable on facts. Their coverage of the first Gulf War was iconic. These days, CNN has become just a mirror image of Fox News for the left, replacing the straight news loop with talk shows hosted by the likes of Anderson Cooper and Brian Stelter. Now, it’s not only boring and repetitive, but biased as well. No wonder CNN has lost 90% of its viewers in the past year, and that there was so little interest from viewers in paying $5 a month for CNN+ that the service mercifully died in a week.
Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek has written a new book about how “an obsession with postmodern doctrines of anti-racism has caused left-wing journalism to become a wholly unreliable source of information about the current, rapidly improving, state of race relations in America,” as reviewed in Quillette. As Mark Thiessen says, the media need to “put aside their political biases and do their jobs.” Unfortunately, there’s no sign of that happening anytime soon. And as long as they don’t, look for the American people to increasingly ignore them as the third-raters that they are.
This is an excellent article! Although they would argue to the contrary, the far left and far right are mirror images of each other.