September 5, 2018 at 5:46 p.m.
Defending a truly free and independent press
Defending a truly free and independent press
Yes, the free press is under attack. It is being assailed at every turn over fake news and rampant bias. It has been called the enemy of the people by the president of the United States. It has lost most if not all of its credibility, the only hard currency it possesses.
A free press without credible currency is an oxymoron. It is not a sentinel in a Fourth Estate; it is an imposter living on a patch of muddied land, trampled and trespassed upon by powers it can no longer keep honest.
The question is, who is destroying the free press? Is it President Trump? Is it Breitbart and the far right with its urgent demands to make America great again? Is it an armored cadre of liberal special interests seeking to conquer and oppress the globe using the language of tolerance and diversity?
It is none of those. The truth is, the so-called free press - and these days it is so-called - is being destroyed by none other than .... the so-called free press itself.
The dishonesty, the hypocrisy, the bias, the absolutely brazen disregard for journalistic standards - all these are the reasons America has turned its back on the news media. All these are the reasons many if not most Americans no longer believe what any of the media prints or says.
Though we support many of Donald Trump's policies, it does not make us feel good to hear him call the mainstream media "fake news," or to refer to the media as the enemy of the people. We can understand the language - this president has been the target of the most dishonest and irresponsible journalism in American history - but the tweeted bullets hurt even more because the American people are buying what he is saying.
They are buying it because there's a whole lot of truth to the president's claims.
Remember when The New York Times Magazine's editor posted photos of illegal immigrant children sleeping in cages, suggesting they were of the Trump administration's making, only to find out they were taken during the Obama years?
Remember Brian Ross of ABC, who tanked the stock market when he falsely reported that Donald Trump had instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the presidential campaign? It never happened.
Remember when The Washington Post reported that Russia hackers penetrated the U.S. electric grid, or when Slate reported that a secret server between Trump and a Russian bank had been discovered, showing actual communication between them? Both were false.
Then there was CNN crowing - falsely - that Trump, his son, and others received access to stolen DNC emails nine days before WikiLeaks released them online. Wasn't true.
So should any reasonable person believe the media "exclusives," so loaded as they are with anonymous sources? These days, to average reasonable Americans, that's code for 'they're making it all up.' And too often they are.
Now comes CNN again - this time with none other than Carl Bernstein - reporting that Michael Cohen, the president's former attorney, was willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump knew about and even approved the pre-election campaign meeting at Trump Tower that included Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and an evil Russian delegation.
It was, of course, from anonymous sources - one of whom turned out to be none other than Cohen's lawyer Lanny Davis. The problem was, Davis outed himself as the source and said he actually knew no such thing, and, what's more, Cohen didn't know anything about the Trump Tower meeting until he saw it in the media.
Underscoring all this, Cohen testified last year under oath that he didn't know about the meeting, and both he and Davis stood by that accounting to congressional leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after CNN's report.
Here's how committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and vice chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) put it: "What we can say is that we recently re-engaged with Mr. Cohen and his team following press reports that suggested he had advance knowledge of the June 2016 meeting between campaign officials and Russian lawyers at Trump Tower. Mr. Cohen had testified before the Committee that he was not aware of the meeting prior to its disclosure in the press last summer. As such, the Committee inquired of Mr. Cohen's legal team as to whether Mr. Cohen stood by his testimony. They responded that he did stand by his testimony."
So whether Bernstein made it up or whether Davis made it up or whether there was miscommunication, the story was bunk from the start.
So what does CNN do? They stand by Bernstein and the story.
Their defense of this is that they have multiple sources, and maybe they do. But if that is true - if other sources are saying that Cohen said he intended to tell Mueller that Trump knew about the meeting - those sources are contradicting what Cohen and Davis are saying publicly and to lawmakers, and what Cohen himself has testified to under oath and has recently confirmed.
How can CNN stand by a story about Cohen's intentions when Cohen and his lawyer say the story is wrong?
But, as journalist Glenn Greenwald - no fan of Donald Trump - has pointed out, that's not even the worst of the story. The worst of the story is the apparent outright lie in which Bernstein and his colleagues wrote: "Contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment."
That would be the same Lanny Davis who now says he was one of the main sources for the story. In addition to standing by a debunked story, CNN has made not one scintilla of effort to explain what appears to be a blatant lie.
As this case and the foregoing examples show, the mainstream media has become a showcase for impressive lies. The mainstream media simply cannot be believed on any significant story, and the American people have figured it out.
And so the damage to its credibility has been self-inflicted, as Greenwald points out: "And when it comes to discrediting journalism in the U.S., thousands of mean Donald Trump tweets about Chuck Todd and Wolf Blitzer can't accomplish even a fraction of what this media behavior has done to themselves, particularly when their behavior is followed by secrecy and refusals to comment so brazen and unjustified that it would make even security state spokespeople blush with shame."
The long-term damage the mainstream media has done to itself cannot be ignored. It will take generations to recover any lost credibility, decades before the American people trust the news media again.
Even honest journalists working in the trenches - and those journalists are out there, some in the mainstream media, most in independent and smaller outlets - can be dismissed out of hand, thanks to the misconduct of the corporate press.
Now and in the foreseeable future, when the news media confronts powerful figures - long after Trump is gone - they can simply call it fake news, damn the reporters as the enemies of the people, and go on their way.
So this isn't about Trump; it's about giving powerful members of society and government get-out-of-jail-free cards. That is what the mainstream media has done, and that is the true legacy of Carl Bernstein and his mainstream media ilk.
A month or so ago, The Boston Globe launched an effort to defend "freedom of the press" - "in light of President Trump's frequent attacks on the media," to use its words - in which it rallied newspapers and other media to run editorials essentially attacking the president.
This newspaper did not participate, for the very reasons we are writing about today: The true threat to a free and independent press is not coming from President Trump but from the corporate mainstream media that has fabricated so many stories and in the process endangered the entire Fourth Estate.
The Globe's campaign attracted some 300 newspapers to write coordinated and highly partisan attacks upon the president. Rather than calling out the truly dishonest news media within its ranks, the mainstream media chose to attack the president for actually doing so.
It was a coordinated attempt to deceive the public - it was nothing less than collusion by a news media obsessed with proving collusion on the part of the president despite the lack of any evidence of the latter.
How ironic.
The whole campaign exposes the lie of a modern free and independent national press. It begs the question: Of those 300 newspapers, how many owners are there? And of those owners, how many are traditional publishers and how many are global corporate conglomerates more interested in their bottom lines than in free and independent journalism?
The Denver Post participated, for example; it's owned by a hedge fund. The Washington Post participated; it's owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos; The Omaha World Herald and the Des Moines Register participated; they are owned by Berkshire Hathaway; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel participated; it's a Gannett shill, a shell of its former self.
To be sure, some independent newspapers joined in for their own reasons. The point is, fewer and fewer corporate enterprises own more and more of America's newspapers and media companies.
And while there are fewer and fewer newspaper owners, hedge funds and investment firms now own or control a large swath of the industry. As Bloomberg recently reported, Alden Global owns about 60 daily newspapers, the private-equity firm Fortress owns almost 150 newspapers in smaller markets, and the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC is one of the largest shareholders and bondholders in McClatchy.
To believe these newspapers are free of corporate agendas is delusional. To think these newspapers are acting freely and independently is equally absurd.
A nation in which a truly free and independent press flourishes is awash in editorial diversity and spontaneity. Pulling out a corporate dog whistle to have everybody write the party line at the same time is exactly the opposite of how a free and independent press works.
Still, there is hope. More than a hundred years ago, the growth of sensationalist yellow journalism plunged the industry into a national crisis. At first popular, these newspapers quickly lost readership to more serious journalism as the American public caught on and tuned out.
The challenges to overcoming today's equivalent of yellow journalism are greater because of the concentrated ownership and the global character of the media. But those of us who believe and stand up for a truly free and independent press have an Ace in the Hole: the American people.
The American people have caught on to and tuned out the mainstream media. Whether they turn to serious journalism or tune out altogether remains an open question in today's poisoned climate.
Still, we believe serious journalism has a future if only those of us dedicated to its standards will persevere. Stay the course, offer a serious alternative, and readers will come.
Reporting the truth objectively has always won the day. We believe it will again.
One thing is for sure, a truly free and independent press does not gather around in a circle and throw editorial rocks in unison at those who call out its dishonesty.
A free and independent press does not stone truth tellers. It recruits them.
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