Matt Yglesias is now called a blogger, but he has been an editor and a writer at places like The Atlantic and Vox. He’s a journalist; an opinion journalist, for the most part, but a journalist. He also seldom meets a progressive idea he doesn’t like, which is fine, I suppose; after all, that just makes him like about 90 percent of all journalists.
He also endorses lying. The tweet above from Matt is a couple years old, but was recently raised again in an interview with the conservative Daily Caller and some of Matt’s Twitter exchanges with other writers.
“Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes,” wrote Yglesias last week. He seemed shocked that anyone would be troubled by this, asking a conservative writer, “Do you really think deception is immoral in all circumstances?” He told the Daily Caller that he approves of lying by policy advocates, but of course he would never lie, because his job as a blogger is to inform.
Does that mean that he would flag, expose and criticize a lie from a politician or advocate he favors, used in the service of a progressive policy Yglesias wants to see succeed? Say, a health insurance program where the primary public policy-making advocate swears will allow everyone to keep their current health care plans, “Period!”? Will Matt vigorously expose hype by climate change advocates like Al Gore, or false budget claims by politicians like Bernie Sanders? If Yglesias thinks that the public wrongly believing that Mike Brown was surrendering when he was shot will lead to important social reforms, will he expose the lie, or bolster it? What are the implications of a journalist’s belief that lying to the public may be ethical for officials and advocates?
It doesn’t take a lot of thought, or shouldn’t, to realize that such a belief makes trustworthy and credible reporting, opinion journalism or blogging impossible. Yglesias’s belief must necessarily lead him to a double standard: he has an obligation to expose the lies of politicians whose goals are not in the public interest, (that is, goals that he personally does not support); but he also has an ethical obligation not to foil the well-intentioned lies of those noble public servants and warriors for justice who are only using untruths for the greater good—that is, the good as they, and Yglesias, perceive it. Surely it is not ethical journalism to do what is not in the best interests of the public, and if a lie is ethical, then exposing that lie must be unethical. How can it be ethical to foil the greater good? So a journalist like Yglesias may not actively support a lie that he thinks is jsutified by its desired ends….he will just ignore it, and write about some evil Republican. Then he will sit silent when journalists exposing the “good lie” are dismissed as conservative hacks.
Thus he erects a massive rationalization and self-justifying deception. A leftist journalist like Matt must expose as corrupt and a betrayal of trust, for instance, the Bush Administration hyping its certainty of WMD’s in order to justify a war that it sincerely believed had to be fought to protect the country and international order—seek the truth! However, hyping or outright lying aimed at good policies or goals—according to progressive-minded journalists, of course, who know what really matters–Obamacare, climate change legislation, protecting Hillary Clinton or just keeping Democrats in office, must be aided, abetted, and, upon exposure, defended by such journalists.
This delusion leads to a double standard, and journalist complicity with dishonesty for one set of politicians, and opposition to dishonesty in covering others. As a result, the public is deceived about who is lying, but, Matt and his colleagues reason, that’s okay!It’s moral.
A journalist who accepts the need for lies to accomplish goals in a democracy rejects democracy itself, and the news media’s proper role in it. A public that doesn’t know the truth isn’t able to participate in its own government. If Yglesias believes that lying to the public can be “moral” to accomplish goals that he agrees with (but is naturally intolerable to seek goals he opposes), he is endorsing propaganda, deception, Machiavellian tactics and totalitarian government. His version of journalism isn’t truth-seeking. It is assisting in the corruption and disabling of free will and self-determination.
How many other “journalists” reason like this, and genuinely believe they are behaving professionally and ethically? I’m afraid to ask.
Pressed to justify the unjustifiable, Yglesias in his interview with The Daily Caller, Yglesias said “go fuck yourself” and hung up the phone.
Ethics Alarms 
Matt Yglesias has earned the honor only a select few have truly earned in my eyes, he’s officially stupid!
You can’t fix stupid!
By the way; Matt Yglesias is no longer a journalist, he’s just another unethical political hack.
But he was an unethical political hack all along!
Maybe so, but he has certainly cemented his well earned title of stupid political hack now.
If dishonesty is rewarded, expect more dishonesty.
Quoting from memory, here is a little nineteenth century poem that may be apposite:-
Wolfe! One of my father’s favorites, and largely forgotten, at least on this side of the Atlantic!
Slightly off, here’s the correct version:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
I doubt if that is correct either, because its wording appears to be more 20th century than many of the variants I have seen. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t the “official” one appearing in authorised editions these days, of course. (I have an ostensibly faithful King James Version of the Bible – yet, as early as the preface, it contains modern U.S. spelling, absent from an older copy I have!)
Parenthesized and non-parenthesized versions included, the wording of the rendition I posted seems to be all I’m finding.
But sure, doubt if you must.
I hope you weren’t googling for variants that used that wording, because that would have filtered out any that used “nor” rather than “or”. That actually stuck in my mind when I first saw it, wherever that was, precisely because it isn’t a modern word choice.
This was my search string:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22humbert+wolfe%22+AND+%22british%22+AND+%22journalist%22
This search turned up yet another variant, somewhat ahead of a few instances of my own variant given by me. The other variant was:-
That is another quotation from memory, this time Malcolm Turnbull’s. As the Bunyipitude blog remarks,
My own recollection matches the first two lines of Turnbull’s with the last two of the more widely found variant (modulo punctuation) – and it does scan. I strongly suspect that both he and I were exposed to that during our (private, non-U.S.) education, and I remembered the last two lines better. Nevertheless, his memory of the first two lines is an independent backing of mine – and I still think “nor” works better than “or”, by the grammar of a century ago, which makes it likely that our memory genuinely is of a superseded original. More I cannot provide, working from secondary material, and either way variants are as possible as a single canonical version.
I think most people who have political preferences fall into this trap. I hear it all over the place. I’m prone to hear rationalizations only when people with a different political view from mine use them. It’s been an interesting journey for me as I have learned to listen for rationalizations. The trouble I often have is recognizing differences in false equivalencies. “They lied so it’s OK for my preferred pundits to lie.” “Why should I be so careful to weed out my rationalizations when they don’t make any effort to do the same.”
Self-awareness isn’t easy and there’s not really any appreciation for it. Certainly not when you make a living by writing opinions, making policy, or doing things that other people will criticize. For the sake of having enough facts to make a competent decision we should be able to expect journalists to spend time practicing ethics and recognizing and exposing unethical (not to mention unlawful) behavior. But, I wonder if journalists were ever really just stating the facts. Maybe were just more aware of the hypocrisy because of the sheer volume of it now. When supposedly legitimate news sources are indistinguishable from propaganda we either ignore all of it, or choose sides.
Being unethical is a high art form as practiced by politics. The only defense is teaching people to recognize deception. But, that leaves me with no one to trust enough to vote for. So I become a horrified rationalizer hearing myself saying, like Joy Behar “Well, he/she is an idiot, but at least they might possibly be honest enough to vote for some of the things I think are important and that they are saying they think are important.
How sad is that? For the first time in my life I’m not proud of my country. And I’m contemplating not voting.
Too bad Yglesias hadn’t been born at an earlier time. He’d do just fine writing articles for Pravda or working in the Reich Chancellory Ministry of Propaganda with Joseph Goebbels as his boss. After all it’s for the good of the people!
Nice analysis, Jack. “The ends justify the means!” is the shibboleth of the Left. They should all be required to wear baseball caps with that emblazoned above the bill. I first became aware of this going to college in the northeast in the early ’70s and it’s grown more virulent over the succeeding years. As Wayne points out, they have reduced themselves to propagandists.
Mr. Marshall, I read each of your posts. Certainly, I do not agree with each one. But, more often than not, we are in agreement. Will you be issuing a post regarding the armed insurrectionists here in Oregon? Late yesterday afternoon a group was intercepted on their way to a community meeting in John Day. A number of people were arrested and one person, LaVoy Finicum, was killed. And now to the reason that I am sending this note. In the responses that have followed, Mr. Finicum’s daughter has spoken regarding his moral sensibility and essentially peaceful nature, and supporters of the insurrectionists have chanted their mantra of Ruby Ridge and Waco. Indeed, people, including children, lost their lives in those two incidents, but it is not as if government agents picked up people off of the streets. These people rather proudly announced their armed opposition to our government. Did these adults believe that the government was going to allow armed groups to materialize across the country and do nothing? What bothers me regarding the Ruby Ridge and Waco mantra is the lack of any reference to Mr. McVeigh and Oklahoma City. How many children died in that explosion? I appreciate Mr. Finicum’s daughter’s comments regarding her father. But, I would refer her to televised interviews with her father at the beginning of the wildlife refuge occupation during which he had physically positioned himself in the parking lot and he was going to be the first person the police met. He went on to say that the Feds were never going to put him in a concrete cell. The daughter’s comments remind me of the mothers of black Americans who, have died of “state violence” and, indicate that their dead children were the best children and were unjustly identified and murdered.
Yglesias seems dedicated to a bias-serving conflation of principles from The Art of War (Sun Tzu), The Art of Loving (Erich Fromm), and The Art of the Deal (Donald Trump), culminating in his personal creed, “My Moral Imperatives as a Journalist.”
Jack, thank you for several memorable, even quotable assertions in this post:
“It doesn’t take a lot of thought, or shouldn’t, to realize that [belief that lying to the public may be ethical for officials and advocates] makes trustworthy and credible reporting, opinion journalism or blogging impossible.”
“A journalist who accepts the need for lies to accomplish goals in a democracy rejects democracy itself, and the news media’s proper role in it. A public that doesn’t know the truth isn’t able to participate in its own government.”
“[Yglesias’ (and anyone’s like his)] version of journalism isn’t truth-seeking. It is assisting in the corruption and disabling of free will and self-determination.”
In that second one above, I imagine substituting “voter” for “journalist” and “electorate’s” for “news media’s” in the first sentence.