My, this is ironic! In an essay defending journalism while attacking President Trump for labeling current day journalists as “enemies of the people,” Esquire writer Ryan D’Agostino both manages to prove Trump correct, and while lionizing disgraced journalist Dan Rather, inspires Rather to show how he exemplifies what’s rotten within his profession.
“In a wide-ranging interview,” the essay/interview ‘s description says, “the legendary reporter gives a clinic on journalism, its intersection with politics, civil rights, and the future of American culture.” This alone would normally keep me from reading such a piece, were it not part of my job to expose unethical mind rot. Rather is a legend, as the cliche goes, in his own mind. Having him give a clinic on journalism would be like Sweeney Todd giving a clinic on barbering, and no one should care what he says or thinks about anything, having proven himself to be untrustworthy and afflicted with warped reasoning.
Here, for example, is Rather’s description of the fake news scandal that cost him his reputation and career. Well, let me take that back: first read part of D’Agostino’s self-indicting introduction of it:
There were proven technical and even journalistic flaws in the evidence Rather’s team found—but no one questioned the truth of what they were saying. Bush never disputed the veracity of the claims. It was a strange situation: By way of a possibly forged document, they had uncovered a damning truth about the sitting president.
Wow.
- Equivocation and deceptive verbiage: “Proven technical and even journalistic flaws in the evidence Rather’s team found.” The “technical flaw” was that the only tangible evidence Rather found was a forgery, and the journalistic “flaw” was that Rather’s report was built on a lie, which is what a forged document is.
That’s not “flawed” journalism; it’s a political attack disguised as journalism.
- The Big Lie: “no one questioned the truth of what they were saying. Bush never disputed the veracity of the claims.” Since Rather’s claims were rumors and unsubstantiated, nobody had to dispute them. You can see how Rather helped seed the Big Lie journalism culture we now see at work daily, and D’Agostino’s embrace of the tactic shows that Rather did his job depressingly well.
Just make an accusation without proof, and if the target doesn’t deny it, then it must be true!
- Possibly forged??? Possibly forged? There is no question that the letter in question was forged. D’Agostino’s use of “possibly” makes him complicit in Rather’s fraud. Nor did the forged document “uncover” any truth at all, because it was forged.
Now here’s Rather, who, as might be expected, even tops his pupil in stunning ethics blindness:
I’ve never been bitter about it. Would I have liked it to turn out a different way? Of course I would have. But when I say I’m at peace with myself, it’s that we reported a true story. In the process of getting to the truth, we didn’t do it perfectly. Which is to say we made some mistakes. And our bigger mistakes were after the piece had played, we didn’t defend it effectively. We were rolled over completely in the battle for what was then the early stages of social-media primacy. We were routed.
Whatever my faults are and were, loyalty to CBS News was not one of them. CBS News had a long history of standing behind its reporting, even when the reporting was controversial, maybe especially when it was controversial, and even when the reporting had not been perfect. All of that went out the door and I was unprepared for it. Nonetheless, what was then the new ownership—Viacom, a man named Sumner Redstone—was a big Bush supporter, and he made very clear that he wanted Bush to win the election. He couldn’t stand the thought of what we were doing, and he wouldn’t listen to “standing by the reporting.”
- That’s what they call journalism today: a “true story” is what a reporter “knows” is true, and valid evidence isn’t necessary.
- Rather’s rationalizations: #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!” and #20, The “Just one mistake!” Fantasy
- “ We didn’t defend it effectively”? Using a forged document to base a news report on can’t be defended! All this time has passed, and Rather still won’t accept that. It is the central fallacy of modern journalism: the ends—meaning a political result the reporter favors—justifies the means, even fabricating evidence.
- Wow, Rather blames everyone but himself. It was social media’s fault! It was Viacom’s fault! It was CBS’s fault! No, Dan, it was your fault, you and your equally unethical, politically motivated producer. And you still won’t accept responsibility for shattering core journalism ethics.
- Incredible: CBS was disloyal to Rather by refusing to stand behind his unethical and falsified reporting. Well, I guess the news organizations have learned their lesson: Look at CNN and the New York Times. Standing behind misleading or false reporting is the norm now.
- The report wasn’t “controversial,” it was a lie, just as calling a false report “controversial” is a lie.
Rather ends his defense by repeating the “proof” that Bush never denied the unsubstantiated story about his going AWOL in the Air National Guard.
In the introduction to the interview, Rather is quoted as saying this, while comparing Richard Nixon to President Trump:
“…he would himself criticize individual reporters and journalistic institutions, but most of the time President Nixon would do that behind the scenes, or using surrogates. Now, with President Trump, he criticizes not only individual reporters but basically all of journalism. Every journalist is no good, is evil, is a threat to democracy, is treasonous. Everybody. He does it himself. He does it consistently, relentlessly, and he does it for the purpose of personal gain, which is to say keeping himself in office.”
Indeed, the President today criticizes all of journalism (as do I) because in the 50 years since Richard Nixon was elected, journalism has decayed from a critical institution of democracy tasked with informing the public to being polluted with what Professor Reynold accurately refers to as “political operatives with press credentials,” which is exactly the model Dan Rather set for them.
The President has indeed been forced to attack journalists (though not all journalists) and journalism to keep himself in office, because journalism has set out to remove him from office, contrary to the results of the election. Since the profession—or what once could be called a profession—refuses to police itself, President Trump’s choice is to either expose the news media’s corruption or submit to its abuse of power.
Dan Rather did not bring us to this point alone, but he played a significant part in getting us here. His words, and the fawning manner in which Esquire presents them, are strong evidence, and no forgery was involved.
Ethics Alarms 
After reading this blog post this morning I thought it was reasonable to share this.
In just the first three paragraphs of the CNN article below they wrote something like “people familiar with the matter said” three times (there are more later in the article) then in paragraph seven they go straight into “This account is based on interviews with nearly a dozen sources, including White House officials, conservative allies and people close to the process, many who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about Trump’s selection process.” They are doing the same kind of thing that Rather did, sources said something that doesn’t reflect kindly on President Trump so they run with it without verifying anything and they justify their their lack of journalism integrity by using the plural “people”, “Dozen sources”, “White House officials”, “conservatives allies”, “many” to imply that it wasn’t just one source an all their sources want anonymity. This is the new journalism standard that CNN is using all the time, they rarely have any named sources for anything like this. CNN is full of anti-Trump propaganda and fully consumed with their blatantly transparent support of the extreme political left, it’s clear to me that CNN “journalists” are political shills for the political left.
Personally I don’t believe anything CNN writes anymore.
ARTICLE LINK: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/26/politics/trump-supreme-court-barrett-lagoa/index.html
Just in case CNN decides to dramatically change the content of the article after it’s already been posted, here’s the entire article as I saw it.
Lastly; I think I’m already hearing the social media undercurrents of the political left implying and in some cases outright saying that President Trump is a racist for not nominating Barbara Lagoa, let’s see if that one gets legs in the political left.
Whenever they say “people familiar with” or the equivalent, I picture semi-inebriated leftists sitting at a bar, being waited on by Ocasio-Cortez.
I love your updated image reminiscent of the bar in “Cheers”. Now I’m going to have to work on which political hack would most likely play a character from that TV comedy.
Legitimate criticism of the right by the left doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as quickly as they want it to. This is partly a by-product of the Democrats’ own tactics to discredit Fox News and other conservative outlets as untrustworthy. As might be expected, these tactics have resulted in tit for tat accusations that the mainstream media is made up of Democrat shills and also untrustworthy, and some of those have taken root. Real reporting, accurate though it may be, no longer has the effect it once did.
The double standard of journalism is nothing new, and does date back at least to this story. Questions about John Kerry’s service in Vietnam and protest actions afterward, some legitimate, some not as much, were all treated as irrelevant and unfair by the media, and even gave birth to the term “Swiftboating” for unfair cheap shots based on distortion of the record. On the other hand, questions about GWB’s time in the Air National Guard around the same time were treated as though they were as important as Watergate. Indeed, Mary Mapes of CBS openly talked about how much she wanted the story that is the subject of this post. She, Dan Rather, and their supporters saw an opportunity to bring down a Republican president, and didn’t care if they had to cut some journalistic corners to do it. However, the fact that they HAD cut corners came to light, the rest is history.
It’s no secret that the journalism industry leans left and always has. Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly went after Joseph McCarthy as much because they didn’t agree with his politics as his tactics, and there are still journalists out there arguing that the Rosenbergs and Mumia were innocent victims of the conservative establishment. It’s also no secret that it tends to second-guess leaders, especially military ones and conservative political ones, leading to the Duke of Wellington’s and Robert E. Lee’s (attributed) somewhat justified sneering comments about the best generals all editing newspapers and Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech.
However, no one in the industry has ever come close to duplicating Woodward and Bernstein’s bringing down of Richard Nixon. That investigation is not just seen as determined and competent professionals doing their job and uncovering the biggest investigative story of the second half of the 20th century, which resulted in logical consequences for a president who abused his power, by many on the left. To many on the left it’s the ultimate heroic story which all journalists should aspire to – the scrappy liberal reporter who finds the smoking gun and confronts the dangerous conservative demagogue, defeating him with that ultimate of ultimate weapons, the TRUTH, and sending him into the ashes of disgrace, paving the way for more liberal, compassionate, progressive leadership to come in.
Of course that’s not exactly how it played. Yes, Nixon resigned in disgrace, but he never faced the full consequences of his actions, since Gerald Ford, perhaps wisely, pardoned him to close the book on Watergate. Yes, the next election gave us liberal Carter, who promised to never lie to us… but he proved not to be up to the job and paved the way for 3 GOP White House terms back to back. Time and again the journalistic establishment tried to bring down both Reagan and GHWB, trumpeting Irangate, US adventures and misadventures in supposedly otherwise peaceful Central America, supposed insufficient compassion towards the emerging AIDS crisis, but nothing stuck to either of them, and Bush the elder only lost in 1992 because he didn’t try to win. Strangely, during the Clinton years, that same establishment largely ignored or minimized a lot of the shady stuff that went on behind the scenes (Whitewater, Vince Foster, etc), and tried to minimize Clinton’s adultery with a subordinate on the job and subsequent perjury.
Enter GWB, and suddenly it was again all-attack all-the-time. The press never forgave GWB for the constitutional crisis that marred his assumption of office, or his finding his voice and becoming, at least for a time, heroic, after 9/11, to the point where they really couldn’t touch him from 01-03. Then they saw the chance to bring him down in 04, but muffed that, as I already described. After that, they never let go of the missing WMDs (what did he know and when did he know it? Bush lied, kids died), Valerie Plame (even long after who outed her was known), Katrina (despite the local leaders less-than-wonderful handling of things) and everything else they could throw at him. Still they couldn’t bring him down before his second term was over.
Now they’ve spent almost eight years minimizing the long disaster that was the Obama administration, which frankly got NOTHING right, from Iraq (withdrew too early and let ISIS grow, now we’re still cleaning up the mess), to the ACA (a pack of lies sold with lies and an incompetent roll-out), race relations (the worst since the 1960s), and religious liberty (Islam gets a pass on everything, Christianity, not so much), foreign policy generally (Syria, Libya, Russia, need I go on?). Yet to all the press except Fox, he’s still the super-cool Messiah who ended our wars, got back the world’s respect, spread the wealth around at home, and made life just a little bit better for those who needed burdens of oppression lifted and barriers to the life we all deserve removed. He would have made life even better too, you know, but those Republicans in Congress just wouldn’t work with him, despite his many, many, many more than reasonable attempts to work with them, because they couldn’t stand that a black man became successful and all they could put up against him in 2012 was Mittens.
Not to worry, though, they were firmly on the side of Hillary, his chosen successor, and a worthy person to carry forth the beacon of progress. As long as they kept the spotlight on Donald Trump and off of her, she was a shoe-in, after Bernie Sanders gracefully conceded (he was really a model opponent that whole campaign) and returned to being the crochety gadfly in the Senate. He had some good ideas, you know, but those hopeless, scary, gun-toting rednecks in the South who all have bad teeth and those studiously dull folks in the Midwest whose idea of a night out is bowling league and who keep their forks at the end of the meal will never be ready for them, and there are still too many rural types and suburbanites in a few key states who still aren’t quite ready for some of them.
Then THAT idea came unglued, and you know the rest. They are banking on a Biden victory hopefully helped across the finish line by polls, polls, and more polls. However, I think they know that Biden is likely to look like what he is, a senile old man, next to Trump in Tuesday’s debate. They know that Amy Coney Barrett is probably as good as confirmed, since only one GOP Senator has said she will vote against her, one is hemming and hawing, and Mitt, the only other defector, has said he won’t be defecting. They also know that Black Lives Matter has overplayed its hand and the pendulum is swinging back. Yet the press continues the same as four years ago, and Dan Rather still defends his actions in 2004. The old joke is the difference between God and a doctor is that God doesn’t think He’s a doctor. I think that also applies to journalists. I think the joke could be “What’s the difference between God and a journalist? God never makes mistakes and leaves the truth to be revealed, a journalist thinks he makes truth and leaves the mistakes to be revealed…or not, depending on who made them.”
Amazing how leaving pride and hubris unchecked can undermine ethics.
So, if I say the moon is made of green cheese and NASA doesn’t deny it, that means it might be true? I’m just trying to follow Rather’s rationalization regarding Bush not denying an obvious forgery.
Dan who?
Growing up as a child I seem to associate that name with a respectable reporter who seemed eager to get the news to the people. Then in my last years at Texas A&M I seem to recall a Dan Rather showing the most disgracefully unethical conduct, laying bare what had been long suspected: demonstrating openly that the Media was unhinged and grossly biased…and worse… didn’t care about it’s own bias. That Dan Rather really made me hate the other Dan Rather from my childhood…it may be an unfair association, but I can’t help but think what a dishonest shmuck that other Dan Rather might have been…but that would be unfair of me to smear that Dan Rather’s reputation with the conduction of the Dan Rather of 2004.