Ethics Alarms made it clear, I hope, that one reason I believed that it was crucial for Donald Trump to win the election was to decisively foil the news media’s attempt to defeat him through relentless unethical journalism. To be honest, I sometimes think, like right now, that this was even more important than rejecting the nascent and sometimes not-so-nascent totalitarianism of the 21st Century Democratic Party and the American Left. It is now clear to even the most die-hard propagandists masquerading as “independent journalists” that the mask is off, the jig is up, and all but the most gullible and ignorant of the American public don’t trust them any more. That’s wonderful, but if reform is on the horizon, it’s barely detectable.
For example, here’s CNN’s fake conservative S.E.Cupp, like “The View’s” Ana Navarro but smarter, during the network’s efforts to use today as a day to remember how terrible Donald Trump and anyone who supports him are…
“Yeah, Joe Biden made a lot of mistakes, messaging was one. Telling people that the economy was great and the migrant crisis wasn’t real, and their cities were safe. Those were mistakes, and he let his ego get in the way. However, there’s one thing he didn’t do. He never encouraged his supporters to go and march on the Capitol, to go and break the system, to go and break democracy, to go and break the law just so he could stay in power. His legacy isn’t going to be great or as great as I imagined he wanted it to be leaving office, but that’s one ding he will not have.”
..I have to revise my opinion of Cupp after that speech. I used to view her as just a greedy sell-out, who accepted a lucrative gig to be the token Republican who bashes Republicans and who was still capable of adding some useful perspective while supporting biased journalism….you know, kind of like David Brooks with the Times. But she’s an ethics villain. “Telling people that the economy was great and the migrant crisis wasn’t real, and their cities were safe” isn’t “messaging,” it is called lying. Cupp is saying that for Biden and his party to lie to the public was a “mistake” because it didn’t work, which is the same thing as the Harry Reid position is that lying is fine if it does work (“Romney lost, didn’t he?” As for the next part of her statement, true, Biden “never encouraged his supporters to go and march on the Capitol, to go and break the system, to go and break democracy, to go and break the law just so he could stay in power,” but neither did Donald Trump. That’s three Big Lies, all standard Axis narratives, and anyone, journalist, pundit or politician who continues to spread them cannot be trusted and should not be.
Then we have a superb but damning essay at Chronicles by Mark Judge, as he recounts the indefensible extent to which the mainstream media set out to assist its favorite party by smearing Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his Senate hearing using uncorroborated accusations from over three decades past, when the distinguished jurist was a high school student. Mark Judge was a victim of the smear too, and has been a vocal critic of the news media ever since. Read it all, but I want to highlight his conclusions, which are valid and useful.
The basis for the essay is that a New York Times reporter, David Enrich, who was part of the media onslaught against Kavanaugh (and Judge) in 2018 now claims that he regrets some of what he did. It sure doesn’t seem like he does: Judge quotes an upcoming book by the reporter, who writes in it,
“Beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2024-15 [Trump] relentlessly demonized the media as “evil,” “criminals,” and “the enemy of the people,” applauding violence, threatening to revoke TV networks’ licenses, and floating the idea of jailing reporters. There is a long history, of course, of politicians attacking the news media. What set this apart was not just Trump’s rhetoric but also his success. He convinced broad swaths of the public that journalism itself was illegitimate, that its articles, fact checks, and exposés were not to be trusted—a belief that was enhanced at times by some journalists shirking their roles as open-minded seekers of truth and instead donning the robes of ideologues.”
Trump didn’t convince Americans that this was true: their own eyes, ears and brains did. Trump, if anything, undermined the revelation by his usual overblown rhetoric: when Trump says something is “criminal,” for example, he means “wrong.” It hasn’t been “some” journalists behaving as ideologues rather than objective journalists, but almost all of them, including Enrich. Judge concludes,
Murder the Truth could have been a very different and better book had Enrich focused more on the last tantalizing comment about journalists abandoning fairness to don “the robes of ideologues.” But he doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge or explore just how reckless and partisan the media has become in the last several decades, such that charges of bias and “fake news” are believable to millions of Americans. Enrich is disturbed that the current Supreme Court has shown signs that it may be in favor of revisiting Sullivan, and he laments the fact the public no longer blindly embraces that standard….
Good. The media now routinely runs with false stories (Russiagate), covers up inconvenient facts (the Hunter Biden laptops), and maligns people who are both public figures and private individuals. Lies and errors are rampant, and they never get corrected. We are a long way from 1964 or even Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein supposedly agonized for weeks over a small mistake they once made in their reporting. This is why Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against The New York Times is moving forward, as is a lawsuit against CNN’s Jake Tapper. It’s why ABC and George Stephanopoulos just had to pay Trump $15 million for falsely claiming that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll.
It also might be why David Enrich is having an attack of conscience even as he prepares to do battle with the right as a defender of journalistic integrity. I wish him luck pulling it off. But it would be more convincing if he would first come clean about what he did to Brett, to me, and to our friends.
Again, if journalism is going to reform itself, it’s going to happen slowly. It will happen slowly because the “profession”—a real profession deserves to be trusted, and these people don’t—has been corrupt for so long that its members really don’t understand any more what being ethical journalists means.
Ethics Alarms 
Reformation in journalism is pretty darned unlikely given the journalism schools are pushing nothing but “advocacy journalism,” so called. (What a nasty and preposterous misnomer for “propaganda.”)
Like I’ve long said, the media is finally coming to understand they have lost the public’s trust. What they still don’t understand, what they might never understand, is that they have deserved to lose it. Enrich here gives a token nod toward the bad behavior of some journalists sometimes, but it’s clear that overall he thinks that loss of trust is the fault of bad actors poisoning the public against them.
it’s never going to happen. The journalists who actually believed in ethics or in being objective are all either dead, retired, or working either for Fox or for much smaller organizations that will never have the impact of the legacy media. A lot of journalists simply are not as smart as they think they are and blindly follow the organization’s lead. However, just as many take the attitude of Christiane Amanpour that there are not two sides to every story and it is the reporter’s duty to advocate for the oppressed as they see it. Too many think they are heirs to Woodward and Bernstein, and that their greatest act would be to bring down a Republican president or force a strong Republican candidate to quit the race.
First of all, bringing someone down or forcing them to quit should never be journalism’s goal. They are not political assassins working for the left whose job it is to dig up dirt and throw innuendo or throw lies and later say oops we made a mistake after the damage has been done. It’s not their job to buttress tenuous claims by the left by writing bad history and bad statistical pieces.
Secondly, journalism should not be choosing a side. Their job is to find the truth, not pick a side and become that side’s cheerleaders. Unfortunately, when everyone in a particular organization belongs to one side, it’s inevitable that anyone who joins that organization will find himself having to choose that side as well.
Third, when journalism resorts to these kind of tactics, they do not have the right to act surprised or indignant when the other side turns their own tactics against them or uses worse tactics like calling them enemies of the people, fake, or whatever, or threatening to put them out of business.
“And who,” they ask, indignantly, “are readers and viewers to question their integrity, intelligence, or veracity? These little people who vote against their own interest and don’t know better.”