ABE ROSENTHAL IS TURNING IN HIS GRAVE
Amonth before the election, WikiLeaks produced proof of what had long been obvious—many members of the media conspired during the campaign against Trump and colluded with Hillary Clinton. Indeed, among the villains who emerged during the campaign, perhaps none did more damage to themselves than members of the media.
Take the case of Politico’s senior staff writer, Glenn Thrush, a voguish figure in the Washington press corps. According to a trove of hacked John Podesta emails, Thrush was in cahoots with the chairman of Hillary’s campaign. Podesta was an intimidating figure to many reporters; he was notorious for his hot temper, and when he blew his fuse, which he did on frequent occasions, reporters said that he turned into his Evil Twin Skippy. At one point, Glenn Thrush asked “Skippy” for approval of the language in a story he was writing—a journalistic no-no second only to plagiarism.
“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u,” Thrush emailed Podesta. “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this. Tell me if I fucked up anything.”
Thrush wasn’t the only Hillary Clinton sycophant in the media. After he interviewed Hillary, Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent of the New York Times Magazine, emailed Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary’s director of communications, offering her quote approval and promising her that she “could veto what you don’t want.” This violated a New York Times policy forbidding its reporters to give news sources approval of quotations in stories. Palmieri asked Leibovich to leave out a joke about Sarah Palin cooking mouse stew. When Leibovich’s story appeared, the Palin joke was gone from his copy.
Another Times reporter, John Harwood, who also served as the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, had a backdoor relationship with the Clinton campaign. In several emails to Podesta, Harwood praised Hillary’s performance, offered advice on how to deal with Ben Carson if he became the Republican presidential nominee, and criticized his own newspaper for collaborating with Peter Schweizer on his bestseller, Clinton Cash. Harwood was a moderator at a Republican presidential debate, and afterward he bragged to Podesta in an email how he had sandbagged Trump with a trick question: “Let’s be honest, is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?”
But it didn’t take the WikiLeaks email dump to prove that most journalists were biased against Trump. Their contempt for the Republican nominee was there in plain sight on social media.
“News reporters are supposed to keep their opinions out of stories they write and air,” noted Paul Farhi, the Washington Post’s media reporter. “Twitter, it seems, is another realm entirely. With the political campaigns staggering into their final days, mainstream reporters otherwise obliged to objectivity—or at least a reasonably balanced, non-argumentative account of events—have taken to Twitter to unburden themselves of their apparently true feelings about the race.”
“[Trump was] really just asking for it with this venue,” tweeted Alex Burns of the New York Times after Trump gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Like a losing caucus candidate speaking in Waterloo, Iowa.”
Glenn Thrush, who was eventually hired away from Politico by the New York Times despite his incriminating Podesta email, was openly snarky about Trump on Twitter. During a live presidential debate, Thrush tweeted: “Note to future presidential hopefuls: debate prep, maybe, matters a little” and “The problem for Trump: [Hillary] is better at being reasonable than he is.”
Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed’s technology writer, went a lot further than that. After the Trump-Pence logo was shown for the first time, Warzel tweeted: “lol to all of us tho for thinking that after a year of racist, vitriolic campaigning that trump gives two shits about a logo.”
“The mainstream media is going to need to go through a serious readjustment period after this presidential election,” wrote the Washington Times’ Kelly Riddell. “The collusion between reporters and the Clinton campaign, revealed by WikiLeaks, has laid bare to the American public the left-leaning bias of the press.”
Jim Rutenberg, the media columnist for the New York Times, didn’t agree. Rutenberg, whose penseés on journalism influenced the thinking of other reporters, argued that journalists should abandon their quest for objectivity when it came to covering Donald Trump.
“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” wrote Rutenberg.
“Because if you believe all of those things,” he continued, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. . . . But let’s face it: Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.”
Many journalists were quick to embrace Rutenberg’s new guidelines. Among them was Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who had gone from being cozy with Trump to being his foe.
“How balanced do you have to be when one side is irrational?” Scarborough said when questioned about his on-air attacks on Trump.
Perhaps no news organization was more hostile to Trump than the Washington Post, which under the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had gone off the partisan rails. Here are some of the Post’s most outrageous online headlines.
• “This 30-Second Video Is Absolutely Devastating for Donald Trump”
• “Trump’s Shallowness Runs Deep”
• “Donald Trump Is Suffering From Mushroom Breath”
• “The Unbearable Stench of Trump’s B.S.”
Not to be outdone by its chief rival, the New York Times released a three-minute video, “Voices from Donald Trump’s Rallies, Uncensored,” that began with a trigger warning: “This video includes vulgarities and racial and ethnic slurs.” The video depicted Trump supporters as religious bigots and fascists. One wore a T-shirt with the words “Fuck Islam.” Another displayed a button that read, “KFC Hillary Special—two fat thighs, two small breasts . . . left wing.”
“The media and Democrats are so close in association and so close in their philosophical views that we might as well use one word to describe both, and that’s Mediacrats,” Texas Representative Lamar Smith, a fifteen-term lawmaker, told the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard. “How can the media be considered ‘mainstream’ when it doesn’t represent a majority of the American people? It’s more accurate to use the term ‘liberal.’ [The media] want themselves to be the oracle. They themselves want to be the only conduit. They themselves want to tell the American people what to think. I am concerned that it is hurting our republic.”
“Swaths of the media do have a credibility problem with much of the public,” Daniel Henninger, the deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, agreed. “But that no longer matters, because many media platforms have decided to set aside nominal standards of objectivity and turn partisanship and resistance into a business model, pitching their coverage to half the electorate and ignoring the rest as commercially irrelevant.
“Mr. Trump keeps saying they should thank him because he’s building their audiences,” Henninger continued. “This misrepresents what is taking place now. They are turning the angry Trump tweets . . . into pure political entertainment for their customers. They will make Donald Trump their tweeting dancing bear, if he lets them.”
Not all members of the media were blind to the threat posed by leftist reporters and editors. As far back as 2004, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of the New York Times, asked, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” He answered his own question in four words: “Of course it is.”
“My concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right,” wrote Okrent. “These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulations, among others. And if you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed. But if you’re examining the paper’s coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”
After Okrent’s j’accuse, some people held out hope that the editors of the Times would rethink their news coverage. But according to Liz Spayd, who followed Okrent twelve years later as the paper’s public editor, the Times remained relentlessly liberal.
“Like the tiresome bore at a party,” wrote Spayd, “I went around asking several journalists in the newsroom about . . . claims that the Times sways to the left. Mostly I was met with a roll of the eyes. All sides hate us, they said. We’re tough on everyone. That’s nothing new here.
“That response may be tempting,” Spayd continued, “but unless the strategy is to become The New Republic gone daily, [the] perception [of leftist bias] by many readers strikes me as poison. A paper whose journalism appeals to only half the country has a dangerously severed public mission. And a news organization trying to survive off revenues from readers shouldn’t erase American conservatives from its list of prospects.”1
When I read Liz Spayd’s indictment of the Times, I was reminded of a conversation about journalistic ethics that I had forty years ago when I was hired as the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine by A.M. Rosenthal, the paper’s executive editor. During Abe’s time at the helm of the Times (1977–1987), the paper’s newsroom leaned to the left, and he cautioned his editors to be on guard against reporters whose ideas had been shaped by the free-speech movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and Watergate. He was especially wary of reporters who got too close to their sources.
“I don’t care if you fuck an elephant,” Abe liked to say, “just so long as you don’t cover the circus.”
Abe died in 2006 and the epitaph on his tombstone reads: “He kept the paper straight.” If he read today’s New York Times, Abe Rosenthal would be turning in his grave.