“That’s just not true, Senator.”
It was January of 2016, and Jake Tapper was calling me a liar to my face. Jake and I had been sitting in the back of my campaign bus for about twenty minutes at that point, conducting an interview for CNN’s State of the Union that would air that next Sunday.
I paused for a moment.
The disagreement, as best I can recall, had come in the middle of an otherwise fair and relatively pleasant interview about the upcoming presidential election, and it centered on a vicious terrorist attack that had occurred during the Obama administration. On November 5, 2009, Nidal Hasan, a major in the Army who had become radicalized, opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood military base in Texas. As he shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great”), he murdered fourteen innocent souls, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child.1
Any reasonable person assessing what happened knew immediately that this was an act of radical Islamic terrorism.
But the Obama administration didn’t acknowledge that obvious fact. In the weeks after the shooting, the Obama Department of Defense decided, instead, to classify the incident as a case of “workplace violence,”2 thereby preventing the soldiers who had been injured or murdered from receiving the Purple Heart. This medal, which is given to soldiers who’ve been wounded or killed in combat, cannot be awarded for mere “workplace violence.” The Obama White House was incredibly reluctant even to acknowledge that “radical Islamic terrorism” exists. (Indeed, a few years later, in 2012, the FBI bizarrely “purged” 876 documents from its own training materials to remove any references to “jihad” or “Islamic terrorism.”)3 But the result was a gross injustice for the soldiers who had been wounded or murdered at Fort Hood.
And one of my first legislative victories in the Senate had been to correct that injustice. In 2014, I introduced an amendment mandating that the Purple Heart be awarded to the victims of Hasan’s terrorist attack. I was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Obama Pentagon fought my amendment vigorously. At the time, Democrats had the majority in the Senate, but nevertheless I was able to garner bipartisan support for my amendment, and it passed into law through the Harry Reid Senate. Obama signed it, and, in 2015, I was privileged to be at Fort Hood and thank the victims and their families personally when the Army finally awarded the more than forty Purple Hearts that were long overdue.
The statutory language in my amendment made clear that the Purple Heart should be awarded if the perpetrator of the attack “was in communication with [a] foreign terrorist organization before the attack” and “the attack was inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.” Which brings us back to Jake Tapper.
What I said on that interview was that Nidal Hasan (a self-identified “Soldier of Allah”) had been in repeated email contact with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, that he had asked about the permissibility of waging jihad on his fellow soldiers, and that the Obama administration knew about those communications—they intercepted and read them in their entirety—but inexplicably did nothing to prevent Hasan from carrying out the attack.
That’s when Jake interrupted and said I was just wrong. “That just didn’t happen, Senator,” he confidently asserted.
With the tape still rolling, I said, “Actually, Jake, it is true. And you’re objectively wrong.” Smiling, I continued, “The facts will back that up; as John Adams once said, ‘facts are stubborn things.’ ”
After telling me once more that I was not telling the truth, Jake moved on to other questions. We spoke about the pressing issues facing the country at the time, including my disagreements with Senator Marco Rubio on immigration, a few tweets from the future president Trump, and then, if I’m remembering correctly, even more tweets from the future president Trump.
After about twenty minutes, the interview was over. Jake and the rest of the CNN crew headed out into the frigid Iowa air, and I took a seat in the middle of the bus with a Diet Dr. Pepper. My seven- and five-year-old daughters, Caroline and Catherine, played on the floor as I talked with my staff about the barrage of interviews and events we had in the day before us. Around us, the mood on the bus was collegial and loose, as usual. Campaigning is fun—relentless and exhausting, but also exhilarating—and our team had become a close-knit family. Even near-zero temperatures and the dour faces of liberal news crews couldn’t dampen our spirits.
Then, about ten minutes after the end of the interview, I heard a knock on the door of the bus. Someone opened the door to find Jake Tapper standing outside with one of his producers. Jake said he needed to speak with me, so I told him to come in and have a seat.
Right away, I could sense that something was off. Jake looked more serious than usual. So did the person he’d brought with him.
“So,” he said, seeming to want to tread lightly. “I did some research about the Fort Hood shooting… the thing we talked about. It turns out you were right, and I was wrong.”
I nodded, appreciating his honesty.
“Now, I know we negotiated with your team that the interview would be live-to-tape, but we’re in a tough situation here. So, I wanted to offer you two options. The first is that we’ll air the entire interview as it occurred, with my mistake in it. Then, I will go on air right afterward with a message admitting that you were right and I was wrong. The second—and this is the one I would prefer, obviously—is that we cut out that whole conversation about Fort Hood and air the segment that way.”
Two feelings washed over me. The first was gratitude to my press secretary Cat Frazier, who’d negotiated the terms of the interview with the producers at State of the Union. On my instructions, she had told the producers—and all producers for major media outlets—that I would consent to interviews only if they were live (meaning the conversation would be broadcast as it occurred) or “live-to-tape,” meaning the conversation would be recorded and then aired in full—with no editing whatsoever—at a later date. In other words, the news networks couldn’t take footage from the interview, move it around, and cut into my sentences to alter the meaning of what I had said.
I had learned this lesson the hard way the week earlier, when I had been interviewed by Bob Schieffer, the veteran host of Face the Nation. Schieffer, who was thirty-four years my senior, was apparently astonished that a young pup like me was daring to fight back hard in the Senate, which is likely why his questions seemed to be dripping in condescension and hostility. In response, I laid out a detailed indictment of the myriad policy failures of the Obama administration. My criticism was effective, so much so that Face the Nation simply edited it out. We had done a pre-tape, and their production team presumably decided that substantive criticism of Obama was not to be tolerated. So they omitted it, and instead ran select portions of my interview interspersed with Schieffer sneering at my partial (and edited) answers. This type of conduct is not exclusive to Face the Nation or CNN; sadly, it happens to be a widespread practice in the industry.
From then on, I was careful to specify that if news networks were going to interview me on television, they would need to air the entirety of whatever I had to say—with no editing. If my team hadn’t negotiated for this beforehand, Tapper and his producers would have been free to slice up the interview in any way they pleased. They could, if they really wanted to, have re-cut the interview so that I looked like the one who was wrong, then maybe worked in some CGI footage of Jake Tapper hitting me over the head with a mallet.
If I had been another candidate—or simply an American citizen whom CNN had stopped to interview on the street—the network would have been free to use the partial footage as they wished, slicing it up to fit whatever particular narrative suited them.
Maybe that’s why the second feeling that came over me was a mild sense of vengeance. For decades, left-leaning networks like CNN had acted like the self-righteous hall monitors of American society, always ready to call out politicians and candidates—especially Republicans—for making any small slip-up. It didn’t matter whether these errors were made in good faith or if the politician in question had corrected himself immediately afterward; the news media would descend like a pack of wild hyenas and run tape of the mistake (or “gaffe,” as these things were commonly called) until every television-watching person in the United States had seen it. Newspapers would print full articles about the single incident for months.
Now here I was with a chance to make an anchor go live on CNN and admit that he, too, was capable of screwing up—a fact that the network was usually able to hide because it had the final edit on most clips, not to mention full staffs of producers and fact-checkers looking after every word that was said on air.
I thought about it for a moment. Clearly, it would have been in my short-term interest to let Jake go on television and admit that he’d screwed up. In the early stages of a presidential campaign, scoring such a clear victory against CNN would have been quite popular among Republican voters. If I really wanted to spike the football, I could have taken the clip and tweeted it out with something snarky, drawing even more attention to the failures of CNN and helping my campaign even more.
But I didn’t do that. Instead, I told Jake not to worry about recording his apology, nice as it would have been to see it air that Sunday. I said he could take option number two and cut out the argument we’d had, then air the full interview as if we’d never even mentioned the shooting at Ford Hood. To this day, no one has ever seen that portion of the clip, and I’m sure no one ever will.
You might be wondering why I did it that way. So did a few of my campaign staffers, who were on the bus when this conversation occurred. (I could practically hear them salivating when Jake mentioned that he might go on television and admit he’d gotten something wrong.)
I let Jake Tapper off the hook in part simply because I liked the guy. By the time I ran for president, we had known each other for two decades, having met during the election of 2000. I’d been a young lawyer working on the policy team for George W. Bush, and Jake had been a cub reporter covering the campaign trail for the left-wing website Salon.
We didn’t agree on much—he was a Democrat partisan even then—but I could tell that Jake, unlike many of the bloggers and biased reporters he was coming up with, would be successful in the news business. He seemed to care about getting his facts straight, and he didn’t usually allow ideology to drive the stories he wrote or the questions he asked. He at least aspired to objectivity, attempting to treat both Republicans and Democrats with at least some degree of rigor in his reporting. Also, in this instance, I respected that Jake was admitting he was wrong. In other words, he wasn’t a Keith Olbermann type, who in my view often foamed at the mouth in his partisanship, or the Rachel Maddow type, who frequently came off as a deranged conspiracy theorist, and I felt that anyone who resisted the temptation to go in that direction should be rewarded for it.
Most important, though, we were at the beginning of what was going to be a long campaign. I wanted my relationships with media outlets to remain cordial. The left-wing press was overtly antagonistic, but I thought we’d be more effective in getting our message out if we treated them respectfully and kept the lines of communication open. At the time, CNN had not yet fully descended into what I consider to be unhinged partisanship, and it was an important outlet for reaching the voters (particularly, the data showed, independent or undecided voters).
For my first few years in the Senate, I went on CNN often, sometimes once a week. I’d even go on MSNBC with some regularity. When I would go on their shows, of course, I had no illusions that the anchors would give me the same fawning coverage or softball questions that they reserved for my Democrat colleagues, but there was a hope at least that you might have a reasonable chance to explain your views.
At the time, those outlets purported to follow at least some ground rules. The most important was that actual journalists, almost all of whom leaned hard left politically, were supposed to set aside those biases when they clocked in in the morning and began writing stories about politics. At the very least, they needed to pretend to do this. After 5:00 p.m., they were free to throw on their I’m With Her T-shirts or their pink fuzzy hats.
By the time I was sitting on my campaign bus with Jake Tapper, there had been a few clear signs that this model was breaking down. I’m not sure anyone could have claimed that the media was acting objectively when they widely disseminated the false report that an image published by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s PAC had inspired the shooting of Gabby Giffords,4 for instance, or that these organizations were unbiased when they gave days of breathless coverage to Occupy Wall Street protestors.5
But in the aftermath of those scandals, the institutions responsible needed to express remorse for deliberately misleading the public. When a journalist made a mistake, he or she needed to either resign or do a great deal of work to explain to readers how that error had come to be, and why it wasn’t going to happen again. That’s what Dan Rather did when he was forced to resign from CBS News in 2005 after being caught using fraudulent documents on 60 Minutes to broadcast a false attack on George W. Bush.
In 2004, the New York Times did something similar when it was revealed that the newspaper had falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In that case, a reporter was forced to leave the paper, and editors at the Times conducted a full investigation to see how they had managed to get the story so wrong.6
But when Donald Trump began rising in the polls, this began to change. Toward the end of the 2016 general election, when most news organizations were giving Trump about a 2 percent chance of winning, the partisanship of the media wasn’t yet fully unhinged (at least compared to what was coming). There were the usual hit pieces that would have been aimed at any Republican candidate. Donald Trump was called a fascist, which is a charge that liberal news outlets have levelled at every Republican since Ronald Reagan. In October of 2016, the Boston Globe ran a fake front page predicting the apocalyptic events that would befall everyone if he ever became president.7 For a while, it seemed like this whole ordeal might conclude peacefully on Election Day, when Donald Trump was predicted to lose big.
Then he won.
For the previous few years, the bottom ranks of American newspapers and cable networks had been slowly filling up with young, woke staffers. These were people who had been educated in Critical Race Theory, postmodernism, and other neo-Marxist nonsense at our nation’s top universities—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia, among others. While at school, they had imbibed ideas about systemic racism and the alleged evils of American history. Some of them had gone straight into journalism from college, while others had stopped along the way at various graduate schools of journalism, where they sat in small classrooms and debated the new role of the journalist in a world where, they were assured, fascism was about to break out at any moment.
For the next few years, these young woke staffers sat at the bottom rungs of institutions such as the New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations that had been drifting further and further to the political left with each passing year. They wrote stories about the inherent racism of American society and occasionally conducted interviews with left-wing professors about similar topics. They pointed out why scenes in the latest installment of The Justice League were transphobic. They made “listicles” of all the times cats did funny things to other house pets, slowly building the case that this kind of nonsense belonged on the front pages of newspapers and the homepages of online news organizations.
Like all good neo-Marxists, they were biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to rise up and take control of the institutions that had hired them.
In November of 2016, as the American news business threw fits of hysterics over the new presidency of Donald J. Trump, they saw their moment.
American journalism has not been the same since.
In August of 2019, the staff of the New York Times gathered for a town hall meeting at the newspaper’s auditorium on Eighth Avenue in New York City.
The mood was tense, to say the least.
A few weeks earlier, Special Counsel Robert Mueller had released his long-awaited report on the Trump campaign’s non-existent collusion with Russia, dashing the hopes of liberals all over the United States who had been assured repeatedly—often by reporters at the Times—that it was only a matter of time before President Trump was arrested, tried for treason, and shipped off to some prison colony in Siberia for his innumerable crimes.8 Given just how wrong the New York Times had been about this massive story, and given the Pulitzer Prize they had won for their factually inaccurate reporting on it,9 it would have made sense if the topic of the town hall meeting was how to do better in the future. At the very least, they might have issued a series of corrections.
For a few minutes, that’s exactly the direction that Dean Baquet, who’d been the paper’s executive editor for about four years at that point, tried to go in.
“We had a couple of significant missteps,” he said. “This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [it] went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”10
As admissions of guilt go, this is not exactly impressive. But it’s not like the executive editor of the New York Times was going to get up in front of his staff and say, Well gang, we sure blew that one; someone go get all those prizes from the hallways and ship them back to the Pulitzer committee, stat. Later in the meeting, Baquet would admit that the staff of his newspaper had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of the Mueller investigation. He’d also say that the reaction of most readers of the Times, upon finding out that President Trump was not going to be sent to prison for collusion, was “Holy shit, Bob Mueller’s not going to do it.”
But the staffers who’d gathered in the hall that day didn’t care that their newspaper had just blown one of the biggest stories of the twenty-first century. They didn’t care that the newsgathering organization they worked for—the one that was still widely considered the “paper of record,” to be studied by historians for decades to come—had fallen for a hoax that wouldn’t have fooled Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame. Evidently, none of them wanted to talk about how they might prevent their paper from basing another three years of coverage on something as flimsy as a lurid and fictional dossier, a few anonymous sources, and the word of a disgraced British spy working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
They wanted to talk, as always, about racism.
As soon as Dean Baquet was done speaking, an unnamed staffer stepped up to a microphone and demanded, astoundingly, to know why the New York Times did not call President Trump a racist more often. Specifically, he or she (or they, or zim/zer) wanted to know why the paper did not explicitly use the word “racist” in headlines that described the president’s actions and remarks.
Speaking with all the restraint he could muster, Baquet (who, it bears mentioning, happens to be a Black man) said that he believed that as a reporter, the best way to report what someone had said was… well, to report what they had said.
“You quote the remarks,” said Baquet. “The most powerful journalism I have ever read, and that I’ve ever witnessed, was when writers actually just described what they heard and put them in some perspective. I just think that’s more powerful.”11
Twenty years earlier—even three years earlier—saying something like this to an audience full of journalists would not have been controversial. Everyone in the room, even the ones who were the most rabidly left-wing in their private lives, would have agreed (or at least pretended to agree) that straight-news reporters like the ones at the New York Times were not supposed to inject their own opinions into their stories, especially not when those stories were intended to give readers, and future historians, a fair and accurate summary of the day’s events. Everyone in the room would have understood that journalists, no matter how impassioned their private political leanings, were not supposed to be activists. For most of the twentieth century, in fact, many of them would have refrained from being personal friends with anyone in politics, and perhaps even from voting, to avoid the appearance of any bias toward one side or the other.
During that time, when Dean Baquet and many editors of major newspapers were coming up in journalism, the American news business claimed that it strived for objectivity above all else. There had been a time, however, in the more distant past, when this hadn’t been the case. In the 1800s, newspapers advocated explicitly for political parties, filling their front pages with overtly slanted and sensationalized news stories. Some, like the New Orleans Daily Democrat, even carried the names of these parties in their banners.
The type of reporting these papers did, which became known as “yellow journalism,” was popular. But it left the American people without a place to go for a clear, unbiased account of the day’s events. People had to rely on gossipy rags that sold for pennies on the street, or else look to the government for information, which would inevitably come with its own partisan slant, depending on the party in power. The choice was between sensationalized, slanted trash or government propaganda.
There’s some debate about when exactly this changed. But most scholars of journalism agree that the shift began sometime in the early twentieth century. This is when the writer Walter Lippmann, who had, somewhat ironically, been heavily involved in writing government propaganda for the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, wrote an essay called “Liberty and the News.” In that essay, published in 1920, Lippmann argued that the news business was giving people a sense that they were “being baffled and misled”; he lamented “the loss of contact with objective information,” saying that writers and reporters were more likely to tell people what to think rather than giving them the honest truth. The news, in other words, was propaganda.
“Without protection against propaganda,” he wrote, “without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation…. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”12
Gradually, over a period of a few decades, the job of a reporter became professionalized and even respectable. The Washington Post, New York Times, and many other newspapers employed enormous staffs whose job it was to collect facts, organize them, and deliver them to the American people in a manner that was accurate, sharp, and fair. That didn’t mean that the news had to be boring, and it didn’t mean that it had to be wishy-washy, either. It meant that reporters needed to find, or at least attempt to find, all sides of a given issue. They were supposed to follow the facts where they led—and it wasn’t supposed to matter whether those facts were ugly, complicated, or inconvenient to the personal beliefs of the journalists.
Some of the best works of journalism ever published were written using exactly that method. If you go back and read through Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s coverage of the Watergate burglary and the cover-up that came after it, in the mid-1970s, you’ll notice that there is very little emotionally charged language in their prose. Woodward and Bernstein did not call people “crooks” or “enemies of democracy,” and they didn’t write any more than they were able to uncover, one step at a time, through the use of documents and interviews. That process was often painful and deliberately slow, as they would write years later in their book All the President’s Men, and it made many of their colleagues doubt that they had a real story at all.
But in the end, the reporting came together to tell an amazing tale of paranoia, corruption, and hubris on the part of President Richard Nixon and his band of crooked criminals—men whose various misdeeds I chronicled at length in the opening chapter of my last book, Justice Corrupted. One imagines that their reporting would not have been nearly as impactful, or as long-lasting, if it had been written in the style of today’s revolutionary, activist journalists. “Racist Cuban Men Connected to President Richard Nixon, Who Is Also Racist, Break into Watergate Complex, a Building with Deep Ties to White Supremacy, Likely Trying to Steal a Videotape of Prostitutes Urinating on the President” doesn’t quite have the same force as the calm, informative headlines that Woodward and Bernstein used in their reporting.13
Reflecting, years later at an event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, on the process of getting that story, Carl Bernstein used a phrase that great journalists of the past often employed when discussing their jobs. He urged the reporters in the room, many of whom were covering the Trump White House, to find and write “the best obtainable version of the truth.” He talked about interviewing sources, painstakingly reviewing documents, and going back to those sources and documents dozens of times in the attempt to find the truth.14
As they listened, I’m sure many of the reporters in the audience were fantasizing in their heads about breaking the Trump-Russia collusion story wide open and earning similar acclaim for their work. By that time, many of the news outlets they worked for had even begun referring to the breaking non-story as “Russiagate,” applying the standard suffix for all modern political scandals.
But there was a key difference. Whereas the Watergate scandal began with an actual crime—the break-in at the Watergate complex—that was eventually traced back to the president through careful reporting and analysis of documents, the “Russiagate” scandal moved in exactly the opposite direction. Liberal reporters who hated Donald Trump and had wanted to stop him from taking office (in part because of his mean tweets) looked around for anything they could find to prevent (and when that didn’t work, to destroy) the Trump presidency, eventually settling on an obscure set of allegations that would later turn out to have been bought, paid for, and peddled to media outlets by the campaign of Hillary Clinton herself.
Every time these reporters hit a stumbling block or a brick wall in their pursuit of this fantastical theory, there was always another anonymous source to rely on or another set of unverified allegations to print. This type of “reporting” followed the example of Marxist forbear Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief of the Soviet secret police, who joked about the ease with which he could indict his political enemies: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
I’m sure that if any of these reporters ever had doubts about whether these stories were true or not, they were able to chase them away by convincing themselves that this was noble work—that Donald Trump, a literal fascist in their eyes, simply could not remain in power. This, of course, is the same excuse that Marxist revolutionaries throughout history have used to justify the monstrous crimes of the regimes they served. They have always believed that while their side might be doing very bad things, it was nothing compared to what came before.
Like the revolutionaries of the past, these new activist journalists—many of whom proudly count themselves among the #resistance, modeling themselves on antifascists in World War II—tolerated no opposition among their ranks. Speaking recently to Jeff Gerth, who wrote an excellent piece for the Columbia Journalism Review on the various missteps that the media made during the worst of the Russiagate scandal, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi described his experience.
Taibbi, who was a left-wing reporter for most of his life, wrote for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press, and New York Sports Express. He won a National Magazine Award for reporting he published in Rolling Stone. His work regularly drew comparisons to the gonzo journalism of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who had also covered politics for Rolling Stone. However, when Taibbi began writing stories raising doubts about the veracity of the Russiagate allegations against President Trump, left-wing media voices immediately denounced him. It didn’t matter that he’d been “on the right team,” so to speak, for so many years, or that he was a subject-matter expert on Russia, having lived there for most of his twenties.
“ ‘It was a career-changing moment for me,’ he said in an interview. The ‘more neutral approach’ to reporting ‘went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.’ ”15
The journalists in the auditorium of the New York Times in 2019 were unwilling to allow the facts to shift their focus from their ideological commitments. Dean Baquet’s answer on race was not good enough for them. The person who had asked the original question hounded him again when he tried to move on to something else, demanding that Baquet address the issue of why the Times didn’t call President Trump a racist more explicitly.16
Suddenly, Dean Baquet, who had come up in the newsrooms of the late twentieth century, when objectivity was supposed to be the gold standard, found himself in the same position that countless professors, business executives, and politicians have been in over the past few years: standing in front of a room filled with angry, woke, (mostly) young neo-Marxists, all of whom want to shame and bully you into submission. If you say one wrong word during these interactions—if you even make a hand gesture that the crowd doesn’t like—you’ll find yourself trending on Twitter within seconds, and looking for a new job within minutes.
I’m sure Baquet knew better than anyone how carefully he’d have to tread for the next few minutes, which brought more and more questions on the same topic: race, power dynamics, and why the New York Times was not more concerned with calling out racism anywhere and everywhere it occurred.
In the middle of the meeting, one staffer rose to suggest that race should be part of every single story the Times published from then on. The full question is astounding:
Anonymous Staffer: Hello, I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.17
If nothing else, this long-winded, nonsensical question reveals just how deeply the principles of wokeness and neo-Marxism had already invaded the newsroom of the New York Times in the lead-up to the so-called “racial reckoning” that occurred during the summer of 2020. And how little journalistic standards mattered anymore at the Times; you could be a vapid Valley Girl with poor grammar, but you’d be celebrated if you virtue-signaled correctly (“… the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country…. Just because it feels to me like…. Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything.”) It amply explains the coverage that came during and after the events of that summer, much of which might as well have appeared on the front page of the Communist Party USA’s Daily Worker.
Near the end of his or her question, the staffer mentions how proud he or she feels that the Times would soon publish the 1619 Project, which would come out just a few weeks after the town hall meeting in 2019. In many ways the publication of this project, which is riddled with factual inaccuracies and gross and deliberate distortions of history, signaled a paradigm shift at the “paper of record,” and in American journalism more generally. For years the new woke staffers had been at war with the old guard, and the old guard had been managing to hold them back to some degree. Every time there was a flare-up over some “microaggression” in a newsroom, the damage was mostly contained, and the story was confined to the media sections of other news outlets. Whenever journalists called out their employers on social media for being racist, as they often did, the top brass at those institutions would hold “listening sessions” and promise to “do better” in the future.18
But with the publication of the 1619 Project, the neo-Marxists began to claim victory over the real reporters who simply wanted to report the facts. And it was not enough, at least according to the staffers at the Times’s town hall meeting, to publish long propaganda pieces like the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones and other contributors to the 1619 Project. Antiracism had to be present in every story that the Times published, and in every section of the paper’s coverage.
During the worst of the rioting burning through American cities in the summer of 2020, the New York Post published a piece by Charles Kesler, illustrated with a picture of a defaced statue of Thomas Jefferson, entitled “Call Them the 1619 Riots.”19
“It would be an honor,” Nikole Hannah-Jones replied on Twitter.20
A few months later, when my colleague Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed urging President Trump to “send in the troops” to restore order to American cities,21 the young staffers at the New York Times were incensed. Over a period of a few days, they conducted a smear campaign against Senator Cotton on Twitter, posting the identical message, “Running this puts Black NYTimes staff in danger.”
And their hysteria had its intended effect: the Times’s editorial page editor, James Bennet, was immediately forced to step down. Of course, Bennet was a partisan Democrat (indeed, his brother currently serves as a Democratic senator from Colorado). His punishable offense was even acknowledging that any contrary view existed. Bennet prostrated himself before an all-staff virtual meeting and apologized for publishing the op-ed—under what kind of pressure, I can only imagine. According to publisher A. G. Sulzberger, the “tone” of the op-ed was “needlessly harsh,” and as a result, “both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”22
Mind you, nobody thought Bennet agreed with Senator Cotton. Indeed, nobody on earth thought that anybody at the Times agreed with Cotton that we should be more vigorous in stopping the Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioting and looting. But because he dared to publish an op-ed—that he vigorously disagreed with—from a sitting U.S. senator, Bennet was effectively forced out of his job. He resigned in June of 2020.23
This incident gave the nation a rare look not only into the nasty internal politics of the New York Times, but also into the extremely far-left political views of the reporters who work there. In a sane world, the stories about left-wing rioters running rampant through cities, attempting to burn down federal buildings, and causing millions of dollars of damage to property would have been the story of the decade; there would have been correspondents on the ground covering these riots with a sustained critical eye, counting up all the damage done and doing long narrative exposés on just how these rioters had been spurred to violence by their ideas. Had the mobs been right-wing groups engaging in some kind of anti-immigration protests, you can bet that the coverage would have gone in that direction. But the rioters shared the politics of most New York Times reporters, so that didn’t happen.
Back at the newsroom, this complete incuriosity about the world was beginning to grate on journalists who actually wanted to do… well, journalism. One of them was Bari Weiss, a relatively young left-wing editorial writer who was not completely woke or insane. She had been hired by the Times shortly after the 2020 election, ostensibly to help address the lack of ideological diversity at the paper. At first glance, it seemed that she was a perfect fit. Although she did write about issues such as the censorship of conservatives on social media platforms and the various ways that Jewish people were discriminated against by the Left, she also shared a great deal of the Times’s supposedly liberal values. For starters, she was an openly gay woman who had voted for Barack Obama twice. She was also a sharp writer and a deep thinker who believed in developing stories carefully and following them wherever they led.
But the mob hated her. To the new neo-Marxist woke contingent at the Times, Bari Weiss might as well have been Adolf Hitler. When she tweeted a picture of an Asian figure skater in 2018 with the caption “Immigrants: they get the job done” (a terrific line from the musical Hamilton), the internal message boards of the New York Times lit up as if she’d committed some kind of hate crime. It turned out the figure skater, unbeknownst to Weiss, had been born not in a foreign country but in California, although her parents had immigrated from China some decades earlier. The young woke staffers were “offended” and “disgusted” by the tweet, or at least they were performing disgust and offense to please their fellow revolutionaries.24
According to the laws of woke, whoever is most offended, or can claim the greatest oppression, gains the most status; the incentive, therefore, is to take offense at everything and never give anyone—especially not conservatives—the benefit of the doubt. After a few more months of passive-aggressive (and sometimes plain-old aggressive) jabs from the leftist staffers in her office, Bari Weiss made the decision to leave the New York Times, once the most respected institution in American journalism. Her resignation letter, addressed to the paper’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, and still available on her website, is a remarkable document—one that should be assigned and discussed at every journalism school in the country. I would encourage readers to look it up and read the whole thing.
A relevant sample:
… the lessons that ought to have followed the election [of Donald Trump in 2016]—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.25
I couldn’t have said it better myself. What Bari Weiss puts her finger on is the tendency of all revolutions—especially Marxist ones—to insist on complete agreement at all times. When you’re dealing with a woke, neo-Marxist movement, the truth is whatever the revolutionaries need it to be at that very moment. This is why, when communists come to power in a given society, independent newspapers are usually among the first institutions to fall. It happened in the Soviet Union, and it certainly happened in Cuba. The revolutionaries knew that if people were able to find objective truth, their regime could not last.
What’s most troubling about the woke revolution in the United States, of course, is that the revolution began, and is being perpetuated by, the institutions of American journalism themselves. The calls (for censorship, race obsession, and total adherence to the woke narrative) are coming from inside the house.
At first glance, it may seem a little excessive to spend so much time on the internal politics of the New York Times in a book about Cultural Marxism. It may seem like a foregone conclusion that the people who work there are hopelessly woke and unbelievably biased in selecting their stories. I’m sure many people think that they have been for decades.
But like it or not, for decades the Times has been considered the gold standard as far as newsgathering institutions go. If there is one journalistic institution that should be equipped to deliver straight, unbiased news to the American people, it’s this one. The paper has millions of dollars, access to the best journalists in the world, and a brand that most people in the country recognize and trust. It’s been that way for nearly a century now. Moreover, virtually every journalist and every editor in America reads the Times; its stories drive print, television, and radio stories in markets across the nation, large and small. As the writer Gay Talese put it in his book-length biography of the paper, The Kingdom and the Power, Americans have viewed the institution for years as “necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist… it would be duly recorded each day in The Times.”26
This is the point.
From the outside, it would seem that the New York Times should have more institutional safeguards against being corrupted in this way than any other organization in history. The stages that a story must go through before publication—each one intended to make sure that the facts within that story are accurate, fair, and unbiased—are numerous, and they are not present at most journalistic institutions in the United States. This raises a question. If this much bias from woke neo-Marxists has been allowed to take over at the New York Times, once considered the gold standard of American information-gathering, what the hell is going on at other places that don’t have the resources, manpower, and institutional prestige that the paper of record does?
As Geoffrey Chaucer memorably put it in his prologue to The Canterbury Tales, “If gold rust, what shall iron do?”
The answer, as many of us who’ve been following the news business for the past few years know, is that the institutions we once trusted to bring us information will continue to rust and corrode until very little is left of them. The news organizations that were once called “mainstream” will drift further and further toward the radical left—selecting their stories and writing them to please an increasingly radicalized audience of woke neo-Marxists—and ultimately die out when they realize there is no more room to their left.
If you need proof, look around.
Today, the landscape of American journalism is grim. Even the outlets that enjoyed a brief sugar high during the Trump presidency, largely by publishing countless stories warning their loyal readers that fascism was coming at any moment, are now seeing a marked decline in revenue. This is especially true at CNN, which (hilariously) attempted to launch a streaming service called CNN+ in 2022, believing for some reason that viewers who barely watch the network for free would suddenly want to pay $9.99 a month for the privilege.
The fact that the service lasted less than thirty days and aired only a handful of shows speaks to the absolute unwillingness of people to pay for anything with the toxic letters “CNN” attached to it.
It’s no surprise that trust in the mainstream media has hit an all-time low. The most recent figures indicate that only 7 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of trust in the mainstream media.27 In November of 2022 a Canadian foundation hosted a debate on the proposition that we should trust the mainstream media. Arguing for the motion were Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg, figures from the New Yorker and the New York Times, respectively. Arguing against it were the author and commentator Douglas Murray, for whose excellent work I have great respect, and Matt Taibbi, whom I had the pleasure of meeting just before he testified before Congress about the Twitter Files.
At the beginning of the debate, the audience was split along relatively even lines: 52 percent believed that the mainstream media should, in most instances, be trusted, while 48 percent believed that it usually shouldn’t be. With every minute that the debate went on, that balance shifted steadily. For about one hour, Murray and Taibbi provided countless examples of stories that the mainstream media had bungled, citing precise quotes, dates, and headlines. They covered the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was deliberately buried by virtually every “mainstream” news outlet in the country because it would be damaging to Joe Biden, as well as various stories about Covid that later turned out to have been completely false.
“I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Every adult I knew growing up seemed to be in media,” said Matt Taibbi, according to a summary of the event in National Review. “I love the news business. It’s in my bones. But I mourn for it. It’s destroyed itself.”
When the debate was over, the audience was polled again. After hearing the arguments from both sides, the balance had shifted completely. More than a third of the audience (39 percent) had changed their views and now supported the motion that the mainstream media should not be trusted. It was the single largest swing in the history of the Munk Debates, which have been running for many years.28
Sadly, the responsibility that journalists once felt to get a story right and to admit their errors—the very sense that made Jake Tapper come back onto my campaign bus, apologize, and try to keep the record correct as recently as 2016—is falling quickly away, replaced by an unabashed left-wing activism that would have been unthinkable in past decades. In the war between the Nikole Hannah-Jones faction of American journalism, whose adherents appear to believe that reporting is simply a means to achieve their neo-Marxist political goals, and the old guard, who were trained to believe that the news business exists to inform the American people about the world around them, the neo-Marxists are winning.
Like all good revolutionaries, they are “pulverizing” the past, either forcing their older, more sane colleagues to adopt their views, or shaming them into submission with baseless accusations of racism, sexism, or transphobia.
It’s working.
Rather than attempting to return to some notion of fairness and objectivity in their reporting, these organizations are leaning even harder into their left-wing activism. In January of 2023, a longtime editor at the Washington Post named Leonard Downie published a long, supposedly well-researched piece in the back pages of the paper titled, “Newsrooms That Move beyond ‘Objectivity’ Can Build Trust.”
In this piece, written in prose that is stilted and confusing enough to make Karl Marx himself proud, Downie—who, as he notes, was an editor at the Post back when the paper was publishing its famous Watergate coverage—recites his new woke talking points perfectly. Reading through the piece, one gets the impression of an eighteenth-century French nobleman trying desperately to talk his way out of being guillotined as the revolutionaries begin gathering outside his door—by declaring his loyalty to the revolution.
The very notion of objectivity, Downie writes, “was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. [Today’s reporters] believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
For the rest of the piece, Downie quotes more than seventy-five people who work in newsrooms, most of whom are on board with this strange neo-Marxist way of looking at the job of a “journalist.” They speak throughout of the imperative to center “lived experience” over facts, and the apparently urgent need to call many more things racist much more often.29
How anyone could read the modern corporate media for even one day and come to the conclusion that they don’t call things racist enough is beyond my understanding. I also wonder what these people mean when they say lived experience—are they comparing it to dreamed experience? What they really mean, of course, is that their own emotions and feelings—and especially their own ideological dogma—should be elevated above actual facts, quotes, evidence, data, or reality to the contrary.
One editor at the Los Angeles Times said that he was trying to make sure that journalists felt safe engaging in activism, noting that the leadership of that newsroom was “trying to create an environment in which we don’t police our journalists too much. Our young people want to be participants in the world.” Another editor said plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”30
For a long time, journalists attempted to hide their passion for left-wing activism. Now, they are utterly brazen in their partisan ideological bias and their willingness to actively deceive the public to advance their agenda.
That’s because they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.
Of course, there are reasons for hope. There always are.
Individual citizens can speak up and hold the media accountable for its misrepresentations. As we saw with the army of “pajama bloggers” who took down Dan Rather,31 sunshine can be a powerful tool against lies. Likewise, the voices of countless Americans mocking CNN for its “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” chyron, as their reporter stood before a massive burning building, had a profound effect. As did the millions online who mercilessly mocked the NBC reporter who claimed that the NASCAR audience chanting “F*** Joe Biden” was yelling “Let’s go Brandon!”32
Moreover, in the past few years alone, several new media organizations have sprung up to offer alternatives to the biased, left-wing mainstream media. Some are outspoken about their conservative leanings, while others attempt to go at the news in a more objective manner. Bari Weiss, admirably, has started a media venture called The Free Press, which aims to give an unbiased look at current events.
The Daily Wire has built an entire media empire, routinely breaking stories that the corporate media ignores. In the aftermath of the Scott Smith incident in Loudoun County, it wasn’t reporters at our nation’s “premier” media institutions who got to the root of the story. It was an excellent investigative reporter named Luke Rosiak, who did weeks’ worth of on-the-ground reporting—what Woodward and Bernstein became famous for—to reveal the massive cover-up in the Loudoun County school system. To this day, his reporting on the subject serves as the most accurate account in all of journalism of left-wing corruption at the local level.
Likewise, conservative viewpoints can often be found on outlets like Red State, National Review, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, Town Hall, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, New York Post, and New York Sun, not to mention Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, and most of talk radio.
We need more right-of-center media outlets. Or just outlets that report actual facts, rather than left-wing dogma. Conservatives and libertarians with real resources need to invest seriously in (1) starting new media outlets, (2) growing the reach of existing reasonable outlets, and, critically, (3) buying major branded corporate media outlets. In 2013 Jeff Bezos, the left-wing billionaire, bought the Washington Post for $250 million. That’s a lot of money, to be sure, but nobody thinks Bezos bought the Post because he believed in the long-term profitability of print media. Rather, in my estimation, he wanted to control the commanding heights of political discourse.
There are countless conservative business leaders today who could have afforded the purchase price of the Post, but most no doubt took a narrow cost-benefit analysis and concluded that a slightly higher profit margin could be found in manufacturing widgets in Tennessee. But if we do not retake journalism from the neo-Marxists who have captured it—if we allow the media to remain overt propagandists—American capitalism cannot survive much longer. Not just the Post; those who care about free speech and vibrant democracy should buy newspapers in major cities across America, along with major networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN. And not just English-language media, but Spanish as well.
Buying these institutions could dramatically—and instantaneously—transform the media landscape, as we saw in 2022 when Elon Musk invested $44 billion and purchased Twitter. And then shocked the tech world by releasing what would be called “the Twitter Files,” which took a deep, often horrifying look at the extent to which left-wing neo-Marxists had taken over not just American journalism, but Big Tech as well. The corporate media largely ignored the Twitter Files because reporting on the story—one of the greatest scandals of modern times—conflicted with their own political agenda. But the right-of-center outlets provided at least some coverage for the shocking revelations.
The leftists’ takeover of Big Tech has been perhaps their most sinister achievement—so that the events that occurred behind the curtain at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other platforms merit a much longer discussion.
Which begins now.