Green Shoots of Journalism Emerge, Part II
The new year is off to a good start if you're looking for evidence of a turnaround in journalism. And it's coming from interesting places.
The “legacy” news media - consider the major national newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, etc.) and their broadcast counterparts at NBC, CBS, and ABC - are still a pretty powerful bunch. But a new Gallup-Knight Foundation public opinion survey on media trust and several recent stories should scream like a five-alarm fires in their newsrooms.
Except fires are breaking out in the newsrooms themselves. It reminds me of the 1979 horror movie When a Stranger Calls. “We traced the call,” someone tells a frightened woman, alone at night in her home, being harassed by a creepy caller. “The call is coming from inside the house.”
The Knight Foundation study, released earlier this week, sums it up this way.
To be sure, distrust of information or institutions is not necessarily bad. Some skepticism may be beneficial in today’s media environment, where the number of information sources available feels infinite, advanced technology often makes it difficult to identify reliable information and journalists inevitably make mistakes in their reporting. But this study suggests that many Americans are not solely skeptical of news today — they feel distrust on an emotional level, believing news organizations intend to mislead them and are indifferent to the social and political impact of their reporting. (Emphasis added) Our analysis demonstrates that these indicators of emotional trust in news are, in fact, distinct from the opinion that news organizations are capable of delivering accurate and fair reporting.
Predictably, some are more trusting than others. Democrats are much more trusting of the news media than Republicans and Independents. That’s probably because many news reporters and editors identify or are registered as Democrats and cater their stories to those equally immersed in their worldview. A 2014 study by a pair of Indiana University researchers indicated that only seven percent of reporters were Republicans.
The Gallup/Knight Foundation study also shows that Americans are more trusting of local media, but that number is still unimpressive. It’s no secret that national newspaper chains have gobbled up formerly independent newspapers in recent years, including the center-left Gannett (publishers of USA Today) and their ownership of the Arizona Republic (once owned by Vice President Dan Quayle’s family, along with the Indianapolis Star) and the once-conservative Daily Oklahoman (formerly owned by the conservative E.K. Gaylord family).
It’s been a bleak landscape for Americans living outside the Democratic blue bubble. Thus, the explosion in recent years of mostly online media that caters to center-right eyeballs. You know some of them: Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro), Daily Caller (started by Tucker Carlson), Just The News (John Solomon), the Washington Examiner, and many more.
But as good as those outlets might be at generating some original reporting, that’s not where new shoots of journalism have emerged in recent weeks. Reporters, editors, and publications once associated with legacy or center-left media have emerged with solid new unbiased journalism of the kind the old outlets used to feature, resulting in official reactions. To wit:
Bari Weiss, The Free Press, and Jamie Reed
Bari Weiss was driven out of her job as an editor at the New York Times, courtesy of a revolt of woke newsroom staff and a spineless publisher. Instead of wallowing in her “cancelation,” she remained faithful to her honest form of journalism and began to publish on Substack.
Weiss is no conservative. She’s in a same-sex marriage. Her views, when expressed, are usually to the left of mine, but there is an unmistakable dose of reality and common sense in her writing. She is very unwoke and dedicated to solid reporting while respecting free speech and diverse views. She attracted an instant audience and has now used Substack to launch The Free Press, which also features the work of a black conservative, Coleman Hughes. Last week, she published a blockbuster, game-changing story written by Jamie Reed, a self-described “queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” who worked at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
If you’re unfamiliar with or perhaps undecided on the wisdom of gender surgery for minor children, you must read her story. I bet you’ve already seen it published elsewhere. A genuine whistleblower, she blows many myths of “gender ideology” out of the water. It is detailed, straightforward, and alarming. Most legacy media won’t touch the story because of the apparent fear of not embracing an ideology and industry raking millions to mutilate minor children. It is a scandal on steroids. Challenging this industry and ideological movement takes real courage.
This isn’t the first “scandal” over transgender surgery for minors. Jonathan Chait - also no conservative - just wrote on the topic for New York Magazine. Reed’s story has prompted an investigation by Missouri’s attorney general and calls for congressional hearings.
Jeff Gerth, The Columbia Journalism Review, and the Russia Collusion Hoax
The New York Times and the Washington Post were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russia. “The New York Times revealed the Trump team’s connections with the Russians and attempts to sway the F.B.I. director, James Comey. The articles, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, triggered the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel,” the Times still brags today on its website.
Thirty million dollars later, the Mueller special counsel investigation turned up nothing on Trump or his campaign. Thanks to an inspector general investigation and special counsel John Durham, the only person prosecuted was a Justice Department lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith. He pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about how he altered an email as part of a brief filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to hide the fact that Trump supporter Carter Page worked with the CIA. Clinesmith lost his government job, served 12 months of probation, was ordered to conduct 400 hours of “community service,” and lost his law license for a year.
Enter Jeff Gerth. Wikipedia describes Gerth as “an American former investigative reporter for The New York Times who has written lengthy, probing stories that drew both praise and criticism. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for covering the transfer of American satellite-launch technology to China. He broke stories about the Whitewater controversy and the Chinese scientist Wen Ho Lee.”
He also worked on George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. He doesn’t sound very Trumpian to me.
But earlier this month, writing for one of the nation’s two leading journalism industry publications, the Columbia Journalism Review, he conducted a four-part autopsy of the media’s coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. It also was riveting, detailed, and courageous. While hardly pro-Trump, it makes a mockery of the Pulitzer Prize, the media’s most sought-after award. They'd return their prizes if the Washington Post and New York Times had any integrity. And if the Pulitzer Prize had any, they’d demand them back. Don’t hold your breath for apologies from any of the three.
“Most Americans (60 percent) say they want unbiased news sources. Yet 86 percent think the media is biased,” Gerth wrote as he finished Part Four of in-depth reporting and analysis. “The consequences of this mismatch are all too obvious: 83 percent of the audience for Fox News leans Republican while 91 percent of the readers of the New York Times lean Democratic.
Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me of her concerns about news silos.
“If you are only getting your news from one source, you are getting a skewed view,” which, she said, “increases polarization” and “crowds out the room for compromise, because people base their views on these siloed news sources.” She added: “People don’t have time to deal with nuance, so they settle on a position and everything else tends to become unacceptable.”
Walter Lippmann wrote about these dangers in his 1920 book Liberty and the News. Lippmann worried then that when journalists “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.”
Other “Green Shoots” include the “Twitter Files” by a literal coalition of independent journalists and authors, including former New York Times science writer Alex Berenson, former progressive activist, independent gubernatorial candidate (California) and author Michael Shellenberger, and journalist Matt Taibbi, among others.
In Taibbi’s words, with the Twitter files, “we've discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship. Basically companies like Twitter have a system by which they receive ten tens of thousands of requests for action on various accounts. Typically through the DHS and FBI, but these requests for coming from basically every department in the government. We've seen them from the HHS, from the Treasury, from the DOD, even from the CIA. And they will send basically long lists of accounts in excel spreadsheet files and ask for action on those accounts.
”And in many cases, Twitter is complying.” Before a new owner famously entered the building with a sink, they used to.
Add to that terrific work by Washington Examiner investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky, who unearthed a network of global “disinformation” tracking organizations and funders that target center-right media as part of a demonetization effort. Thus the product, “Global Disinformation Index.”
If any “disinformation” is being spread, it’s by the government, including our official health agencies and, most recently, the FBI’s Richmond Office. They published a memo targeting traditional Catholics as potential terrorists citing only one discredited left-wing hate group, the Southern Law Poverty Center (SLPC). Once a respected organization, it has descended into a leftist hit group that targets conservative religious organizations and inspired at least one terror attack on the Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington, DC.
One last shoutout to Seymour Hersh, a legendary Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist for the Associated Press and New York Times, and who also once served as US Senator Eugene McCarthy’s (D-MN) presidential press secretary in 1968. Through his Substack page, he published a landmark report on how the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream pipelines, which, if true, is an act of war. This is the kind of story that the Washington Post and New York Times used to break, but there’s a reason why they call the Post a voice of the “deep state.”
These and other publications are being “rewarded” with reported massive subscription declines since Joe Biden took office. I’m not buying the spin that it’s just because Donald Trump left office. There’s something else at work here.
It’s hard to say if the legacy media has caught on after this bevy of blockbuster stories from unusual sources. Perhaps not, but it is only a matter of time before they begin to smell the smoke and spot the fires around them.