Green Shoots of Real Journalism Emerge, Part 1
Are independent and citizen journalists rescuing the profession? Recent major stories - the Twitter Files, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Substack show promise. Are the dark days over?
While packing to move from the Philly suburbs to northern Virginia two years ago, I stumbled across a box of materials I used in the late 1980s and 1990s as a federal government subcontractor for the “Trail Boss” program.
It was operated by the General Services Administration (GSA) to train government officials in multiple agencies, from the US Park Service to the Internal Revenue Service, involved in major information technology systems, most involving major federal contracts under close congressional supervision. Unlike most government programs, it ended when it completed its mission towards the end of the Clinton Administration. Separately, I also helped train Department of Interior personnel, including Park Rangers, how to deal with hostile reporters.
I got the job due to my previous experience on both sides of the microphone, as it were, as a state capitol correspondent for 12 newspapers in Oklahoma, followed by a stint as a daily newspaper editor and later as a campaign and congressional press secretary. Working with another contractor, my role involved teaching these career officials two things: how to deal with the media and, occasionally, how to testify before Congress.
One nugget from my materials stuck out after all these years. “Anyone with a modem (remember those?) and a computer can be a reporter.”
This was around when Al Gore invented the internet, followed soon by AOL (America Online, “You’ve Got Mail”), “My Space,” the first browser, “Netscape,” followed by other social media and their fellow travelers well after 9/11 during the latter years of the George W. Bush Administration.
Citizen journalism is now the rage, much of it here on Substack; genuinely independent journalists are leading the way and tapping into it with a vengeance, especially former New York Times editor (and no conservative) Bari Weiss, The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald (again, no conservative), Matt Taibbi (ditto), and a growing legion of others.
That’s because the traditional media - call it “legacy media,” “mainstream media,” or it’s latest pejorative, “regime media” - has jettisoned whatever respect it once enjoyed with the American people.
Not long ago, we watched one of three media outlets competing to share the same news stories with names like Huntley and Brinkley, Chancellor, Lehrer, and Cronkite. As a young staffer, I remember grabbing my copy of the Washington Post off my front porch before heading to work in the morning and spending the first minutes at my Capitol Hill desk perusing its contents over coffee. We all - Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative - read our news from the same sources, even as we interpret and reacted differently. There were no personal digital devices in those days from which we read the news, opinion, or anything else. The ginormous desktop computers and floppy disks on our desks didn’t deliver much information then. They were glorified information processors useful for drafting mail and memos.
The thing about most reporters during those days; first, they usually kept opinions on the editorial pages. Second, they tended to trust readers to judge their reporting; to form their responses and opinions.
In those days, journalists tried not to rely on “anonymous sources.” Watergate changed that. When they did - including me, during my brief foray into the profession - they strived to confirm the information. It was more important to get it right than to get it first. Integrity, credibility, and believability meant everything. With exceptions, they weren’t pushing narratives other than occasionally “piling on” when a scandal emerged, looking for unique angles.
That’s generally not true anymore. We not only don’t trust the media, but thanks to many news sources and aggregators, we can pick the ones that cater to our interests, world views, and preconceived notions. MSNBC and CNN, The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Economist would be on the left, among many others. We have National Review, Breitbart, Daily Wire, Just The News, the Washington Free Beacon, and others on the right. A few in the political center are trying to hold court, including the Wall Street Journal and News Nation, but they’re rather lonely. Regional newspapers like the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic aren’t much better.
As for the Washington Post and New York Times, they’re shadows of their former selves, having led the way in undermining faith and credibility in their reporting, as evidenced by the infamous Russia Collusion Hoax. They dutifully report pretty much what their “Deep State” sources tell them, as we saw recently with his first story of the first Chinese spy balloon in the Washington Post, by David Ignatius, relying - you guessed it - on an “authoritative” Pentagon official with “detailed, firsthand knowledge” of the escapade (says who?). We’ve had our experience with other media misrepresenting “senior officials” who’ve been allowed to over-inflate their role to push propaganda.
Ignatius is well known as the voice of the “Deep State,” that collection of anonymous intelligence (mainly CIA) and federal law enforcement (FBI) that enjoy spinning tales to reporters to protect and promote their interests, no matter who is President. Catch the following little ditty from Ignatius’s chat with his single anonymous source.
The political fracas is already underway in Washington. Republicans claim the Biden administration showed weakness in allowing the balloon to enter U.S. airspace. Officials counter that the previous administration, under President Donald Trump, didn’t react to several similar missions over U.S. states and territories. Yet those previous incursions didn’t go on for so long, or reach so far into the continental United States.
Except that all Trump Administration senior intelligence officials, including the former President himself and his national security advisors, deny knowing a thing about it. This presents another major problem - Deep State officials concealing this information from our civilian command. Who elected them? Talk about threats to democracy.
Ignatius, a veteran reporter who should know better, discloses a poor editor and his bias or laziness. He appears to have made no effort to contact Robert O’Brien, Ric Grennell, John Ratcliffe, Mike Pompeo, or any other senior Trump Administration national security official for a response. Fortunately, Fox News and others did.
That is a colossal error on part of the Washington Post that a competent editor would have caught.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that some in the media are doing real investigative journalism, not serving as “regime media,” and doing serious autopsies that expose major flaws in “award-winning” media coverage, especially the infamous Russia Collusion Hoax. Others, through the release of the “Twitter Files,” are exposing what Taibbi accurately calls an “elaborate bureaucracy” involved in “public-private censorship,” symbolized by both the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco and our government health czars shutting down opposing expert views. These are scandals on steroids that receive scant, often buried coverage in major media, if any.
My next post will discuss all three major “green shoots” of optimism. The stories are important; you need and deserve to understand their impact and consequences.
The good news is that there’s hope for the media. But patience and persistence will be required.
The Washington Post’s motto - Democracy Dies in Darkness - isn’t wrong, but when your idea of reporting is to cover the truth, like a pillow, until it stops breathing, that’s what happens (hat tip to Twitter’s David Burge, @Iowahawkblog). As Jeff Gerth wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review, “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.’”