Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.
So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.
But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say:
During an interview Monday with Semafor media editor Max Tani about the Harris campaign’s media strategy, Flaherty claimed, “There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us.”
Well, not all of them, because I was certainly not with the Vice President’s campaign!
I will admit to some laughter when over 250,000 subscribers to the Post said they had cancelled their subscriptions after owner Jeff Bezos spiked the newspaper’s anticipated endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff. I did hate to see it, because I want the newspaper to survive.
But Mr Flaherty told the truth, at least the truth as Democrats see it, that the consumers of the credentialed media — other than Fox News, that is — are already deeply in the pockets of the Democrats. He admitted what we all knew: that the credentialed media were heavily biased.
Then there was this, the lead editorial in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
A worrisome sign as media companies and tech leaders start lining up to bend the knee to Trump
The widespread capitulation before Donald Trump even takes office is a dark omen for the American system of government built on checks and balances.
by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, December 17, 2024 | 5:01 AM EST
Even before the presidential election, many members of the press began caving to the possibility of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The owners of major newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, decided not to endorse a candidate in the race, prompting some opinion staffers to resign.
The Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy newspaper, and the closest thing I have to a ‘local’ newspaper, also made no endorsement, after McClatchy’s brass told their thirty owned newspapers not to do so unless both candidates sat down with them for an interview.
In the weeks since Trump’s narrow victory, media companies and other influential leaders — including powerful chief executives, federal law enforcement officials, and moderate Republican lawmakers — appear to be falling in line.
The widespread capitulation before Trump even takes office is a worrisome omen for the media and the American system of government built on checks and balances.
Really? I don’t normally watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe, but looked briefly this morning, around 6:15, and there they were, attacking Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth because his security guard, former Master Sergeant in the United States Army’s Special Forces John Jacob Hasenbein has what The New York Times called “a dark episode in his past.”
The Army charged Mr. Hasenbein with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. A military jury found him guilty of the assault charge in a court-martial in 2020, according to Army records. But the judge overseeing the case declared a mistrial after learning that a friend of Mr. Hasenbein had been talking to a juror throughout the trial, court records show. The Army did not retry the case.
In other words, Mr Hasenbein has no criminal record. Yet the Times and the denizens of the openly leftist MSNBC show were trying to discredit Mr Hegseth based on the fact that one of his security guards might have beat someone up almost six years ago. If you saw the need to have a security guard, wouldn’t you want someone capable of beating up someone?
The Inky’s editorial then used Mr Bunch’s formulation that the press were ‘obeying in advance,’ citing Morning Joe hosts Joe and Mika Scarborough flying to Mar-a-Lago to interview Mr Trump to try to “restart communications” with the newly reelected President about whom they had been so critical.
Don’t Mr and Mrs Scarborough at least claim to be journalists? Isn’t the elected President of the United States the most important newsmaker in the country?
Time magazine crowned Trump “Person of the Year,” less than seven months after he was convicted of illegally paying off an adult film star in a scheme to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
I get it: the newspaper hates Mr Trump. But a former President, whom the Democrats and the media and heavily biased prosecutors and even two thwarted assassins tried to kill, politically, legally, and literally, coming back to win the 2024 election is the undeniable man of the year. All of the odds were against him, but he won through nevertheless. Had Mrs Emhoff won, she’d have been the ‘person of the year.’
There’s significantly more, but it was the Board’s last paragraph that topped it all off, and had me rolling on the floor:
Trump and his allies fail to understand the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy. More alarming, some in the media also fail to understand George Orwell’s famous description that “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
Really? Then where were the Inquirer, the Times, the Post, and the rest of the credentialed media as President Joe Biden was stumbling through the last few years of his term? Where were the reports in the legacy media that Mr Biden was slowly sinking into dementia? We evil reich-wing bloggers and conservatives on Twitter and other social media were reporting it, but the deeply-in-the-pockets of the Democrats said nothing, nothing at all, until the President’s “halting and disjointed performance” in the June 27th debate exposed it to the wider world in a way even the most dedicated of journolistic — not a typographical error; see the box at the top of this article — sycophants could not cover up or ignore. By the day after the debate, despite a significantly better performance by Mr Biden the day after the debate, the Editorial Board of the Times was saying, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.”
By the 29th, Axios was reporting:
- From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
- Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.
By the 30th, the President’s family were trying to blame his staff.
The Wall Street Journal was harder on the story, not even 24 hours after the debate:
Yet they had already become increasingly apparent in Washington’s corridors of power and across the world for months. In interviews, top officials abroad and Democrats said they have witnessed other moments when Biden’s behavior concerned them. Some were quickly relieved when Biden appeared to regain his footing. Others were left shaken by the experiences.
European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term, but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.
How is it that conservatives knew of Mr Biden’s mental decline, but the Inquirer and “the adversarial role (of) the press” somehow managed to miss it and failed to report it?
Are we supposed to believe that an ‘adversarial press’ were completely unaware of what Washington insiders all knew? Are we supposed to accept that an ‘adversarial press’ would not have at least investigated whether the rumors and stories that conservatives were spreading had some basis in fact?
“Everything else is public relations,” the Editorial Board concluded, yet what were the credentialed media doing other than “public relations” when they deliberately concealed the physical and mental decline of a President who was playing nuclear pattycake with Vladimir Putin?
How did an ‘adversarial press’ not at least raise questions about the condition of the man who could, quite literally, order the destruction of much of the entire world, at a time when direct conflict between Russia and the United States was possible?
But, not to worry, we all know that “the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy” will return, return with a vengeance, for the next four years. It’s just that it would all be so much more believable if the press had played that same role when it came to Democrats.
