Canceled by the Jackals

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, April 15, 2021

 

Journey back in your mind to 50 or 60 cancel-culture cycles past, when the New York Times’ long-toothed science reporter Donald McNeil was forced out by management for failing to more servilely soothe the prep-schooled scions of some of its wealthier subscribers.

 

It’s fine if you don’t remember the details — do you think the average Roman citizen remembered the death of every Christian whom Nero had condemned to damnatio ad bestias? Just recall for our purposes that on the Web-publishing platform Medium, McNeil wrote a compelling and often enraging account of his trial and dismissal.

 

Early on in his screed is this refreshing bit of candor about his experience with the Daily Beast reporters who were investigating his alleged transgressions: “I know journalists. . . . We make America what it is — without a free press, democracy dies. But we’re still jackals. We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just as you’re offering us a treat. We can’t help it. It’s the nature of the job.”

 

Charming! McNeil goes on to say that “at the basest level,” the work of a journalist involves repeating accusations “even if you know [they’re] untrue or half-true” and “filtering” away “tiny shades of nuance” to “choose the bits” you “think important” and “control . . . the narrative.”

 

That this is how journalism often — usually — works is obvious to anyone with eyes to see, even if it’s shocking to hear it put so plainly by somebody paid to do it. Imposing narrative coherence, heroes and villains, praise and blame, on a chaotic and indifferent universe is “the nature of the job.” In fact, I did just as much by selectively quoting McNeil in the paragraph before this one. The words are accurate and the gist is preserved, but if you go back and read his original you’ll see I sliced and diced his sentences up real nice to amplify the effect I was going for — to demonstrate that journalism is a seedy little business with seedy little ends.

 

Our press’s self-regard has grown inversely to the regard others have for it. Its highest-status practitioners aren’t war correspondents or crime reporters but either precious “data visualizers” who write “explainers” about why all their college professors were right or else Google-search private eyes who specialize in getting people fired for having had opinions in 2012. And yet to hear them speak of their own bravery you’d think they were soldiers.

 

The thing reporters have in common with soldiers is this: Rooting around in other people’s lives in order to embarrass and hurt them is, like killing, both dis­reputable and wrong; and yet in limited cases and under strict rules of engagement, it can occasionally serve the greater good.

 

The philosophers have given us just-war theory, and for a time the empty turtlenecks in the nation’s J-schools gave us something not half as thoughtful or humane, a kind of just-journalism theory. Its rickety edifice was erected in the historically anomalous era of “objective” journalism — Murrow and all that. Sure, our reportorial class still found ways to rationalize “shading nuances,” as McNeil puts it, but there were guardrails. The papers and the networks were constrained and constrainable by big, important institutions that were either apolitical or stodgily middle-of-the-road. This was a press that colored reality in center-left tones but did not render it wholly imperceptible to readers who didn’t share their assumptions.

 

Something changed. Even the pose of neutrality became intolerable to the media, which joined seemingly every other estate of power in unified disgust over the existence of Trump voters. In self-righteously granting themselves permission to call “an apple an apple,” CNN’s eye-rolling phrase, they in fact gave themselves permission to call a lot of things a lot of other things, without regard to the evidence and with no felt need to blush.

 

The week before I wrote this, CNN had to correct a story that had stood for two days saying that people’s risk of catching COVID once fully vaccinated was exponentially higher than it actually was. That was just the latest in the network’s free-for-all of fashionable left-wing COVID-trutherism, which holds that life can’t start getting back to normal even after everyone has had the shot.

 

The press played a vital role in spreading the lies about the Georgia voting law, too — which, whether it’s marginally good or marginally bad, is nevertheless marginally the one or the other, and not the second coming of the poll test. And at the same time, the press actively led the soft-focus rehabilitation of Hunter Biden even as it papered over the still-shocking reality that it had conspired with the social-media oligopoly to suppress the New York Post’s coverage of him ahead of the 2020 election.

 

And then there is 60 Minutes’ fiction about Florida governor Ron DeSantis. It is both the most laughable recent excess of our unbound press and the most genuinely worrisome. Laughable because of how obvious the misdeed was, how quickly its basic premises were dismantled, how little of substance could be mustered in the TV tabloid’s defense. Worrisome because for all the ridiculousness, 60 Minutes suffered no consequences for it and was not compelled to walk it back an inch, and because all those stodgy old institutions that in 2004 could — just barely — compel 60 Minutes to admit that Dan Rather had been had (or that Rather had had them) reacted to the DeSantis calumny with conspicuous silence.

 

It’s too soon to tell whether this late movement is pendular, and we’ll swing back from excess toward the middle, or terminal, the whole contraption having broken down for good. The truly scary thing is that it might be up to the “jackals” themselves just how far this thing goes. Take a good look around. It sure doesn’t seem like there’s anyone coming to save us.