By Glenn Greenwald
Monday, May 18, 2020
The New
York Times’ recently hired media columnist Ben Smith, who spent the previous
nine years as editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed as it grew into a
media behemoth, did something Sunday night that very few other U.S.
journalists would be willing to do: He published an unflinching and sometimes scathing
critique of former-MSNBC-daytime-host-turned-widely-beloved-New-Yorker-star-investigative-reporter Ronan
Farrow.
Farrow’s
work in exposing Harvey Weinstein as a serial predator earned him celebrity,
wealth, adoration in liberal circles, and — along with two New York Times
reporters whose work on Weinstein was crucial — a Pulitzer Prize. His multiple
appearances on late-night entertainment talk shows, his family lineage (he is
the son of actors Mia Farrow and Woody Allen or, according to his mother, perhaps Frank Sinatra), his
bestselling book, his New Yorker perch as star reporter, his marital engagement
to former Obama speechwriter and current Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett,
and his telegenic appearance have all cemented Farrow’s status as one of the
country’s most untouchable and lucrative media commodities. Few journalists
have the stature or courage to criticize his work, especially in the pages of
the New York Times, but Smith did exactly that in paragraph after paragraph of
a long critique that seriously called into question the reliability and even
integrity of Farrow’s reportorial methods.
Smith’s
critique of Farrow’s journalism raises complex questions that are not easy to
assess, and that critique is already receiving its own criticisms. Much of that particular debate
depends on how one views the unique journalistic challenges of #MeToo reporting
(though one of the most embarrassing mistakes Smith flags was unrelated to
sexual assault claims: Farrow’s breathless and ultimately misguided
allegation that
the Trump administration destroyed records involving former Trump lawyer
Michael Cohen, a “blockbuster” revelation mindlessly and predictably hyped
by MSNBC’s prime-time on-air personalities). I admire much of what Farrow has
done over the last several years in battling corporate media outlets,
particularly NBC and MSNBC, to get stories about powerful factions
published, but I’ll leave the assessments of Smith’s specific critique of
Farrow’s reporting to others more steeped in the specifics of those debates.
What is
particularly valuable about Smith’s article is its perfect description of a
media sickness borne of the Trump era that is rapidly corroding
journalistic integrity and justifiably destroying trust in news outlets. Smith
aptly dubs this pathology “resistance journalism,” by which he means that
journalists are now not only free, but encouraged and incentivized,
to say or publish anything they want, no matter how reckless and fact-free,
provided their target is someone sufficiently disliked in mainstream liberal
media venues and/or on social media:
[Farrow’s] work, though, reveals the weakness of a
kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That
if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce
damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices,
the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments
than essential journalistic imperatives.
That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment
when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.
In
assailing Farrow for peddling unproven conspiracy theories, Smith argues
that such journalistic practices are particularly dangerous in an era where
conspiracy theories are increasingly commonplace. Yet unlike most journalists
with a mainstream platform, Smith emphasizes that conspiracy theories are
commonly used not only by Trump and his movement (conspiracy theories which are
quickly debunked by most of the mainstream media), but are also
commonly deployed by Trump’s enemies, whose reliance on conspiracy
theories is virtually never denounced by journalists because mainstream news
outlets themselves play a key role in peddling them:
We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous
untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies —
that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and
unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best
reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with
clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what
we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his
publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.
***
Ever
since Donald Trump was elected, and one could argue even in the months leading
up to his election, journalistic standards have been consciously jettisoned
when it comes to reporting on public figures who, in Smith’s words, are
“most disliked by the loudest voices,” particularly when such reporting
“swim[s] ably along with the tides of social media.” Put another way: As long
the targets of one’s conspiracy theories and attacks are regarded as villains
by the guardians of mainstream liberal social media circles, journalists reap
endless career rewards for publishing unvetted and unproven — even false —
attacks on such people, while never suffering any negative consequences when
their stories are exposed as shabby frauds.
It is
this “resistance journalism” sickness that caused U.S. politics to be drowned
for three years in little other than salacious and fact-free conspiracy
theories about Trump and his family members and closest associates: Putin
had infiltrated and taken over the U.S.
government through
sexual and financial blackmail leverage over Trump and used it to dictate U.S.
policy; Trump officials conspired with the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016
election; Russia was attacking the U.S. by hacking its electricity grid, recruiting journalists to serve as clandestine
Kremlin messengers, and
plotting to cut off heat to Americans in winter. Mainstream media debacles —
all in service of promoting the same set of conspiracy theories against Trump —
are literally too numerous to count, requiring one to select the worst offenses as
illustrative.
In March
of last year, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi — writing under the headline “It’s official: Russiagate is
this generation’s WMD” — compared the prevailing media climate since 2016 to
that which prevailed in 2002 and 2003 regarding the invasion of Iraq and the
so-called war on terror: little to no dissent permitted, skeptics of
media-endorsed orthodoxies shunned and excluded, and worst of all, the very
journalists who were most wrong in peddling false conspiracy theories were
exactly those who ended up most rewarded on the ground that
even though they spread falsehoods, they did so for the right cause.
Under
that warped rubric — in which spreading falsehoods is commendable as
long as it was done to harm the evildoers — the New Yorker’s Jeffrey
Goldberg, one of the most damaging endorsers of false conspiracy theories about Iraq, rose to become
editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, while two of the most deceitful Bush-era
neocons, Bush/Cheney speechwriter David Frum and supreme propagandist Bill
Kristol, have reprised their role as leading propagandists and conspiracy
theorists — only this time aimed against the GOP president instead of on his
behalf — and thus have become beloved liberal media icons. The
communications director for both the Bush/Cheney campaign and its White House,
Nicole Wallace, is one of the most popular liberal cable hosts from her MSNBC
perch.
Exactly
the same journalism-destroying dynamic is driving the
post-Russiagate media landscape. There is literally no accountability for
the journalists and news outlets that spread falsehoods in their pages, on
their airwaves, and through their viral social media postings. The Washington
Post’s media columnist Erik Wemple has been one of the very few
journalists devoted to holding these myth-peddlers accountable — recounting how
one of the most reckless Russigate conspiracy maximialists, Natasha
Bertrand, became an overnight social media and
journalism star by
peddling discredited conspiratorial trash (she was notably hired by Jeffrey
Goldberg to cover Russigate for The Atlantic); MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spent three years hyping
conspiratorial junk with
no need even to retract any of it; and Mother Jones’ David Corn played a crucial, decisively un-journalistic
role in
mainstreaming the lies of the Steele dossier all with zero effect on his
journalistic status, other than to enrich him through a predictably bestselling
book that peddled those unhinged conspiracies further.
Wemple’s post-Russiagate series has established him as a
commendable, often-lone voice trying — with futility — to bring some
accountability to U.S. journalism for the systemic media failures of the past
three years. The reason that’s futile is exactly what Smith described in his
column on Farrow: In “resistance journalism,” facts and truth are completely
dispensable — indeed, dispensing with them is rewarded —
provided “reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce
damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices.”
That
describes perfectly the journalists who were defined, and enriched, by years of
Russiagate deceit masquerading as reporting. By far the easiest path to
career success over the last three years — booming ratings, lucrative book
sales, exploding social media followings, career rehabilitation even for the most
discredited D.C. operatives — was to feed establishment liberals an
endless diet of fearmongering and inflammatory conspiracies about Drumpf
and his White House. Whether it was true or supported by basic journalistic
standards was completely irrelevant. Responsible reporting was simply was not a
metric used to assess its worth.
It was
one thing for activists, charlatans, and con artists to exploit fears of Trump
for material gain: that, by definition, is what such people do. But it was
another thing entirely for journalists to succumb to all the
low-hanging career rewards available to them by throwing all journalistic
standards into the trash bin in exchange for a star turn as a #Resistance
icon. That, as Smith aptly describes, is what “Resistance
Journalism” is, and it’s hard to identify anything more toxic to our public
discourse.
***
Perhaps
the single most shameful and journalism-destroying episode in all of this — an
obviously difficult title to bestow — was when a national security blogger,
Marcy Wheeler, violated long-standing norms and ethical standards of journalism
by announcing in 2018 that she had voluntarily turned in her
own source to the FBI, claiming she did so because her still-unnamed
source “had played a significant role in the Russian election attack on the US”
and because her life was endangered by her brave decision to stop being a
blogger and become an armchair cop by pleading with the FBI and the
Mueller team to let her work with them. In her blog post announcing what
she did, she claimed she was going public with her treachery because her life
was in danger, and this way everyone would know the real reason if “someone
releases stolen information about me or knocks me off tomorrow.”
To say
that Wheeler’s actions are a grotesque violation of journalistic ethics is
to radically understate the case. Journalists are expected to protect their
sources’ identities from the FBI even if they receive a subpoena and a court
order compelling its disclosure; we’re expected to go to prison before
we comply with FBI attempts to uncover our source’s identity. But here, the FBI
did not try to compel Wheeler to tell them anything; they displayed no interest
in her as she desperately tried to chase them down.
By all
appearances, Wheeler had to beg the FBI to pay attention to her because they
treated her like the sort of unstable, unhinged, unwell, delusional
obsessive who, believing they have uncovered some intricate conspiracy,
relentlessly harass and bombard journalists with their bizarre theories
until they finally prattle to themselves for all of eternity in
the spam filter of our email inboxes. The claim that she was in
possession of some sort of explosive and damning information that would blow
the Mueller investigation wide open was laughable. In her post,
she claimed she “always planned to disclose this when this person’s
role was publicly revealed,” but to date — almost two years later — she
has never revealed “this person’s” identity because, from all appearances, the
Mueller report never relied on Wheeler’s intrepid reporting or
her supposedly red-hot secrets.
Like so
many other Russiagate obsessives who turned into social media and
MSNBC/CNN #Resistance stars, Wheeler was living a wild, self-serving
fantasy, a Cold War Tom Clancy suspense film that she invented in her head and
then cast herself as the heroine: a crusading investigative dot-connecter uncovering
dangerous, hidden conspiracies perpetrated by dangerous, hidden Cold War-style
villains (Putin) to the point where her own life was endangered by her bravery.
It was a sad joke, a depressing spectacle of psycho-drama, but one that could
have had grave consequences for the person she voluntarily ratted out to the
FBI. Whatever else is true, this episode inflicted grave damage on
American journalism by having mainstream, Russia-obsessed journalists
not denounce her for her egregious violation of journalistic ethics
but celebrate her for turning journalism on its head.
Why?
Because, as Smith said in his Farrow article, she was “swim[ing] ably along
with the tides of social media and produc[ing] damaging reporting about public
figures most disliked by the loudest voices” and thus “the old rules of
fairness and open-mindedness [were] more like impediments than essential
journalistic imperatives.” Margaret Sullivan, the former New York Times
public editor and now the Washington Post’s otherwise reliably commendable
media reporter, celebrated Wheeler’s bizarre behavior under the headline: “A
journalist’s conscience leads her to reveal her source to the FBI.”
Despite
acknowledging that “in their reporting, journalists talk to criminals all the
time and don’t turn them in” and that “it’s pretty much an inviolable rule of
journalism: Protect your sources,” Sullivan heralded Wheeler’s
ethically repugnant and journalism-eroding violation of those principles. “It’s
not hard to see that her decision was a careful and principled one,” Sullivan
proclaimed.
She even
endorsed Wheeler’s cringe-inducing, self-glorifying claims about her life being
endangered by invoking long-standard Cold War clichés about the treachery
of the Russkies (“Overly dramatic? Not really. The Russians do have a
penchant for disposing of people they find threatening.”). The English language
is insufficient to convey the madness required to believe that the Kremlin
wanted to kill Marcy Wheeler because her blogging was getting Too Close to
The Truth, but in the fevered swamps of resistance journalism, literally no
claim was too unhinged to be embraced provided that it fed the social media
#Resistance masses.
Sullivan’s
article quoted no critics of Wheeler’s incredibly
controversial behavior — no need to: She was on the right side of social media reaction.
And Sullivan never bothered to return to wonder why her prediction — “Wheeler
hasn’t named the source publicly, though his name may soon be known to all who
are following the Mueller investigation” — never materialized. Both CNN and, incredibly, the Columbia Journalism Review published similarly sympathetic
accounts of Wheeler’s desperate attempts to turn over her source to the
FBI and then cosplay as though she were some sort of insider in the Mueller
investigation.
***
The most
menacing attribute of what Smith calls “Resistance Journalism” is that it
permits and tolerates no dissent and questioning: perhaps the single most
destructive path journalism can take. It has been well-documented that MSNBC
and CNN spent three years peddling all sorts of ultimately discredited
Russiagate conspiracy theories by excluding from their airwaves anyone who
dissented from or even questioned those conspiracies. Instead, they relied upon
an increasingly homogenized army of former security state agents
from the CIA, FBI, and NSA to propound, in unison, all sorts of claims about
Trump and Russia that turned out to be false, and peppered their panels of
“analysts” with journalists whose career skyrocketed exclusively by
pushing maximalist Russiagate claims, often by relying on the same
intelligence officials these cable outlets sat them next to.
This
trend — whereby diversity of opinion and dissent from orthodoxies are excluded
from media discourse — is worsening rapidly due to two major factors. The first
is that cable news programs are constructed to feed their audiences only
self-affirming narratives that vindicate partisan loyalties. One liberal cable
host told me that they receive ratings not for each show but for each
segment, and they can see the ratings drop off — the remotes clicking away
— if they put on the air anyone who criticizes the party to which that outlet
is devoted (Democrats in the case of MSNBC and CNN, the GOP in the case of
Fox).
But
there’s another more recent and probably more dissent-quashing development: the
disappearance of media jobs. Mass layoffs were already common in online
journalism and local newspapers prior to the coronavirus
pandemic, and have
now turned into an industrywide massacre. With young journalists watching
jobs disappearing en masse, the last thing they are going to want to do is
question or challenge prevailing orthodoxies within their news outlet or, using
Smith’s “Resistance Journalism” formulation, to “swim against the tides of
social media” or question the evidence amassed against those “most disliked by
the loudest voices.”
Affirming
those orthodoxies can be career-promoting, while questioning them can be
job-destroying. Consider the powerful incentives journalists face in an
industry where jobs are disappearing so rapidly one can barely keep count.
During Russiagate, I often heard from young journalists at large media outlets
who expressed varying degrees of support for and agreement with the skepticism
which I and a handful of other journalists were expressing, but they felt
constrained to do so themselves, for good reason. They watched the
reprisals and shunning doled out even to journalists with a long record of
journalistic accomplishments and job security for the crime of Russiagate
skepticism, such as Taibbi (similar to the way MSNBC fired Phil Donahue in 2002 for opposing the
invasion of Iraq), and they know journalists with less stature and security
than Taibbi could not risk incurring that collective wrath.
All
professions and institutions suffer when a herd, groupthink mentality and the
banning of dissent prevail. But few activities are corroded from such a
pathology more than journalism is, which has as its core function skepticism
and questioning of pieties. Journalism quickly transforms into a sickly, limp
version of itself when it itself wages war on the virtues of dissent and
airing a wide range of perspectives.
I do not
know how valid are Smith’s critiques of Farrow’s journalism. But what I know
for certain is that Smith’s broader diagnosis of “Resistance Journalism”
is dead-on, and the harms it is causing are deep and enduring. When
journalists know they will thrive by affirming pleasing falsehoods, and suffer
when they insist on unpopular truths, journalism not only loses its societal
value but becomes just another instrument for societal manipulation, deceit,
and coercion.
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