Fox Business News and New York Post columnist Charlie Gasparino can speak with great authority about corporate media hypocrisy. Over the years I have repeatedly seen reporters refer to him as “conservative” or “right wing,” which in modern media functions less as description than as a warning label telling readers who should not be taken seriously. Given that Gasparino wrote a book titled Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America, it is a safe bet his views will never grace the pages of the New York Times.
Allow me to share some context about Gasparino and the media’s habit of labeling people they dislike. When I lived in New York and owned a public relations firm, I often had dinner with Gasparino when he was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Over the years he introduced me to leaders who owned minority investment banks. Gasparino was close to them and commanded their respect because he was interested in their businesses and the obstacles they faced. More than one of those leaders told me Gasparino was the only journalist who ever bothered to meet with them.
Gasparino was also supportive when other journalists dismissed me as a “flack.” One remembers things like that.
Gasparino does not mince words, and this morning on LinkedIn he posted a deliberately abrasive comment about Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who was arrested in Los Angeles on charges related to an alleged violation of federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Gasparino’s language is confrontational and intentionally provocative, but the underlying critique is worth examining because it exposes how selectively the media remembers Lemon’s career.
Gasparino wrote:
If you want a primer on the moral hypocrisy of the mainstream media just do a little content analysis on the coverage of the Don Lemon arrest. Put aside whether he should be arrested for a moment, I do not think so, but focus on the moralizing about this guy, the florid descriptions of his allegedly great career, when in fact the record shows he was and is a horrible journalist. He has never broken a news story. He offers nothing beyond trite leftism and commentary grounded in moral superiority. And then focus on his latest work of performance art, joining a group of protesters to manufacture a scene inside a church. The stunt did not tell a story. It was a staged event designed to embarrass Christians exercising constitutional rights while ignoring protesters doing what the law forbids. It makes you wonder whether the media applies a different standard to Lemon’s behavior and career. These are the same people attacking Bari Weiss every day for asking reporters to be fair.
Gasparino is on solid ground charging that the media’s retrospective portrayal of Lemon bears little resemblance to his actual record. Three years ago, People magazine published a primer detailing how Lemon became famous less for reporting the news than for being the news. Lemon generated controversy with comments that women’s soccer was less interesting than when played by men, mercilessly berating his CNN co-host Kaitlan Collins and other colleagues, and declared that women are in their prime in their twenties and thirties and maybe forties.
During the height of the pandemic, Lemon urged CNN viewers to shun people who refused to get vaccinated.
“I think we have to stop coddling people when it comes to the vaccines, saying you cannot shame them or call them stupid. Yes, they are,” Lemon said.
Stupid? Former interim FDA chief Janet Woodcock later acknowledged that some vaccine recipients experienced uncommon but serious and life changing reactions beyond those initially described by federal agencies.
Lemon was also once accused of sexual assault in a case involving salacious allegations. The accuser later withdrew the claims. Whatever one makes of that episode, controversy has long been the defining feature of Lemon’s career.
Let’s not litigate the merits of Lemon’s arrest. Of greater concern is how corporate media has framed the episode as yet another example of Donald Trump’s supposed threat to democracy and a free press. Lemon, a longtime Trump critic, has retained high profile Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, who understands how to fuel that narrative.
“This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand,” Lowell said. “Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.”
Arresting journalists is indeed worrisome. But I regard Lemon as a performer miming a journalist rather than practicing journalism. I was far more alarmed by the Obama administration’s aggressive prosecution of journalists and their sources, a record that corporate media almost never mentions when covering Trump.
According to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder directed the Department of Justice to pursue leaks with what Obama himself described as zero tolerance. In 2012, after news organizations reported on drone strikes and efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, Holder assigned two U.S. attorneys to track down journalists’ sources.
“Since I have been in office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds of leaks and speculation,” Obama said in June 2012. “If we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences. In some cases it is criminal. These are criminal acts.”
Holder’s Justice Department brought Espionage Act charges against eight people accused of leaking information to the media: Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden.
Two other senior officials, General David Petraeus and General James Cartwright, were also prosecuted in leak investigations. Both ultimately pled to lesser charges and were never indicted under the Espionage Act. Including those cases, the Obama administration pursued ten leak related prosecutions.
Genuinely troubling press freedom issues too often pass with little notice.
The corporate media paid scant attention when an Internal Revenue Service agent paid journalist Matt Taibbi a house visit shortly before Taibbi was scheduled to testify before the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government. The visit was never satisfactorily explained. It came after Taibbi had made himself persona non grata in much of the corporate media by publishing internal Twitter communications that showed how the social media platform coordinated with Biden administration officials on content moderation prior to Elon Musk acquiring the company.
Among Taibbi’s disclosures was evidence that California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff urged Twitter to ban investigative journalist Paul Sperry, who was responsible for identifying the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint triggered impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump. Even Twitter’s censors were reportedly aghast by the brazenness of Schiff’s demand and initially pushed back, saying there were no grounds to ban Sperry, but nevertheless later suspended him for roughly two years.
The media, by contrast, was consumed with alarm when Trump sued CBS News, warning darkly about the chilling implications for a free press. I have seen no comparable expressions of outrage when Saks Global Enterprises sued business journalist William Cohan and his publication, Puck, accusing Cohan of engaging in a sustained campaign of false and sensationalist reporting. Saks objected to Cohan’s reporting that the company was mismanaged and on the brink of collapse. That reporting has aged well. Saks filed for bankruptcy protection this month.
Companies suing reporters at upstart publications for critical coverage is especially worrisome, particularly for journalists who challenge fashionable narratives and lack the legal firepower of legacy outlets. Cohan is an accomplished journalist and former Wall Street banker who once served as a special correspondent for Vanity Fair back when it was a credible and essential publication.
Vanity Fair has since devolved into something far less serious. It hired Olivia Nuzzi, who reportedly concealed romantic relationships with two presidential candidates she profiled. One might expect the corporate media to avoid publicizing Nuzzi given her breaches of longstanding journalistic ethics. Instead, the New York Times rewarded Nuzzi with a lengthy and notably sympathetic feature.
The same selective moralizing appears in the press’s fixation on Bari Weiss’s leadership at CBS News. I have soured on Weiss and am embarrassed by my earlier columns portraying her as a principled champion against antisemitism. Weiss has proven herself to be primarily a champion of Bari Weiss, cashing out for millions while cultivating greater fame and influence. That said, the media’s obsessive and mean-spirited coverage of Weiss strikes me as driven less by concern for journalistic integrity and more by the industry’s pervasive antisemitism.
CBS Evening News has long ranked at the bottom of the broadcast ratings, yet I do not recall similar piety when Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews ran the network. She was promoted despite multiple employee complaints and a major internal probe alleging discrimination against white journalists. Nor was there much concern when Ciprián-Matthews fired veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, ostensibly for budget reasons, rather than possibly because Herridge was actively pursuing stories involving Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings.
America needs a credible and respected press more than ever, particularly as President Trump continues to lurch further off the deep end. Yet the media has squandered its authority with the public. Television journalists now rank only slightly above Congress in public trust surveys. That collapse happened because of the media’s dishonesty, arrogance, and disconnect from the U.S. public.
Frankly, I blame the corporate media for Trump’s emergence, his election multiple times, and his ability to get away with brazen ethical and business conflicts that are most disturbing and alarming. If the media had aggressively pursued Biden and his family’s questionable activities, perhaps the public wouldn’t dismiss Trump’s as business as usual in the Beltway. Of course, the knee-jerk response from most journalists is that Trump is far worse than Biden, thereby missing the broader point of the criticism.
Corporate media has increasingly turned itself into a cast of cartoon characters, and perhaps it is time to acknowledge the reality. Cartoons were traditionally meant to make people feel good, as I was reminded this morning while watching clips of my favorite childhood program, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, a cartoon that was ahead of its time.
The show was once banned in the Soviet Union because it featured two bumbling spies named Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale and was protested in Canada because a supporting segment called Dudley Do-Right and the Canadian Mounties was deemed offensive to Canada’s national police force.
Watching old clips this morning to distract from reading the news was oddly uplifting, a feeling rarely experienced by Americans who consume corporate media in heavy doses. It’s been decades since I last watched CBS Evening News, but if Paramount replaced the broadcast with reruns of Rocky & Bullwinkle, I’d wager there would be nary a protest from much of the American public.