When I left journalism to go into PR decades ago, there was a stigma for making such a move. My media friends and former colleagues mocked me for “selling out” and “going to the dark side.” In those days, there was a healthy divide between journalism and PR, and to most reporters becoming a “flack” was almost criminal. There was good reason for such disdain.
U.S. journalists were once imbued with a certain humility. Indeed, many mocked themselves as “ink-stained wretches” because most serious journalists worked at newspapers where the ink would rub off on a reader’s hands. Journalism didn’t pay nearly as well as PR, but the rewards were far greater for those who found satisfaction holding powerful people accountable and defending victims who were wronged by them.
“To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” was once the motto most working journalists lived by.
The line between journalism and PR has blurred to such a degree that it can be argued it no longer exists. America’s mainstream journalists have become glorified stenographers, transcribing the messages points given to them by influential political and business leaders or their PR people and then serving it up as news.
President Joe Biden announced today that he wouldn’t stand for reelection, an acknowledgement that he lacks the mental acuity to stand for reelection. The announcement comes on the one-month anniversary of this New York Times story, co-authored by a reporter specializing in “misinformation,” assuring readers that videos capturing President Biden’s decline were misleading and lacking “context.” The story reaffirmed the narrative peddled by White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre four days earlier dismissing videos of Biden looking disoriented and confused as “manipulated and deep fakes.”
Since the presidential debate where Biden’s decline was abundantly clear, the Times was at the media forefront publishing articles and commentaries calling for him to step aside because of his impaired mental acuity. Maureen Dowd, one of three Times columnists calling for Biden to step down, shamelessly admitted that he “has clearly been declining for the last couple of years.”
Readers of the Times and other legacy establishment publications live in an Orwellian world where they are fed one narrative, which is subsequently inserted “down the memory hole” and replaced with a new narrative. Sometimes evidence of the earlier narrative remains, but they’re still told that’s not true.
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a much-maligned essay for the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which originally argued that 1619 was America’s true founding because that’s when the first slaves were brought to America. After leading historians derided the commentary as being inaccurate and flawed, the Times quietly removed the 1619 “true founding” claim and made other stealth revisions. Hannah-Jones subsequently denied ever claiming that 1619 was America’s true founding, despite a since deleted tweet making clear she did.
It’s been a week since Donald Trump was nearly murdered, supposedly by a 20-year-old kid from Pennsylvania that no one, including the FBI, seems to know all that much about. It’s appalling how little information the establishment media has uncovered, particularly given the feigned concern for protecting America’s democracy. One might expect that the near killing of a popular presidential candidate months before his possible election would spark a flurry of investigative reporting.
In fact, much of what was initially reported has seen been debunked or simply didn’t make sense. As an example, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s near murder, there were reports his campaign had requested additional Secret Security because of heightened security threats.
“There’s an untrue assertion that a member of the former president’s team requested additional resources and that those were rebuffed,” Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said last Sunday, the day after the shooting.
Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, said the following day that the accusation was “a baseless and irresponsible statement and it is one that is unequivocally false.”
Really?
The Washington Post on Saturday reported that top officials at the U.S. Secret Service indeed repeatedly denied requests for additional resources and personnel sought by Trump’s security detail in the two years leading up to his attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania, citing four people familiar with the requests.
FBI officials reportedly told senators last Wednesday that Thomas Matthews Crooks, Trump’s alleged shooter, posted on the Steam gaming site that, “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.” It has since been reported that the Steam account was faked.
Duping America’s establishment media is as easy as fooling the FBI. After the Trump near assassination debacle, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle heeded the counsel of some likely high paid crisis experts and opted to “get ahead of the story” by giving interviews to some lightweight reporters. I can assure you that Cheatle was instructed to assume full responsibility and declare “the buck stops with me.”
Dozens of media outlets thought that it was newsworthy that as head of the Secret Service, Cheatle admitted that she was ultimately responsible for what happens under her watch.
If Cheatle really believed the buck stopped with her, she would have immediately resigned. Credit Breitbart, a publication the legacy media says isn’t credible, for its more critical headline.
In her media interviews, Cheatle made the incredulous claim that Secret Service snipers weren’t positioned on a roof with a clear shot at Trump because it was “sloped.”
Media photos of Trump’s Pennsylvania event show police snipers were posted on another sloped roof, although admittedly the photos haven’t yet been verified by the New York Times’ misinformation reporter. My house has a sloped roof, and recently I had two repair persons up there doing significant upgrades and a water test, which would have made the work rather treacherous. They managed just fine.
Fortunately for Cheatle and Mayorkas, Biden announced today that he wouldn’t run for reelection, despite his repeated insistence he wouldn’t step aside because he was the best person to defeat Trump. Vice president Kamala Harris is expected to be the nominee.
If that happens, rest assured the New York Times and the establishment media in the next few weeks will be cranking out narratives about how Harris’ candidacy is “historic” because she is the first woman of color and Asian descent to run for president. You’ll be hearing lots about Harris’ hard-won struggles to advance in a male dominated world and all the racism and sexism she had to overcome to be the exemplary role model and inspiration she is today
If you don’t agree, well, then you, too, are sexist and racist.
As I was writing this post, the Times already posted the first installment of its new Kamala Harris narrative. As reported by Jazmine Ulloa, who covers national politics:
The news of Ms. Harris’s potential candidacy electrified the network of organizations and members who have pushed for increasing the ranks of women in politics and have prepared to support her. Ms. Harris, they said, had substantial leadership experience and offered to be a powerful voice at a time when democracy and women’s rights are under assault.
None of the Harris narrative is true, as I warned readers of this blog four years ago. In fact, Ulloa’s reporting is inconsistent with this Times story from February of last year.
Here’s some excerpts destined for the memory hole.
The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
Through much of the fall, a quiet panic set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term. Most Democrats interviewed, who insisted on anonymity to avoid alienating the White House, said flatly that they did not think Ms. Harris could win the presidency in 2024. Some said the party’s biggest challenge would be finding a way to sideline her without inflaming key Democratic constituencies that would take offense.
George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair, and his faded tombstone simply says, “Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born 25 June 1903, died 21 January 1950.” I’d gladly contribute to replace the tombstone with this inscription: “I warned you!”