May 18 2020, 12:01 p.m.
by Glenn Greenwald
THE NEW YORK TIMES’ recently hired media columnist Ben Smith, who spent the
previous nine years as editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News 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.
Adam H. Johnson
✔
@adamjohnsonNYC
Glenn Beck 2009 + Maddow 2019 is the greatest crossover event in history
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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.
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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.
Glenn Greenwald
✔
@ggreenwald
That NBC & MSNBC hired as a "news analyst" John Brennan - who ran the CIA when
the Trump/Russia investigation began & was a key player in the news he was
shaping as a paid colleague of their reporters - is a huge ethical breach. And
it produced this:
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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.