Nonetheless, CNN’s President, Jeffrey Zucker, self-righteously declared: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did. A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”38 But CNN repeatedly reported not facts but fiction.
Indeed, the media wagons began to circle, again, as a growing number of media executives, journalists, and commentators shamelessly pushed back against their critics. For example, on March 25, 2019, while appearing on the View, ABC News chief White House correspondent John Karl asserted that “. . . I think there are some questions that need to be asked. I think there were significant mistakes in some of the reporting. But I also think this is a huge story. This is the most significant investigation of a president since Watergate. The allegations couldn’t have been more high-stakes, the idea of a foreign power potentially colluding with a presidential candidate. Now, it turned out that was not the case, but there were significant steps along the way. There was a major criminal investigation here. How could reporters not cover that and cover it aggressively and consistently?”39
Perhaps the best answer was provided by Fox News senior political analyst and former ABC News chief White House correspondent Brit Hume. On March 25, 2019, during an appearance on Fox, Hume declared: “If you think about it . . . this investigation actually goes back to about the middle of 2016, so it’s been going on for quite a long time and this endless speculation about it and indeed the accusations about it that came out of many mouths on cable television and in the public prints, the list of people who got it wrong is really quite extensive. And, you know, to include many news organizations that got the prospect of Donald Trump being elected in the first place badly wrong and seemed not to learn very much from that. One hopes, and expects, perhaps, that after this debacle, and that’s exactly what it is, in the worst journalistic debacle of my lifetime, that there’ll be some serious soul searching. Unfortunately . . . I’m not seeing a lot of it. I noticed that a couple of our cable news competitors have moved on, kind of, seamlessly on to speculation about obstruction of justice now, following as they so often seem to do, the Democratic party script.”40
Having learned nothing, and not interested in changing course, the Democratic party-press looks for new opportunities to create pseudo-events, as one event spawns another event. Again, as Boorstin stated, these events become “ritualized, with a protocol and rigidity all [their] own.”41 Indeed, the media turned to questioning Attorney General Barr’s motives, running stories based on anonymous sources about dissension on the special counsel’s staff, treating a PR stunt—a legally baseless subpoena issued by House Democrats for an unredacted copy of the Mueller report—as breaking news, etc.
More broadly, the media inundate the public with “news” stories based on claims, speculation, and spin from “anonymous sources,” or “unattributed sources,” or “leaks” that typically support and promote their narrative. Nearly entire books critical of the president and his management style, including by investigative journalist Bob Woodward, rely heavily on anonymous sources. Frequently the books and their authors are themselves treated as newsworthy and receive considerable subsequent “news” coverage. Meanwhile, the public is unable to rationally judge the authenticity of these reports and books because they are unable to take the measure of those who are supposedly providing the information to the journalists and authors, and whether they are reliable, disgruntled, have an ax to grind, etc.
In fact, on September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an opinion-piece authored by “Anonymous” titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration—I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart part of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The Times explained its extraordinary decision, stating: “The Times is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.”42
Here is a sample of the anonymous author’s assertions:
• The dilemma—which [the president] does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
• But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
• The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
• Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until—one way or another—it’s over.
• The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.43
From the moment the Times published the op-ed and for weeks thereafter, this single individual’s unsigned opinion-essay, disputed on the substance and on the record by several current and former Trump White House officials, was the subject of extravagant, baying “news” coverage. This is exactly what the Times editors had hoped for, and the rest of the Democratic party-press was more than happy to oblige.
A pseudo-event gone wild.
Boorstin described another pseudo-event spectacle—the making of the newsman’s public persona. “At first it may seem strange that the rise of pseudo-events has coincided with the growth of the professional ethic which obliges newsmen to omit editorializing and personal judgments from their news accounts. But now it is in the making of pseudo-events that newsmen find ample scope for their individuality and creative imagination.”44
CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, fits this characterization well. On November 7, 2018, the nation witnessed Acosta’s attempt to hijack the presidential press conference and use his position in the press to argue with President Trump about the thousands of illegal aliens headed in an organized march to the southern U.S. border. Acosta did not ask actual questions. He made assertions in the form of questions, and he did so repeatedly, refusing to give up the microphone. He was rude to the president and his press colleagues. Moreover, when arguing with the president, he was wrong on essential facts.
At the outset, Acosta provocatively confronted the president:
“I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign in the midterms that . . .”
President Barack Obama was never addressed this way by the Democratic party-press at any of his presidential press conferences. In fact, there is no reason for any journalist to behave this way with a president during a press conference. Just ask the question respectfully.
Acosta then essentially accused the president of lying and race-baiting:
ACOSTA: . . . that this caravan was an invasion. As you know, Mr. President . . .
TRUMP: I consider it to be an invasion.
ACOSTA: As you know, Mr. President, the caravan was not an invasion. It’s a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S. And . . .
TRUMP: Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate it.
ACOSTA: . . . why did you characterize it as such?
TRUMP: Because I consider it an invasion. You and I have a difference of opinion.
ACOSTA: But do you think that you demonized immigrants in thi
s election to try to keep . . .45
At the time, Acosta had not covered, in person, the illegal-alien march to the border; their arrival later in Tijuana and the turmoil that transpired there;46 nor did he investigate the organizations and funding sources for the march.47 Acosta knew no more than the public and less than those who had actually done real reporting. Nor did Acosta have the information provided to the presidents on a daily basis by the Department of Homeland Security.
By his insolent and theatrical conduct at this presidential press conference, which is consistent with his conduct at most press conferences, he created a pseudo-event starring himself, which neither informed nor benefited the public, but resulted in subsequent pseudo-events when his press pass was pulled by the White House and CNN went to court to retrieve it with the support of most of the other media. Moreover, recent events on the border, with unprecedented numbers of migrants pouring into the United States, overwhelming law enforcement, administrative courts, and detention centers, underscores just how wrong Acosta was.
Acosta’s antics have also made him a favorite on the late-night show circuit, where he is treated like a Hollywood celebrity.
Acosta then secured a book deal with HarperCollins Publishers. He was paid to dish on the president and his staff, collecting information and writing notes for his book while reporting on the White House for CNN. Is there any doubt that Acosta’s confrontations and tone with the president and his staff were, at least in part, premeditated, for the purpose of providing fodder for his book?
Is that how news reporting is supposed to work?
How does this benefit or serve the American people?
The Acosta book’s title is The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America. According to the publisher’s press release, it provides “never before revealed stories of his White House’s rejection of truth, while laying out the stakes for how Trump’s hostility toward facts poses an unprecedented threat to our democracy.”48
In further hype for Acosta’s book, the press release exclaimed: “The president and his team, not to mention some of his supporters, have attempted to silence the press in ways we have never seen before. As just about everybody has seen, I witnessed this firsthand. As difficult as that challenge may be for the free press in America, we must continue to do our jobs and report the news. The truth is worth the fight.”49
Acosta is illustrative of a media mentality, filled with self-promotion and near-hysterical claims and spin, intended to draw attention to one’s self, to highlight a particular event or agenda, and to make news. Even the press release is laced with propaganda and preposterous allegations, including Acosta’s self-aggrandizing assertion that there have been “unprecedented” attempts by the Trump administration to silence the press. [See chapter 4, which addresses such propaganda.]
What, therefore, have the modern media and present-day journalists created? Boorstin argued that having discarded the journalism of objective truth, “[i]n a democratic society like ours—and more especially in a highly literate, wealthy, competitive, and technologically advanced society—the people can be flooded by pseudo-events. For us, freedom of speech and of the press and of broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-events. Competing politicians, competing newsmen, and competing news media contend in this creation. They vie with one another in offering attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions. Our ‘free market place of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them. When we speak of ‘informing’ the people this is what we really mean.”50
Consequently, Boorstin maintained, we spend much of our waking hours living in a world of unreality fashioned by, among others, the press: “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”51
Boorstin astutely advised: “What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. To discover our illusion will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind.”52
Good advice, but is there any indication that the Democratic party-press will accept it? Not yet. They continue on a destructive course.
Indeed, when their reporting is challenged, these same media groups and reporters respond to criticism by insisting it is they who are the guardians of freedom of the press. “That was once an institution preserved in the interest of the community,” wrote Boorstin. “Now it is often a euphemism for the prerogative of reporters to produce their synthetic commodity.”53
In addition to the routine use of propaganda and the dissemination of pseudo-events, the media also engage in another form of manipulation: self-censorship and outright suppression of information or events to advance a narrative or kill actual news. Two particularly hideous examples of this dishonest practice involved the real-time evidence in the 1930s and 1940s of the Nazis’ liquidation of Europe’s Jews and in the early 1930s of the Stalin regime’s starvation of the Ukrainians.
As hard as it may be to believe, most of the American press, led by the New York Times, consciously downplayed or ignored the Holocaust and the Holodomor. Therefore, for some time most Americans were oblivious to what was taking place.
SIX
* * *
THE NEW YORK TIMES BETRAYS MILLIONS
BRITISH JOURNALIST CLAUD Cockburn once wrote: “All stories are written backwards—they are supposed to begin with the facts and develop from there, but in reality, they begin with a journalist’s point of view, a conception, and it is the point of view from which the facts are subsequently organized. . . .”1
And so it was when it came to reporting about the Holocaust, where, among other things, journalistic groupthink and other professional malpractices—suppression and outright self-censorship—came together to create a monumental betrayal of millions of European Jews and the American public, and in what was the greatest example of American media recklessness and deceit ever perpetrated by the press.
In 1984, Dr. David S. Wyman, in his book The Abandonment of the Jews, explained that “[o]ne reason ordinary Americans were not more responsive to the plight of European Jews [during the Holocaust] was that very many (probably a majority) were unaware of Hitler’s extermination program until well into 1944 or later. The information was not readily available to the public, because the mass media treated the systematic murder of millions of Jews as though it were minor news.”2
Yet, on November 24, 1942, unambiguous evidence of the Nazis’ ongoing extermination of European Jews was made publicly available, but was largely ignored by the media. “Lack of solid press coverage in the weeks immediately following [November 24] . . . muffled the historic news at the outset.”3
In fact, newly released documents prove that the Allied powers knew firsthand of the mass murder of Jews by December 1942. As first reported on April 18, 2017, by the Independent, a British newspaper: “Newly accessed material from the United Nations—not seen for around 70 years—shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been mur
dered and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger. . . . In late December 1942 . . . UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament: ‘The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people.’ ”4
In the United States, Wyman asserted, “two or three clear statements from Franklin Roosevelt would have moved this news into public view and kept it there for some time. But the president was not so inclined, nor did Washington reporters press him. In retrospect, it seems almost unbelievable that in Roosevelt’s press conferences (normally held twice a week) not one word was spoken about the mass killing of European Jews until almost a year later. The President had nothing to say to reporters on the matter, and no correspondent asked him about it.”5
Roosevelt and his State Department—which was populated with several individuals who were, at a minimum, “indifferent” to the fate of the European Jews and others who were flat-out anti-Semites—did not want to draw attention to the Holocaust. Roosevelt was assisted in this policy by the American press. For most of the war, news outlets and journalists censored information about the ongoing extermination of Jews or hid the information in infrequent and sporadic reports among voluminous other news stories. “Most newspapers printed very little about the Holocaust,” wrote Wyman, “even though extensive information on it [eventually] reached their desks from news services (AP, UP, and others) and from their own correspondents. . . .”6
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