Summary: Journalists manipulates our politics to a degree beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. Recent events show their hypocrisy and self-interest, wielded for partisan purposes. It’s just another American institution in rapid decay.
By James Bowman at his website, 29 May 2019.
President Trump’s delegation of the power to declassify documents related to the origins of the Russian “collusion” story to Attorney General Barr has got the New York Times worried. What if, asked reporters Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, blundering Mr Barr endangers the CIA’s secret sources of information by revealing their identities?
“Though the ultimate power to declassify documents rests with the president, Mr. Trump’s delegation of that power to Mr. Barr effectively stripped [Dan] Coats and the C.I.A. of control of their secrets. The move could endanger the agencies’ ability to keep the identities of their sources secret, former intelligence officials said.”
Well, sure. You can understand why that might be a concern. But could this be the same New York Times which, only the day before, was equally worried about the threat to First Amendment freedoms posed by the indictment of Julian Assange? And hadn’t Mr Assange, with the help of Bradley (as he then was) Manning done precisely what they claimed to be afraid Mr Barr would do in publishing the names of secret intelligence sources? “For the purposes of press freedoms, what matters is not who counts as a journalist,” wrote reporter Charlie Savage,
“… but whether journalistic activities – whether performed by a ‘journalist’ or anyone else – can be crimes in America. The Trump administration’s move could establish a precedent used to criminalize future acts of national-security journalism, said Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. ‘The charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,’ he said. ‘The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.’”
Indeed, so strongly did the Times feel about the matter that it didn’t just rely on Mr Savage and his alter ego, Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, to express its alarm but actually ran an editorial in its own voice claiming that “Julian Assange’s Indictment Aims at the Heart of the First Amendment.”
Why, you might almost suppose that the paper was claiming that the job of fingering the nation’s intelligence sources should be reserved for itself and others engaged in “journalistic activities” while being kept away from the President and the Attorney General of the United States. Of course it would be naive of me not to note that, in The New York Times’s view, there are secrets and there are secrets, and the secrets they are worried Mr Barr might declassify are not really the identities of American intelligence sources but those of the American intelligence officials with whom they themselves colluded as part of an effort to sell the country on the bogus narrative of Mr Trump’s collusion with Russia.
Hence the equally bogus concern with Mr Trump’s alleged attempt to politicize intelligence services that have now been revealed as already politicized by his predecessor, if not even earlier.
Yet over and above the need to protect their Russiagate “narrative,” already tottering if not completely discredited in the eyes of all but the president’s most determined enemies, there is also the need to protect the paper’s own business model, which is so largely based on its being the preferred venue for leaked secrets and contraband information whose value to them depends on its remaining secret until they publish it exclusively. Since its publication of the The Pentagon Papers
Well you can hardly blame it, I guess, or not more than any other crony capitalist, for wanting to preserve its quasi-monopoly on monetizing pilfered information. But we now know that when the paper’s august editorial tribunal pronounces, as it so often has pronounced, either explicitly or by implication in recent weeks and months, that no one is above the law, it does so with a mental reservation excepting itself and other practitioners of “journalistic activities.”
It’s yet another indication that such practitioners, especially those who are not a million miles distant from Eighth Avenue, now aspire to run the country in place of its elected officials.
—————————————-
Editor’s note
For another example of the rot Bowman describes, see this excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s new book, Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
Bowman describes the decay of a vital American institution.
It is happening across our society.
For a broader explanation, see A new, dark picture of America’s future.
About James Bowman
Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002. He has also contributed to a wide range of other major papers.
Mr. Bowman is perhaps best known for his book, Honor: A History
See his collected articles at his website, including his film reviews going back to 1994.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about Info & disinfo; new media & old, about ways to reform America, about RussiaGate, and especially these …
- Important: Politics in modern America: A users’ guide for journalists and reformers.
- A nation lit only by propaganda.
- American politics is a fun parade of lies, for which we pay dearly.
- Ways to deal with those guilty of causing the fake news epidemic.
- The secret source of fake news. Its discovery will change America.
- A new year’s gift: two tools to help discover truth in the news.
- We can’t reform America without a new news media.
- James Bowman: journalism is triumphant but doomed.
About Bowman’s great book.
Honor: A History
.
By James Bowman (2006).
I strongly recommend reading this book about a lost but vital element from our culture. A sense of honor was a strength of the West from its earliest days. Now we have lost it. From the publisher…
“The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete.
“In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated.”
