Tag: journalism

The Historic Collapse of Journalism

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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Smollett Testifies CNN’s Lemon Warned Him Police Were Suspicious Over Alleged FAKE Racist Attack

Days after CNN fired Chris Cuomo for abusing his position to help feed information to his sex pest accused brother, it appears that another host, Don Lemon, could become the centre of another journalistic ethics scandal.

Reports indicate that Lemon was pinpointed by Empire star Jussie Smollett who claimed in court that he received texts from the CNN host warning him that police believed Smollett had faked his own attack in February 2019.

Smollett was indicted by a grand jury for staging a racist violent attack on himself and blaming it on Trump supporters.

Witnesses inside the courtroom revealed the details of the testimony.

The Daily Mail reports that the details about Lemon were stricken from the record, writing “Testifying in court on Monday, Smollett, 39, claimed he had been in contact with CNN’s Don Lemon during the early stages of the CPD investigation.”

The report adds that “In a remark that was presented and then struck from the record, he said things began to seem off when he received a text message from Lemon claiming the Chicago police had reached out to him to say they didn’t believe Smollett. “

Don Lemon discussed the case Monday night on his show with CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez (he who uttered the infamous line “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) but both failed to mention that Lemon’s own name had been brought up by Smollett during the hearing.

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Too good to fact-check? Academic journal publishes hoax on conservative takeover of higher ed

Aprestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

They didn’t check whether the conservative foundations named as active funders of higher education actually existed. The “Randy Eller Foundation” is made up, while the Olin Foundation shut down in 2005.

The author who goes by Owens told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the journal didn’t even ask to see their data: “Every page has some glaring errors.”

The authors’ stated names provide a clue when spelled as an acronym: “SOKAL III.” That indicates this is the second successful hoodwink tracing its inspiration to physicist Alan Sokal’s famous parody of leftist “gibberish” in the journal Social Text in 1996.

“We wanted to improve over previous hoaxes by publishing in what was supposed to be a reputable journal,” Owens wrote in an email to Just the News. 

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‘This is obscene’: LinkedIn now censoring U.S. journos on orders from China

Axios’ Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian shared this email she received from the U.S.-based LinkedIn informing her that the company will be censoring her profile to readers in China due to “the presence of prohibited content” located in her profile.

“I used to have to wait for Chinese govt censors, or censors employed by Chinese companies in China, to do this kind of thing,” she tweeted.  “Now a US company is paying its own employees to censor Americans”.

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Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?

The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.

In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:

“The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”

Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.

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