The News: Money For Nothing, Your Trial Balloons For Free

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

There was a brief moment earlier in the 21st Century where prominent American journalists did some rethinking of their use of anonymous sources. That was the same moment when editors and publishers believed that having an ombuds or public editor was a good idea, an important way to rebuild trust with a public that was increasingly wary about journalism.

The immediate cause of this shift, in my understanding, was the revelations about how easily some of the top editors and reporters had been manipulated into supporting post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan via selective leaks, “embedding” in military units and their own desperate desire to be patriots this time around rather than the critics they recalled being during the Vietnam War. They recalled incorrectly: it wasn’t until the Tet Offensive and the Pentagon Papers that American journalism began to demonstrate any kind of skepticism about the war, and many American news outlets continued to defer to government accounts throughout the entire war.

The Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO, and Watergate at least taught one generation of American journalists that not only did the American government lie, but also that it counted on journalists to either be innocent patsies or knowing collaborators in those lies. Watergate, unfortunately, also taught another lesson, a mostly false one, that a good journalist could cultivate individual sources in the government who would provide them with guidance and evidence to counteract those lies.

I say that was an unfortunate lesson because very little of the access journalism that resulted was coming from people who were ethically distressed whistleblowers that felt the American public deserved to know the truth. Almost none of the coverage we’ve had of American policy since 1980 has come from the spiritual descendants of Daniel Ellsberg. It’s mostly come from people like Mark Felt: people with grudges, people working to advance a personal policy agenda against their adversaries within the Administration, people with ambition hoping to burnish their own reputation, and people who are covering their own asses by letting a story leak that makes some other guy responsible for an unpopular decision. That is, when they’re not just fake-leaking as part of a public-relations plan designed to feed the press the story that a particular Administration wants to have in circulation anyway. That last tendency has been particularly pronounced around military operations and diplomatic affairs since 9/11, in which the press has compliantly agreed to help misdirect adversaries and deploy infowar campaigns designed to detour public awareness or divide critics. Most confidential-source stories aren’t data, they’re trial balloons.

That moment where American journalists felt they needed to cut down on their use of confidential sources and have public editors who could critically examine stories that depended on such sources has decisively ended. The New York Times in particular has gone back to the old addiction with a vengeance. The result is a kind of queasy mix of fake naivete and barely-veiled stooging for the people who are sourcing much of the reportage.

For example, I assume any modestly self-aware reader of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files”, excerpted from an upcoming book, finds themselves trying to guess who the sources are within the rules that Haberman and Swan set for themselves. Direct quotes are either from the speaker, someone present to hear the speaker, or detailed notes taken by someone present, whereas paraphrases and general descriptions of people’s seeming moods and demeanor might be more of a composite of statements made. When accounts disagree, they say they removed that information unless the source is one they judge to be consistently reliable. Who might that be? Your guess is as good as mine, since nobody in this administration of liars appears in public to be anything close to reliable. Being “reliably truthful” to Haberman and Swan in this present political moment is like being a BDSM furry with a scat fetish in some previous era of American politics: having a secret perversion that only a few confidants are allowed to know about.

Even given those rules and the inscrutability of who some of those judgments might apply to, there’s still a lot of questions to ask about why anybody inside the rooms where it happened wants this story to be public at this time. Is it J.D. Vance, who might want it known that he wanted all the files completely public? Is it Susie Wiles or David Warrington, who might peculiarly harbor some hope of saving their reputations after this mess is over? Is It Karoline Leavitt or Steven Cheung trying to control the story by feeding Haberman and Swan something that makes Trump look stupid rather than guilty? Is it Pam Bondi hoping to sink Patel? James Blair or Stanley Woodward trying to backstab their way up or claw their way out of complicity and guilt? Is it multiple informants, a la “Murder on the Orient Express”, who are all trying to make Vance look treacherous or disloyal?

Who knows? And yet, the difference matters enormously when it comes to deciding how seriously to take this story and interpret its implications. Don’t we know everything that a democratic public ought to know from what the Trump Administration has done in terms of public actions—fighting desperately against the release of the files, trafficking in conspiracy theories until they turn around and bite them in their own asses, acting in every way as if Trump is guilty of something terrible regarding Epstein? Don’t we already know as much as necessary when it comes to copious evidence of Trump’s association with—and similarity to—Epstein? Is the story that Haberman and Swan share worth much, considering that one way or the other it is doing work that someone in the decision-making loop wants the New York Times to do on their behalf. If Haberman and Swan can’t tell us why these sources are sharing what they’re sharing, we can’t judge its purpose or meaning. And I’m not writing a blank check to them and trusting in their judgments about truthfulness or reliability.

All the more so because this is just a big story amid many small stories carried by the NYT that are even more blatant in their fluffing of confidential sources. Take Glenn Thrush’s June 9th story on Todd Blanche, the current nominee to be Attorney General. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the NYT trying to stan for Blanche, but it’s the most strained. The passive-voicing in the headline says it all: “Blanche Was Once Seen As Tempering Trump’s Tactics”. The story’s frame follows the headline’s suggestion that this was a general perception of Blanche, that in serving as Trump’s personal lawyer and then in his Justice Department, he tried to restrain his boss’s worst instincts. But read the story and you’ll see that this “general perception” rests on a very slender foundation. First, as Thrush tells the story, Blanche “ejected” his underling, Ed Martin, to a distant office. “An 18-minute Uber ride across town” is not exactly being sent to Siberia in this Administration, which has punished entire Cabinet departments by sending everyone who wasn’t fired away to another state entirely. Read on and you’ll find that it’s not that Blanche is contesting Trump’s intense politicization of the Justice Department, it’s just that he thought Martin “spent too much of his time taunting his targets”. He just wants him to knuckle down and actually persecute people legally rather than shoot the shit on social media. This is not “tempering”.

Then read on and you find that “many people inside the department and even some critics of Mr. Blanche on the outside…viewed the Martin episode as a modest victory for normalcy”. This, says Thrush, “seemed to feed into a narrative, which flourished and faded in the early days of the administration, that Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, would at least try to mitigate Mr. Trump’s excesses and caprices”.

This is weapons-grade weaksauce. Where are these “many people”? You’re not going to hear from anything like a multitude in this article and Thrush isn’t going to provide even a fig leaf description of the scope or character of his confidential sourcing. There’s one person who says anything like it quoted in the article, and it’s a Substack writer who was fired by Blanche, who claims that many “career Justice Department” officials thought that maybe Blanche would save them. In the meantime, there’s plenty of evidence otherwise (not to be found in this article) that Blanche is exactly what he has seemed to be from the first moment he associated with Trump, which is a compliant hack who obediently does what his boss and his inner circle demand. Why is Blanche getting this kind of “seemed to” special pleading? I’m guessing it’s more of the NYT’s pathetic attempts to self-nominate as a kind of Washington-insider ref, trying to nudge Trump officials back inside the norms and the rules through encouragement rather than criticism.

That’s not their job. Their job is to report what the Administration does. What it does is lawlessness and corruption. Those aren’t opinions, those are facts. There’s no “seems to” about them and you don’t need some bootlicking inside-source trying to plant a favorable hook in the Grey Lady’s hungry and eager desire to be reeled in to the inner sanctum of power. There’s nothing about these stories that enhances our public knowledge of what is being done in Washington. These are not evidence or data for anything except the compromised state of the NYT itself when it comes to the Trump Administration.

Image credit: Photo by 和国 谢 on Unsplash