In a much younger life, I was a newspaper reporter. A journalism-school graduate, I was going to help change the world, proclaiming truth and justice under my byline. The job didn’t pay much, but with overtime we got by, and it was a heady experience for this young general assignment reporter to rub shoulders with politicians and celebrities and even have some of them return his phone calls.
Later in life, I had a long academic career in economics. I came to understand the mentality that has affected modern journalism for more than a century, and I believe that what we have seen in the past 25 years is the inevitable result of what happens when progressivism takes over.
Twenty years ago, I wrote in a Mises Wire piece that modern media was a Progressive-era relic that was imploding, and that implosion continues apace today. Since I wrote that article, the mainstream media has run over the cliff many times: in their coverage of the Duke lacrosse case, of covid-19 and its aftermath, and now of President Joe Biden’s dementia. In each of these cases, the news coverage has tried to protect a progressive narrative and cast aside that inconvenient thing we call truth.
I was directly involved in the Duke case and saw firsthand how the media, led by The New York Times, stuck to the narrative that three Duke University lacrosse players raped a black stripper even when the combination of logic and DNA science proved otherwise. When North Carolina’s attorney general investigated and declared the players innocent, most of the media quietly accepted the verdict and moved on. Several years later, journalists tried to resurrect the story. William Cohan’s lauded book claimed the story was more complicated (maybe there really was a rape, but we’ll never know). But the book was riddled with errors. (The book review in The New York Times also was full of errors. They never learned nor did they care.)
The Duke case solidified my view that the modern progressive media is worse than useless. For all its braying that it is “protecting democracy,” our media today does nothing more than protect progressive narratives. Journalists wanted to believe that those dastardly Duke lacrosse athletes beat and raped a black woman because, after all, two white men murdered Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. (A Duke history professor wrote an op-ed to that point, and the press ate it up.)
The covid-19 coverage also followed the progressive narrative that truth comes primarily from progressive state-sponsored authorities, even when the truth consists of contradictory accounts. The dominant progressive narratives were that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins spoke ex cathedra and that their pronouncements represented the very best of that holy concept known as science. Only later did Fauci admit that social distancing was not based on science. When a federal judge ended President Biden’s mask mandate in 2022, the legacy media predicted mass infections that never materialized. In the end, progressive narratives overpowered real medical science, but by then, the media had moved on to other things.
The media turns on Biden
A few days before the disastrous presidential debate in late June, The New York Times published an article claiming that published recordings of the president having serious memory lapses and worse were “misleading videos“ created by dishonest conservatives. After the debate, however, the NYT made a seamless pivot to demanding that Biden drop out of the presidential race due to his obvious diminished capacity.
If there ever was a “We have always been at war with Eastasia” moment, here it is. And not only did the NYT turn on a dime, but it has been publishing a number of op-eds by prominent people (like actor and Democratic Party activist George Clooney) to help push Biden out the door. Suddenly, the NYT has “discovered” what has been obvious even to casual observers for many years: Joe Biden is suffering from dementia and clearly is not mentally fit to be president.
One can accuse the NYT and other progressive media of hypocrisy and outright lying, but hypocrisy and outright lying have been a staple of progressive news coverage for years. This latest episode, while quite revealing, should not surprise anyone who follows American legacy journalism with any regularity.
When we see the progressive media having its “war with Eastasia” moments, the patterns always are the same. First, the media jumps in with both feet on something that fits a progressive narrative and ignores anything that might “cloud their vision.” In the Duke case, for example, almost none of the media claims in the first few weeks were true, including the accusation that the lacrosse team had put up a “wall of silence.”
When the DNA tests that the infamous prosecutor Michael Nifong claimed would reveal the alleged rapists came back negative, the NYT trotted out Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, to declare that DNA was irrelevant. (The Innocence Project puts DNA evidence front and center to gain exonerations of wrongfully convicted people, but when media progressives wanted the lacrosse players to be guilty, all science went out the window.)
The NYT propped up the false case against the three accused lacrosse players for nearly a year despite the mountain of exculpatory evidence, promoting its progressive narrative against all science and reason.
Likewise, the NYT and its allied media pursued a political narrative on covid, ignoring sound epidemiology and medical science — all in the name of science.
Once a narrative has been proven false, one might expect a mea culpa from mainstream journalists. Think again. They simply move on. After its disastrous Duke coverage, the NYT basically congratulated itself on its coverage. There was no false narrative, only first-rate journalism.
It would seem relevant to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump that President Biden recently called for placing Trump “in a bullseye.” After all, seven years ago, the NYT blamed Sarah Palin for the assassination attempt against Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona because Palin in a political document placed a printed target on Giffords’ congressional district. The newspaper later put a small correction in its editorial, but it was too little, too late.
Will the media look inward this time? After all, we have been reading in the mainstream press that Donald Trump is the latest incarnation of Adolph Hitler and that he will impose a dictatorship if elected. Law professor Jonathan Turley has highlighted a number of similar claims by the media, including that Trump will unleash “death squads” on political opponents if elected.
One recalls that Trump already served four years as president and did not impose a dictatorship nor send out death squads to kill Democrats or recalcitrant Republicans. Not that it really matters to mainstream journalists. As we have seen, once their narratives are upended, their rallying cry is the equivalent of telling us we’ve always been “at war with Eastasia.”
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