Home » “Could we be wrong?” asks a journalist

Comments

“Could we be wrong?” asks a journalist — 25 Comments

  1. ms. neoneocon

    Please consider contacting the journalist — if his mind is truly open, perhaps he will address you in a follow-up or on twitter.

  2. Edward J. Epstein us definitely worth reading on a number of topics. His modus operandi is to wait several years until the dust has settled and then do an in depth analysis of a topic. His book on Lee Harvey Oswald is absolutely fascinating with a lot of detail about Oswald’s years(!) spent in Moscow as a privileged guest of the Soviet Union. I’d take anything he wrote very seriously.

  3. As best I can determine, the MSM is morally wrong, which permits, nay promotes, intentional factual wrongness. I think that is what Neo was saying about the Pentagon Papers.
    It was a Federal crime to publish the PPs at the time, as I remember.

    It remains unclear to me why the NYT and WaPo were so anti the Democratic POTUS then. What drove these establishment organs with all their info sources to side with North Vietnam, the nature of which was no secret?

  4. Reminds me of the fall out of the 9/11 or Dueffler reports where literally every single media outlet’s summary of the contents was the exact polar opposite of what was actually in the reports. The 9/11 report said too many agencies that dont communicate, but somehow as a result we ADD another layer of bureaucracy in homeland security ? the Dueffler report lists about 5 thousand tons of WMD but according to the media, it showed the opposite.

  5. This is an important story for me…particularly the last half where essentially we discover additional evidence that the MSM – or at least the WaPo and the NYT have been at this fake news business for quite a while. The willful distortion of what the Pentagon Papers said for a particular political outcome. Analogous to Hurst and the sinking of the Maine.
    Thank you very much. I always find your posts challenging and thoughtful.

  6. This, from Project Veritas (James O’Keefe) today:

    “This summer, Project Veritas shocked the nation when our team exposed horrifying bias at CNN:
    Project Veritas caught a producer admitting CNN’s Trump coverage was “bullsh*t,” designed to increase their flailing ratings,

    “Next, our investigators caught CNN pundit Van Jones admitting the Trump-Russia investigation, which dominated CNN airwaves, was a “big nothingburger.”

    “And then, our team caught yet another CNN producer smearing voters as “stupid as sh*t” and lobbing crude insults at President Trump and his staff.
    “This fall, Project Veritas investigators moved on to The New York Times — exposing a shocking culture of bias:
    First, our team caught a Times’s online editor admitting he buried stories that didn’t fit the paper’s anti-Trump narrative.

    “Next, our investigators caught a senior staff editor admitting the company lied about being “objective journalism” as they fed bias and half-truths to the American people.

    “And then, our team caught up with a Times IT contractor — who informed us that the Times didn’t have one single employee that didn’t hate Trump.
    “And finally, our team caught the Washington Post peddling stories even their own journalists didn’t believe:
    Our team caught a top journalist admitting on camera that, despite the Post’s constant claims that Trump colluded with Russia, he thinks “maybe [the evidence] doesn’t exist.”

  7. mockmook:

    I’m not on Twitter, but anyone who is on Twitter is certainly welcome to call it to his attention.

  8. I’d take anything he wrote very seriously.

    I’ve read a number of his books and take them very seriously.

    The new hagiographic movie about the WaPoo is missing Mark Steyn’s hilarious column about Kathryn Graham.

    Born in New York City, the daughter of multimillionaire Eugene Meyer, she grew up privileged. In keeping with her father’s fortune, she graduated from Vassar College, where she was involved with the leftist trends of the day …

    She married Felix Frankfurter’s brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher.

    That’s the stuff! As the Tribune-Review’s chap has it, Mrs G got her philandering spouse banged up in the nuthouse and then arranged a weekend pass with a one-way ticket. “His death was ruled a suicide.” Lovely touch that. Is it really possible Katharine Graham offed her hubby? Who cares? To those who think the worst problem with the American press is its awful stultifying homogeneity, the Tribune-Review’s deranged perverseness is to be cherished. Give that man a Pulitzer!

  9. Why go after Johnson? Remember, Ben Bradlee was a JFK intimate. He got invited to parties on the presidential yacht. And there’s nothing the JFK people hated more than that son of a bitch Johnson.

    I read something this year about how the Watergate judge, John Sirica, essentially colluded with prosecutors, having ex-parte meetings with them. This alone would have voided all of the criminal convictions. Then, the guy on Nixon’s team who listened to the tapes more than anyone else, said the transcripts given to congressional investigators and used in court were quite different at key points from the tapes. There were phrases and sentences that simply could not be resolved, but in the transcripts whole sentences were written as if they were clear and unambiguous.

    The people at the Post during the Papers story and Watergate were pretty much the same at the management level. Sadly, Graham, Bradlee and others faced years of physical therapy from repetitive motion injuries caused by patting themselves on the back.

  10. Frog,

    “It remains unclear to me why the NYT and WaPo were so anti the Democratic POTUS then.”

    They were George McGovern ‘progressive’ (Marxist/socialist) democrats not establishment democrats. They derailed any hopes Johnson had for a second term and failed with McGovern. But have controlled the party ever since.

    “What drove these establishment organs with all their info sources to side with North Vietnam, the nature of which was no secret?”

    Same answer; they were George McGovern ‘progressive’ (Marxist/socialist) democrats not establishment democrats…

  11. Long ago and in another lifetime I had a long, long liquid lunch with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn on the Greek Island of Hydra. But that’s a story for another time.

  12. What? The NYTimes and WashPost stretch the truth from time to time? And decide NOT to publish items that reflect poorly on the left? Say it isn’t so! If I knew how to post photos, I would insert my shocked face +HERE+

  13. Seriously, in the course of a long career working with American journalists overseas, I have not met many (any?) who knowingly mis-reported what they found in the course of their investigation of a story. The editors, OTOH, I do not know. I was once the source for a NTYimes story that I knew they would want to report, and I was working with a NYTimes Correspondent I respected, and whom I trusted to report honestly the story I was handing that correspondent. In the course of 4-5 days, during which the editor in New York decided whether or not to run the story, and HOW to run the story, I was struck by how it was massaged to reflect their own preconceived notions. The correspondent was not to blame for the ultimate result; the editors were.

  14. If you want to know who’s telling the truth a good rule of thumb is to follow the motives. For conservatives — TRUE conservatives — truth IS the motive. Conservatives understand that it is self-defeating to propagate lies. Leftists, on the other hand, only tell the truth when it advances a more important agenda (usually increasing power for the Left). That makes it easy. Generally speaking if I can determine that someone is a real conservative I trust in what they say or report. On the other hand if I know that someone is a leftist I automatically disbelieve anything they say unless it’s confirmed by a conservative. It’s a system that rarely fails me.

  15. I agree with your take here completely.

    As bad as the situation is that you’ve just described, I wish that were all that was wrong with journalism and reporting today.

    I suspect it’s all related, but what turns me off is the now entrenched habit of injecting the journo/reporter into the story. Just obnoxious.

    It’s almost as though the news ostensibly being reported upon were really just secondary and only a vehicle by which the glories of the journo/reporter can be showcased.

    I see it manifest in so many ways such as the increasing habit of reporters interviewing other reporters on air – at great length – on subjects as though the reporter were the news maker rather than an objective observer; the constant crossing during interviews with news subjects to repeated shots of the interviewer him/herself so we can see them nodding sagely as though their own take on what is being said is important in itself and so that we don’t lose sight of who’s really important in the story in the mind of the journalist; and most galling of all for me: the habit after the completion of a news clip of the talking head/anchor looking into the camera and announcing “a sad story there” or “a happy story there” – as though we require their cue to know how to react to a story.

    The 24 hour news cycle is like a gaping maw that must be fed constantly so news and commentary has become a product to be quickly produced, polished to a superficial sheen, wrapped and served up around the clock. One ought not to be surprised in these circumstances when truth takes a back seat.

    I think it’s also to do with the gulf that has opened up between the elites and the general public where reporters now automatically assume that the average person is too deplorably stupid and too busy bitterly clinging to their guns and churches to be able to understand objectively and truthfully reported news stories anyway.

    About the only thing I liked about the old series Murphy Brown, set as it was in a tv news room, was its principled defence of the traditional Chinese Wall drawn between the sober, truth-driven news room and the entertainment division. That was an issue even in the 90’s and I think I see how it played out.

  16. I was intrigued to find this very prescient comment from Neo’s earlier post:
    Ben Says:
    November 16th, 2006 at 4:15 am
    The fundamental problem, IMHO, is that many of our elites no longer believe in America. I am NOT saying that they are unpatriotic, so calm down. What I am saying is that they no longer believe that America is special, or, in fact, any different from any other country. They are so wrapped up in guilt (for our prosperity, our past crimes, racism, etc.), that they are no longer able to make qualitative distinctions. In other words, in their minds the USA is as bad as Nazi Germany because the USA enslaved Blacks and drove Indians off of their lands. Of course, this is so patently ridiculous that one wonders how (or whether even to bother) to refute it.

    As a result, there is a tendency among people holding this view to demand perfection of the USA, while excusing horrible crimes that happen elsewhere. This explains how the USA can be viewed as a fascist society (e.g., the Patriot Act), while Castro’s Cuba is a bastion of all that is good. Because the USA is not perfect, it is therefore as evil as the worst of the worst. Because the benighted Third Worlders in Cuba have universal health care, everything else there must be wonderful. (On a tangential note, I wonder how many people holding this view realize how profoundly racist it is?)

    The fundamental problem is that because of guilt (and other factors), these people cannot accept the fact that in 2006, the USA, despite its lack of perfection and somewhat violent history, is still qualitatively superior to Communist China in almost every measure of human dignity. The old aphorism is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Anyone seeking perfection in a human endeavor will not find it, and the difference between grown-ups and children is that grown-ups are able to understand this.
    * * *

  17. The thing I hate the most about progressives is they often have the nerve to accuse people on the right of things they have been guilty of for the longest time. Roy Moore filed a lawsuit to block the AL election result today, liberals bash him of course for couldn’t tale no for an answer. It is especially ironic hearing that from the left, since they were one who couldn’t take no for an answer on nov 8 2016, and have been throwing tantrum ever since and still trying everything they could to overturn the result.

  18. After fully supporting a president who did nothing but play golf for eight years, CNN suddenly think a president playing too much golf is bad, can you believe that, can you believe the left’s lack of self reflection and shamelessness to criticize people of things they are a thousand times more guilty of?

  19. The media have been corrupt and dishonest for as long as I can remember. They used to pretend they were objective reporters but now they no longer pretend they aren’t partisan hacks.

  20. I refuse to play most of the media game. My TV no longer has any inputs; it’s for DVDs of classic movies only now. I scan Drudge but read few of the articles linked. It is clear to me the MSM has all become the National Enquirer with increasingly freakish headlines (as shown on Drudge) along the lines of “Woman uses cobra as vibrator”.

    At least one can comment on WSJ stories, and I often do that, if only to state the reporter is a dummy for reason X or Y or Z. Lots of people read WSJ comments, it seems.

    My home page is, regrettably, Yahoo, which does its own ‘news’, tending as the main story to feature yet another bald black NFL player doing something or being done to, or that there are many black NFL coaching candidates.

  21. It may or may not be telling that it happened within days of the resurrection/celebration of the WaPo’s heroic moment publishing the Pentagon Papers, with Meryl Streep now playing Katherine Graham, but William W. Graham, one of Katherine Graham’s four children, just blew his brains with a firearm. Stanford grad, white shoe law firm career, and famously anti VN war activist back in the day. Maybe a function of unmanageable clinical depression, possibly inherited, as his father went much the same route in 1963, leaving his widow to take over as the WaPo’s publisher.

  22. The press were and are controlled lackeys and lapdogs of the Deep State. They do what they are told. Expecting more of them would be unwise, unrealistic, and avoidable.

  23. Frog: “It remains unclear to me why the NYT and WaPo were so anti the Democratic POTUS then.”

    This is one of the great ironies from that era. As soon as Johnson took over as POTUS after the Kennedy assassination there was an intense animus towards him from the coastal elites as represented by the media who saw LBJ as a cornpone redneck buffoon. It perfectly mirrors today’s red state/blue state divide – except that Johnson was basically to the *left* of Kennedy. JFK had cut taxes while LBJ was probably the biggest big-government Democrat between Roosevelt and Obama. And the Vietnam policy that resulted in so much calumny towards Johnson (“Hey Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today”) was forged by Kennedy’s Ivy League foreign policy team – McNamara, Rusk, Bundy(s), Rostow etc.

    In fact the misleading cast of the Pentagon Papers may have even resulted from Johnson being more dovish than the JFK advisors. When they said “the Johnson administration” had decided to bomb NV at a time when “the White House” rejected the idea, the former may have been the advisors inherited from Kennedy while the latter was Johnson himself. I read “The Best and the Brightest” many years ago and IIRC Halberstam suggested that Johnson had doubts about the war but reluctantly went along with the JFK team because he had always focused on domestic policy going back to his stint as Senate majority leader and had little of his own expertise in foreign policy. But it was a lot more satisfying to blame Vietnam on Johnson than on the sainted JFK.

  24. “the misleading cast of the Pentagon Papers”

    Really meant to say the misleading cast of the reporting on the PP.

  25. Begin every conversations with a liberal by asking if they feel you should change your mind, then ask them if they have ever considered changing their mind.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>