We don't want journalism back

America does not need a cabal of pencil-necked geeks deciding which is right and which is an illusion

Matt Taibbi is the former Rolling Stone writer who endeared himself to some conservatives by saying a few nice things about us. He quit the magazine and wound up on Substack where he is doing quite well and I am glad for him. His latest masterpiece is “Is Journalism Back? New York Times Editor Goes Ballistic on Biden, ‘Safe Space’ Era.”

The column reminds me of the Beach Boys tune, Brian’s Back, which reminisced about the group’s leader and the days before he dove into a mountain of cocaine at the height of fame. The song says he never left. The reality is he can never come back.

Oh, I want Brian Wilson back. His music did the world a lot of good. The harmonies of the group are still bitchin’ 60 years later. His arrangement of I Can Hear Music is for the ages — well until the last record needle wears out. Stick a penny on it when it starts skipping.

But journalism coming back does not interest me. I would rather have milkmen come back — and the guy who occasionally came down the street selling Belgian waffles from his truck. I make them every Sunday for my wife and I. Come to think of it, between Door Dash and Amazon, both are back in a new and more orderly form.

So it goes with the news. Twitter has replaced them all by being immediate and allowing all sides to be heard.

Taibbi wrote that journalism may come back to what it was before it exposed itself like a dirty old man at a playground. The idea of a Trump presidency sent the cabal of pencil-necked geeks running the news business into a frenzy. On August 7, 2016, in a front-page column by Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times announced that for all intents and purposes it formally was abandoning objectivity altogether.

It blamed Trump.

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?

Blah, blah, blah.

The newspaper was rationalizing its decision to become a completely propagandist tool of anti-American fascists. As a marketing strategy, it was brilliant because anti-American fascists are a well-heeled and lucrative demographic for advertisers. Readers may be familiar with the black-owned business slogan of “For Us, By Us.” NYT should adopt a catchphrase of “Bias For Us”

NYT shaded the news liberal all along but now it devotes every inch of space to the cause, as it were. The sports department is now run by an online outfit NYT bought and now sports is as DEI as its opinion page.

But Taibbi told his readers that, hey, NYT may have had a change of heart because Joe Kahn, the newspaper’s executive editor, scolded a critic who said NYT was not working hard enough to re-elect FJB.

Kahn said in an interview, “I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House, We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda, and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”

The paper objects to being called a whore after whoring itself out. I get that it happened on the watch of Kahn’s predecessor, a DEI hire named Dean Baquet, but Kahn knew it was a brothel when he took the piano playing gig.

James Bennet had a brilliant takedown of the Times last December. In it, he said, “In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates. They are generally also motivated by a desire for a more just world. Neither of those tendencies are new. But there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice.”

How so?

He wrote, “Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term objectivity to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cozying up to power, as journalists often have done.”

Journalists abandoned objectivity, throwing that precious shield from charges of bias just to spite Donald Trump. People outside of its hard core readers have found new sources of information, largely through Twitter. Journalists can throw temper tantrums on the floor about misinformation all they want, but after the media promoted the Fake Covid Vaccine and ridiculous masks, most people no longer believe them nor should they.

Taibbi though believes NYT and the rest can get that toothpaste back in the tube. He wrote:

In a sweeping indictment of Trump-era journalism, Kahn pointed a finger at a generation of reporters who appeared to arrive in newsrooms unequipped to deal with unpleasant facts. Sounding offended on behalf of the paper’s reporting reputation, which took a beating with years of misses on stories like Russiagate and factual fiascoes like the “Caliphate” podcast, Kahn reminded Times reporters that the job is about facing and reporting difficult truths, not striving to remake reality into a campus-like safe space, in pursuit of any political “mission,”

You can put the toothpaste back by opening the other end of the tube.

But who wants to brush their teeth with toothpaste that was scraped off the bathroom sink?

Do we really want the dingbats and dingleberries that Kahn described as the people who decide what is news and what the facts are? When I was a youngun, a wise newspaperman explained to me that the power of the press belongs to the man who owns the presses. NYT and the rest abused that power. We will not give it back to them.

Thus the answer to Taibbi’s question “Is Journalism Back?” is no. Journalists abandoned objectivity. Readers have decided that they do not want the journalists back.

I should end this post with a reference to the Beach Boys, but the more fitting ending comes from a hit single in 1956 by Patience and Prudence, the McIntyre sisters at ages 11 and 14. It went something like this:

Got along without you before I met you
Gonna get along without you now
Gonna find somebody who is twice as cute
’Cause I didn’t want you anyhow

You told everybody that we were friends
But this is where our friendship ends
’Cause all of a sudden you even changed your tune
You haven’t been around since way last June

So long.

Farewell.

Umm-umm.