The New York Analysis of Policy & Government takes a two-part look at the latest reduction in journalistic ethics.
The descent of American journalism continues, as the last vestiges of objectivity from the most well-known news sources continue to be reduced. The traditional leaders in the field have chosen to become partisan advocates, rather than reporters.
The problem was highlighted in May, when the New York Times decided to eliminate the position of “public editor,” which was held at the time by Liz Spayd. The public editor was charged with keeping the Times honest. The publication had suffered substantial damage to its reputation over the past decade as charges of both plagiarism and bias were levied and authenticated.
In doing so, the Times joins the nation’s other best-known newspaper, the Washington Post, in doing away with personnel charged with retaining journalistic standards. In 2013, the Washington Post (which, ironically has as its motto “Democracy dies in Darkness,”) announced that it would no longer have an ombudsman to insure the quality of its reporting, ending a 43-year old practice.
Will Oremus, who was not particularly complimentary towards Spayd, nevertheless wrote in Slate magazine, that the Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, had “challenged the paper to introspect more honestly…he took a thoughtful look at the Times’ reliance on anonymous sources—as urgent a topic today as it was then.”
A publication that is as conservative as Slate is leftist, the National Review, blasted the Times’ move.
“Now the Times has joined the WaPo [Washington Post] in dumping its designated internal soul-searcher …Spayd, who said upon her appointment last summer that “I’m not here to make friends,” was apparently a little too good at not making them… Spayd… said that journalists shouldn’t ‘apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidate.”
One of Spayds’ moves that apparently infuriated her employers was discussing bias (in favor of Clinton, and against Trump) in the 2016 campaign. Kyle Smith, writing for the National Review, reports that “After Spayd told Tucker Carlson that some tweets by professionally neutral Times news reporters that displayed open contempt for and hostility to Donald Trump were ‘outrageous’ and ‘over the line’ and should face ‘some kind of consequence,’ the blue-checkmark battalions rose up to denounce Spayd, calling her ‘the worst possible public editor for the Trump era’ and ‘a disgrace,’ adding that the Times had ‘embarrassed itself’ by hiring her.”
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The Times decision came at roughly the same time as another major embarrassment to journalism was revealed.
On June 27, Project Veritas released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield, captured via one of the organization’s hidden cameras, stating that there is no proof to CNN’s ongoing claim about a Trump-Russian collusion. The video shows Bonifield stating, concerning the story, “I mean, it’s mostly b******t right now…Like, we don’t have any giant proof …I haven’t seen any good enough evidence to show that the President committed a crime. I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.”
Project Veritas describes Bonifield asserting that the instructions came from CNN CEO Jeff Zucker: “Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN (Jeff Zucker) said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that, let’s get back to Russia.”
CNN has retracted parts of its Russian story. In the aftermath, three of its key editorial personnel resigned. A CNN Money article stated: “Three CNN journalists, including the executive editor in charge of a new investigative unit, have resigned after the publication of a Russia-related article that was retracted. Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN. ‘In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a spokesman said…. An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said. The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a ‘Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials,’ cited a single anonymous source.”
CNN has sought to make those three the token sacrifice for its corporate-wide mishandling of the news. Retracting a single story has not remedied the overall problem of CNNs’ exceptionally biased leftist reporting, which prompted it to gain the nickname “Clinton News Network” during the 2016 campaign.
A Rasmussen poll released in January found that “Among those who tune in to cable news networks at least occasionally, 42% say Fox News is the channel they generally watch, compared to 35% who turn to CNN and 19% who prefer MSNBC. These findings, too, are little changed from last year. Among cable news network viewers who watch Fox News most often, 50% say they trust the political news they are getting. That compares to 43% of MSNBC viewers and just 33% who tune in mostly to CNN.”
The Report concludes tomorrow.