RUTHFULLY YOURS

Project Veritas has just released a video further confirming what we already know about the New York Times. It is a leading member of the anti-Trump fake news media club. In this video, Nick Dudich, Audience Strategy Editor for NYT Video, who manages videos displayed on social media for the Times, admitted on hidden-camera that the Times “always” makes sure that anti-Trump stories make it to the left-wing newspaper’s front page. When asked about being objective at the Times, which its ethical handbook says is so important to preserving its reputation, Dudich replied, “No I’m not, that’s why I’m here.” Indeed, Dudich carried his political biases from his days working on the political campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the Times without missing a beat.

Dudich explained how he would target President Trump as a “journalist.” Dudich would go after the president’s businesses and family. His objective would be to “ruin the Trump brand” through relentless investigations. “He cares about his business more than he cares about being President,” Dudich said. “He would resign. Or he’d lash out and do something incredibly illegal, which he would have to.”

In response to the Project Veritas video, a Times spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, sought to marginalize Dudich’s role at the newspaper. She claimed that “a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role. In his role at The Times, he was responsible for posting already published video on other platforms and was never involved in the creation or editing of Times videos. We are reviewing the situation now.”

Notably, the Times spokesperson did not comment on the substance of Dudich’s revelations. The fact is that Dudich is not an outlier at the New York Times. To the contrary, he embodies the Times’ fanatic anti-Trump resistance. According to a study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, analyzing news coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, the New York Times’ news stories on President Trump were 87 percent negative during that period.

The New York Times editors and columnists can vent all they want on the opinion pages. Readers can determine for themselves whether the arguments put forward in the opinion pieces hold up or not. However, it is unethical and intellectually dishonest for reporters who purport to present factual information in their articles to shed objectivity and take sides in their reporting. Yet the Times’ media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote during the presidential campaign that there was nothing wrong with reporters, who believed Trump would be too dangerous if elected president, doing just that.

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” Jim Rutenberg wrote, “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, nonopinion 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?”

For many years, commercial time on CNN International has been filled largely with advertisements for the tourist boards and state-owned airlines of various Muslim countries. Given CNN’s unusually friendly coverage of these countries, and its disinclination to mention Islam when covering such topics as jihadist terrorism and immigrant crime in Europe, it is hard not to view CNN’s willingness to run these commercials with a jaundiced eye.

The TV commercial begins with a shot of the sky, above the clouds, and with the voice of a British male:

“The sky. There should be no borders up here. Only horizons. As an airline, we don’t believe in boundaries. We believe in bringing people together.”

We cut to pictures of people hugging at airports, showing affection for one another.

“The world’s better that way. It is a right for all of us to go where we need to go. To feel the things we want to feel. To see the people we want to see.”

A shot of an airplane, and views of the earth from the sky.

“That’s why we’ll continue to fly the skies. Providing you with everything we can. And treating everyone how they deserve to be treated. We do this because we know that travel goes beyond borders and prejudice.”

Back to shot of people together, smiling, walking here and there, in the city and countryside.

“That travel teaches compassion. That travel is a necessity. That travel is a right for all. Remember that this world is all of ours to explore. And it’s a strange thing for us to be apart.”

The commercial is in heavy rotation on CNN International, which I’ve been watching more than usual lately because of the coverage of hurricanes.

It is a commercial for Qatar Airways, which is, not surprisingly, owned by the government of Qatar.

As a Wall St. Journal reporter Abramson wrote a maliciously biased book about the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas controversy, air-brushing and obfuscating evidence that contradicted Hill’s claims. rsk
Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, used White House reporter Glenn Thrush as an example of how reporters shouldn’t talk about President Trump.“On Twitter, Glenn Thrush, an otherwise great reporter, has tweeted that Trump had ‘breathtaking chutzpah,’ that he ‘will never get over the shock of waking up and seeing the leader of the free world spouting demonstrably false information,’” Abramson recounted in a recent analysis of the paper’s political coverage. While Thrush’s observations may be true, Abramson wrote, they are opinions — and it’s exactly that type of commentary that can be twisted by critics as “gloating” or “overkill” — and that can hurt the paper’s historic, unrelenting and overall accurate coverage of the administration.

The column:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/when-all-the-news-that-fits-is-trump.php

Jill Abramson is a former executive editor of The New York Times. She also writes a political column for The Guardian and is finishing a book on the transformation of the news industry. She is a senior lecturer in the English department of Harvard University.

Since the election, The New York Times has toughened everything about its coverage of Donald Trump, from the choice of words it uses to describe what he says to the number of reporters assigned to cover and investigate him. Like everyone else, the Times underestimated his chances of being elected. Although it published impressive investigations of his taxes, treatment of women, and real-estate deals, it was only after his surprise victory that the dimensions of Russia’s interference in the election and ties to Trump were examined and revealed.

In recent months, the Times has been in a running one-upmanship battle with The Washington Post, a thrilling journalistic display that has reinforced the importance of the few national news organizations left that still have the muscle to do this kind of reporting. “The role of the press is clearer now than it’s ever been,” said Executive Editor Dean Baquet on CBS’s Face the Nation in February. The quixotic nature of the new administration, the president’s serial lies (the word Baquet was right to use on the front page), and the false narratives that tumble out of the White House daily cry out for this kind of accountability journalism.

For years, reporters were content to obscure their ideological dogmas and partisan goals behind the pretense of objectivity and detachment. Though the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN practiced combat journalism against conservatives and Republicans, they did so while aspiring to professional standards of facticity and fairness, and applying, every now and then, scrutiny to liberals and Democrats worthy of investigation.

Donald Trump changed that, of course. He is so unusual a figure, and his behavior so outlandish, that his rise precipitated a crisis in a profession already decimated by the collapse of print circulation and advertising dollars. The forces that brought Trump to power are alien to the experience of the men and women who populate newsrooms, his supporters unlike their colleagues, friends, and neighbors, his agenda anathema to the catechism of social liberalism, his career and business empire complex and murky and sensational. Little surprise that journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy. Who has time for dispassionate analysis, for methodical research and reporting, when the president’s very being is an assault on one’s conception of self, when nothing less than the future of the country is at stake? Especially when the depletion of veteran editors, the relative youth and inexperience of political and congressional reporters, and the proliferation of social media, with its hot takes and quips, its groupthink and instant gratification, makes the transition from inquiry to indignation all too easy.

There is still excellent journalism. I would point, for starters, to the work on charter flights that led to the resignation of Tom Price. But the overall tone of coverage of this president and his administration is somewhere between the hysterical and the lunatic. Journalists are trapped in a condition of perpetual outrage, seizing on every rumor of discontent and disagreement, reflexively denouncing Trump’s every utterance and action, unable to distinguish between genuinely unusual behavior (the firing of Comey, the tenure of Anthony Scaramucci, the “fine people on both sides” quip after Charlottesville) and the elements of Trump’s personality and program that voters have already, so to speak, “priced in.” Supposedly authoritative news organizations have in one case taken up bizarre mottoes, like “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and in another acted passive-aggressively by filing Trump stories under “entertainment,” only to re-categorize the material as news with the disclaimer (since dropped) that Trump is “a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and birther.” The mode of knee-jerk disgust not only prevents the mainstream media from distinguishing between the genuinely interesting stories and the false, partisan, and hackwork ones. It also has had the effect of further marginalizing print and broadcast journalists from middle America.

The other day, for example, Bob Schieffer observed on Face the Nation that one in five journalists live in New York, D.C., or Los Angeles. The news is manufactured by residents of the liberal bubble, where conservatives are few and far between (and certainly do not sound like Sarah Palin), jobs are plenty, education is high, and the benefits of globalization manifest in cheap prices, exotic restaurants, and a reserve labor force of cleaners, contractors, and home-care specialists. Can’t say I was shocked when Schieffer’s finding passed barely noticed, the consciences of the press untroubled by the fact that their experiences and backgrounds are so unlike the majority of the public whose interest they presume to uphold.