The New York Times promotes an unlikely champion of the cause of truth.
The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg (3/26/17), alarmed by right-wing websites with “no commitment to truth,” is eager to balance them out with some respectable conservative journalists—and seems to think he has found one in Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes.
Hayes, writes Rutenberg, is following in the tradition of William F. Buckley:
Mr. Buckley designed National Review to win the larger argument through “logic and superior command of the subject,” as his biographer Sam Tanenhaus (a former writer for the New York Times) told me last week — through facts. And it inspired successive generations of conservative journalists to get in the game, too.
One of them was Stephen F. Hayes….
Unfortunately, as Rutenberg tells it, not everyone in right journalism shares Hayes’ self-proclaimed commitment to “basing our arguments on facts, logic and reason”:
The movement he joined had succeeded in breaking the mainstream news media’s informational hegemony (something the mainstream media had a hand in, too, he said). But as it evolved, grew and splintered, something else broke: any universal sense of truth.
“That’s a problem for our democracy,” he told me last week….
There are right-leaning voters who “don’t believe what they’re getting from the networks and the left-leaning cable outlets” and therefore may be open to false or unsubstantiated content that provides affirmation at the expense of true information, he said.
Aside from the false frame that mainstream media once represented a “universal sense of truth,” or that corporate media don’t themselves provide affirmation (of neoliberal economic dogma, for instance) at the expense of “true information,” this relay race of responsible right-wingers passing along the torch of truth-committed journalism falls down at both ends. For one thing, Buckley was kind of a monster—a supporter of eugenics, Jim Crow, apartheid, fascism (in the form of Spain’s Francisco Franco), McCarthyism, nuclear war (against China and Vietnam) and the tattooing of people with HIV (Extra!, 5–6/08). It’s not clear that he arrived at these positions through “logic and superior command of the subject.”
Even more problematic for contemporary journalism is offering Stephen Hayes as a model of fact-based journalism. Hayes is the reporter who famously used the Weekly Standard as a platform for recycled claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda—an article that FAIR’s Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 1–2/04) characterized as being based on pieces of evidence “so painfully flimsy it’s hard to believe they found their way into an official memo or a national magazine article.”
The New York Times is suggesting the guy who wrote this will lead the fight against “false or unsubstantiated content that provides affirmation at the expense of true information.”
Hayes went on to publish a book on the claim—called The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. The Times’ review of Hayes’ book (9/19/04), by Foreign Affairs’ Gideon Rose, said that
Hayes cannot bear to let his pet theory fall by the wayside, whether it is borne out by the facts or not…. He tries to make the facts fit his theory, rather than his theory fit the facts.
So it’s odd to see a profile of Hayes in the Times bearing the headline, “The Weekly Standard’s Arsenal to Fight Falsehoods: ‘Facts, Logic and Reason.’”
The Weekly Standard, lest we forget—as Rutenberg clearly has—was second to no publication in using shoddy journalism to sell a war that would leave countless hundreds of thousands dead. As Michael Corcoran wrote in Extra! (9/09):
Following the [9/11] attacks, the Standard advanced what became virtually all the noteworthy tactics of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”: focusing the response to 9/11 on Iraq using flawed and flimsy evidence (11/24/03), widening U.S. foreign policy interventions far and wide (11/01/04), dismissing all calls for even partial withdrawals of US troops (5/10/07), shunning the recommendations of the realist-dominated Iraq Study Group (12/11/06) and escalating troop levels in what became known as “the surge” (1/21/08).
The rhetoric in the Standard’s editorials and articles was often indistinguishable from that of the administration, as it downplayed war crimes committed by US troops (6/12/06) and labeled antiwar activists and legislators as anti-American (8/14/06).
Although US intelligence had found little evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks (McClatchy, 9/22/01), the first Standard released after 9/11 (9/24/01) tellingly featured a cartoon of Saddam Hussein and immediately began making the case for targeting his government: “While it is probably not necessary to go to war with Afghanistan, a broad approach will be required,” wrote Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly. Despite acknowledging that Hussein “might not” have been involved in the 9/11 attacks, “the larger campaign also must go after Saddam Hussein,” said the authors. Weeks later, Max Boot (10/15/01) asked, “Who cares if Saddam was involved?” as he pushed for regime change.
One can understand why Rutenberg, unnerved by the likes of Breitbart and InfoWars, would be looking for signs of hope on the right. But expecting a journalist and a magazine that led the most disastrous journalistic scam of the 21st century to restore honesty to conservative media is not hopeful—it’s delusional.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
When the cesspool makes the clogged toilet look clean
I suggest cage matches among all these liars, drawing contestants from the constant fabulists and pitting them against those who only lie when it matters. “Fake News” is subject to interpretation, until we pull the meme apart and divide it into words that describe each category of dishonesty. Any suggestions from FAIR?
Two words: Judith Miller
@Jeb Bushmeister:
Michael Gordon–Miller’s partner in war crime sales.
He’s still a New York Times reporter.
Yes, as in “That’s a Judith Miller.”. Referring to a heavily promoted falsehood originating in the halls of power and taken up by a Grey Lady. Identical to the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” and “Remember the Maine”, fake news from our past. Or call it a Grey Lady, the staid, plausible lie. The “Brown Bannon” is easy to name and call out. ” Pizzagate is a Brown Bannon.” Next,
what about climate change denial?
Rutenberg is a fool, David Carr must be rolling over in his grave, if Carr’s spirit cares enough to pay attention to the continuing inventions coming out of the NY Times.
The big, and rather obvious, problem with Rutenberg is that he’s never worked outside of the NYC press/”news”/spin bubble with all the navel gazing drivel that verbiage machine spews. He’s a big respewer of conventional “wisdom”. He can’t even say “but I went to college on the West Coast” or “in small town New England”.
While Carr had worked for the small respected alt-weekly, City Pages, in Minneapolis. And just making things didn’t up wasn’t allowed in City Pages–at least when I lived in Minnesota in the late 1980s and very early 1990s.
Which are the left leaning cable channels? Neither CNN nor MSNBC is left leaning. And not cable only but CBS news has gone downhill drastically in the last 30 years–Lara Logan on “60 Minutes”, WTF? Comedy Central cancelled Wilmore. Samantha Bee completely destroyed her credibility with her inventions for Hillary.
I guess RT American has some actual liberals working there and appearing on shows–irony.
A good rule of thumb is to remember ALL broadcast and cable channels (including Comedy Central and TBS) are corporate-owned media, thus mouthpieces for the Establishment. Even HBO (home of Real Time and Last Week Tonight, and owned by Time Warner) is not immune.
Whenever I watch any of these outlets (which is rare), I do so with a very critical eye.
My personal favorite iraq invasion promoter, who still writes for the New Yorker magazine, is George Packer. In a just world he would have been tried at The Hague as a war criminal.
For those too young to have suffered watching the “Firing Line” programs that Bill Buckley hosted, one might get a taste of his manners and his “logic and superior command of a subject,” by viewing a great recent film, “Best of Enemies: Buckley vs Vidal,” that recalls the series of “debates” between Bill and his opposite number in almost every way, Gore Vidal. These events took place during the 1968 presidential election, a campaign even livelier, if you can imagine, than that of 2016.
My personal favorite program of his series was the time he had Pete McCloskey, a Republican house member, as his guest. Buckley was the consummate bully. Before there was a FoxNews and the nasty bullies who have made their individual fortunes from their open display of vulgar manners, there was Bill Buckley. Anyone with whom he disagreed would be drowned in a torrent of multisyllabic pomposity that typically left the targeted “guest” bemused and confused, along with the majority of the viewing audience.
Bill ended each show, smiling as if he had some of his guest’s flesh between his teeth, with blood running down his chin–like a hunter posing for a photo while standing next to a lion that he’s just shot dead. His normal body language spoke clearly to the man’s ruling class sneering disdain of the lower classes, In short, a visit to Firing Line was typically an interview to the death.
But the day that McCloskey, a highly decorated Marine Corps combat vet as-well-as anti-Vietnam Republican, came on his show, the tables were turned. Every attempt to out-think or out-talk his guest failed miserably and McCloskey gave back better than he got Buckley lost all of his Royalist pretension at the end, appearing physically intimidated and intellectually suing for Peace. It was a wonderful episode.
Pete McCloskey later became a Democrat; he’s on the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. The last good Republican.
A quibble: lying the way into Iraq is only “the most disastrous journalistic scam of the 21st century” so far.
I think that fake news is a necessity for politicians, the military and for corporations. : (
What to do? Well —remember the seeds of resistance are hidden in the nation’s favorite word of PATRIOTIC
( look within = PAT riot IC : )
LOL ohhhh the New York Times the paper that has David Brock who was formerly of the Weekly Standard and had hired Bill Kristol (whose never off ABC News) the editor and I think still current editor of that waste of ink, as an op-ed columnist because you know he was vindicated for her cheerleading in Iraq. How people can still read the New York Times is beyond me