'Letter to a Young Journalist'
By Andrew Klavan, excerpted from "Against the Corporate Media."
My Dear Friend:
It does my old heart good to address a young person of such talent, honesty and integrity. I am only sorry you are going into the field of journalism, where none of those qualities will be of any use to you. To enter American journalism today in search of honest work is like entering an Episcopal church in search of Christianity. If you find any, you probably brought it with you and, once you’re there, you’re going to have to fight to hold onto it.
Over the past decade or so, the largest and most respected American news outlets have sunk to once-unimaginable depths of mendacity. They have repeatedly spread disinformation to protect the power of the powerful and have demonized and attempted to silence those who tried to tell the simple truth. Let me give a few recent examples.
In 2020, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, which claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery—a lie. During the 2020 Covid pandemic, various outlets decried the “racist” idea that the virus originated in a Chinese lab—as it most likely did.
You really can't hate them enough.
When a felonious drug addict named George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody in May 2020, journalists elevated the story as representative of widespread police racism against blacks. Repeated studies have cast doubt on whether such widespread racism exists, and it is unclear even now whether Floyd died of a cop’s sloppy manhandling or a drug overdose. But the media version helped to inspire nationwide race riots that caused a record $2 billion in damage and left somewhere between twenty and forty people dead. Some TV reporters declared these riots “mostly peaceful” and “not generally unruly,” even as their cameras captured buildings burning down behind them.
During the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post unearthed an abandoned laptop belonging to Democrat candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The laptop contained evidence of extensive Biden family corruption, possibly reaching to the candidate himself. The Biden camp, led by soon-to-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken, orchestrated a letter signed by fifty-one former high-level intelligence officials claiming that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This nonsense allegation was taken up by journalists at all the major outlets, and went unchallenged when it was repeated by the candidate himself. The Post’s reporting was suppressed on social media outlets without protest from the journalistic community. Indeed, Terence Samuel, National Public Radio’s managing editor for news, refused to allow NPR to report on the laptop at all, saying, “We don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” He was then promoted to vice president of newsgathering and executive editor.
A cranky old conservative like myself may be forgiven for suspecting that this habitual dishonesty is an effort to support the age-old leftist cause of larger government and less individual freedom. In a 2013 poll, about 13 percent of journalists said they leaned right, while three times as many, about 39 percent, said they leaned left. This means that a whopping 48 percent of journalists lean left and lie about it. Perhaps more to the point, a recent Gallup poll showed that only 7 percent of the public have a great deal of trust in the news media, while 70 percent of Democrats trust them. In a nation where the people are sovereign, and where that sovereignty is equally divided between the two political parties, a media trusted by one party alone is almost surely reporting with its mind closed.
It is easy to believe that American journalism was always a liar’s game. In his screenplay for the film Nothing Sacred, newspaperman Ben Hecht wrote: “I’ll tell you briefly what I think about newspapermen: the hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.” That was in 1937…