Commentary
Checking my archives, in the past eight years I have written about the death of journalism 18 times, citing evidence of such mainly in the so-called mainstream media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.
After reading New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent opinion piece, “Requiem for the Newsroom,” I felt it was time to write my 19th commentary on the subject.
Dowd’s piece was more along nostalgic lines, with references to movies about newspapers – “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight,” and ”The Paper” – and memories of the old days with the clicking of typewriters, cigarette smoke in the air, and the shout outs for copy boys. While computers have silenced newsrooms, she notes how Covid led most reporters and columnists to work from home.
Reviewing her column, Mark Judge at the Washington Examiner, writes how Dowd doesn’t address what is killing newsrooms – corruption. “The media are made up of idealogues, and they have become too corrupt to be trusted,” he said.
In her nostalgic bent, Dowd wrote of a few newsroom characters she met in the good old days, including Mike Isikoff, while failing to note how they exemplify how the media have killed themselves. It was Judge, not Dowd, who recalled how Isikoff was forced to admit that he “made a huge mistake” in falling for the Steele dossier after it was debunked.
Dowd joins a host of leftist media people, who not only “bought into” the Steele dossier, but they were also convinced by the 51 former intelligence officers who concocted the story of Russian disinformation and signed the timely letter that helped Joe Biden win in 2020.
On February 11, 2023, I wrote how the Columbia Journalism Review stunned the journalism world with its paper, “The Press Versus the President,” a 24,000-word autopsy of the press during the Trump years.
Just as the media failed to admit it’s culpability of biased coverage against Trump, those 51 intelligence officers, several of whom now serving as advisors to various media outlets, have not seen the need to apologize.
John Brennan and James Clapper are frequently mentioned as signers, while Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary and CIA director, has escaped culpability while watching over his Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University in Monterey Bay, far from the deep state of Washington DC.
In an effort to determine the roles of former deputy CIA director Mike Morell and Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, in the bringing the 51 signers on board, Rep. Jim Jordan is seeking testimony,
Mark Zaid, who represents six of the 51 signatories, said “we intend to fully cooperate,” while making it known that “the signatories relied upon their decades of professional training an expertise” when they agreed to sign.
The letter was published just weeks before the 2020 election and days before the debate, during which Biden used it as a credible source in his favor.
Chances are most readers of this blog do not read The New York Times and may not be aware of Maureen Dowd, but her column gave me another opportunity to write about the death of journalism as I once knew it.
May God bless the United States of America.
