What has happened to journalism? Am I overly idealistic? Has it always been this bad, and I just didn't realize it. Have most Americans already accepted the truth of journalism?
Imagine this hypothetical: Corrupt law enforcement agents break the law to punish people of the opposition party. They fail in their endeavor, the cases are dropped, and the targets are exonerated. Then the media pronounces that the government who freed them is corrupt and ignores the problematic process.
This situation does not occur with an independent and legitimate press. This is sensationalist, activist press, the kind you'd expect in dystopian fiction or countries where a dictatorship controls the media.
This was a hypothetical case, but it could be true, and many Americans believe that the FBI agents behind the Flynn case and the Carter Page FISA warrant let their politics override their faith to justice. Maybe those Americans are wrong; maybe the FBI agents were acting in good faith. The facts are, however, that they bent and broke many laws to get what they wanted. With the FISA application and then with the Flynn case.
There are three possibilities:
1. The FBI agents involved were extremely biased and believed punishing their enemies was more important than rule of law, and Bill Barr righted those wrongs.
2. The FBI agents involved were slightly biased and bent the rules a bit too far in pursuit of legitimate investigations, and Bill Barr undid the damage.
3. The FBI agents involved were completely professional, did everything by the book, got a bad guy, and Bill Barr let him off because he's Trump's lackey.
Do we have enough information to know for sure which is true? Does any journalist?
A responsible journalist has an obligation to report these facts. A responsible journalist should recognize that this is a complicated situation and doesn't have an easy answer. An irresponsible journalist jumps to possibility 1 or possibility 3 and tosses around over-generalizations like "Barr is corrupt and he doesn't that you know it." or "The attorney general is turning the Justice Department into a political weapon for the president."
The second quote is written by the editorial board of The New York Times, and is deeply, deeply irresponsible. They are taking a complicated situation, one that's clearly in the gray where there's not enough information to make a real determination as to everyone's motives and deeds, and deciding that William Barr, the attorney general is corrupt. The left's opinion writers are expert at taking many stories, over-interpreting them, and then putting them together to create the illusion of a strong case. This opinion piece is a terrific example.
The thesis is that Bill Barr is a political actor and has politicized the Justice Department. They start with a piece of a statement Barr made in response to a question, that without the full Barr statement makes him sound like he's be happy as long as he wins. Then they talk about Watergate and the reforms that followed it. "To Mr. Barr, these reforms were obstacles to a vision of a virtually unbound executive." This is followed by a statement Barr made about the power of the executive. Instead of arguing against that statement, they simply compare him to England's King George III. Barr said "the president 'alone is the Executive branch', in whom 'the Constitution vests all Federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion." Is that wrong? Isn't this a question for constitutional scholars to debate? Maybe it is wrong. Is it clearly wrong? If Obama's attorney general had said it, would The New York Times proclaim it as indisputable?
Whether it's right or wrong, it's a reasonable interpretation, and Bill Barr is not the only person who thinks so. Many, many legal scholars, who believe in civil rights and want an independent justice system, believe this is true. But, The New York Times throws it in, interprets it as "Bill Barr believes the president is king" and then moves to its next point.
"Bill Barr's America...is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen." These are the words of Donald Ayer, that the Times goes on to agree with. This is such an egregious exaggeration of the facts, it has no place in The New York Times. The United States is not a "banana republic" and the actions of Bill Barr do not come close to being "whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen." Donald Ayer was likely playing up his opinion to get press coverage and headlines. This is not a statement that was meant to accurately portray the state of the country. It is another irresponsible statement that sensationalizes instead of informs.
Next, the Times says Barr "misrepresented the contents" of the Mueller report. A "federal judge called Mr. Barr's characterization of the report 'distorted' and 'misleading.' Both of those come complete with links to back up their take. If you follow the "misrepresented the contents" link, and you read the whole story, you find that what they mean by "misrepresented the contents" was "didn't include all of the context with your accurate summary." There is no argument that Barr said anything untrue or misleading. The complaint is that Barr's summary didn't include context. How ironic that The New York Times calls it "misleading" when the full context is excluded. By that standard what should we call this editorial that doesn't mention a single one of the rationales given by the Justice Department in dropping the Flynn case?
The link to the second quote does more of the same. Claiming Barr misled the public by omitting context. The judge found it "misleading" that while Barr's statements were true, they were too narrow and left out many findings that would've cast doubt. Again, if this is a definition of "misleading" then The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and every news outlet is misleading. It is not that they leave out any context, because providing all context would be impossible. They leave out necessary context. For Flynn, they leave out the fact that the edits went on longer and involved more people than was standard; for Ukraine, they always called Jonathan Turley, the "Republican scholar" because Republicans called him, but they always omitted the fact that he was a long-standing Democrat who disagreed with them; when they discuss Trump's Charlottesville comments, they ignore that he explicitly condemned neo-Nazis and White Nationalists'. Name the story, Kavanaugh, Ukraine, FISA warrant, Russia, and the media are always telling you one side and leaving out inconvenient facts for their narrative.
The next paragraph is a litany of decisions that Barr made and liberals disagree with. Each decision Barr made was a reasonable decision. Maybe the decisions were wrong, but enough fair-minded people agree with them, that it's unfair to paint them as evidence that he's corrupt. He believes that the Russia investigation was improperly started. Is that evidence of corruption? Is the attorney general disagreeing with an inspector general so nefarious? How hard would it be to find previous attorney generals disagreeing with inspectors general? Obama and Democratic representatives disagree with court decisions, does that make them corrupt, too?
He called the investigation "spying." In other words, he said that confidential informants who were reporting the actions of Trump affiliates spies to law enforcement and intelligence agencies "spying."
He reduced the DoJ's recommended sentence for Roger Stone. Every knowledgeable person who looked at that case thought the recommendation was too high. Even so, the recommendation was merely a recommendation, it was the judge's ultimate decision. And the recommendation, even amended, included several years of jail time. By any metric you consider this, it was not a perversion of power, and yet, The New York Times is heaping onto a pile of other flimsy arguments hoping the volume of criticisms amounts to a real case.
It doesn't, and it shouldn't. The New York Times is using their history and the reputation they've earned to peddle a house of cards. Each thin and flimsy, but arranged in such a way that projects an illusion of a substantial argument. It is not; and every American needs to realize that these opinions collapse with the gentlest of breaths.
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