The Cost of Mobilized Media

I first encountered the term "mobilized media" in an Israeli context when a prominent Israeli journalist cheerily confessed that the Israeli media had been "fully mobilized" to bring about Shimon Peres's victory over Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1996 election, following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.

As an example, the media omitted any mention of Peres criticizing "stupid Arabs" shortly before the election, lest it hurt him with Israeli Arab voters. Not so long afterward, when Court President Aharon Barak was a bit too candid in explaining that there were no Mizrachi judges on the Supreme Court because there were none qualified, the Israeli press declined to report it.

What was once an Israeli phenomenon — i.e., legitimation of the idea that the purpose of journalists is not to uncover the truth, but to suppress it in the pursuit of political ends — has now spread everywhere. The number of crucial and long-running stories on which the mainstream media (MSM) missed the boat entirely in pursuit of a partisan political agenda is a long one.

THE BREAKDOWN OF trust in the MSM in America can probably be traced to the 2004 resignation of longtime CBS news anchor Dan Rather, in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, after he highlighted and stoutly defended documents purporting to cast aspersions on President George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. These documents were shown to be forgeries.

Until the 2020 election was safely past, the MSM studiously ignored the Hunter Biden laptop, relying on a letter signed by 51 former senior intelligence officials that it bore the marks of a Russian information operation. This justification persisted despite the fact that the laptop was in the possession of the FBI and had already been authenticated.

And those claims of Russian disinformation followed years of the Trump-Russian collusion story, during which the public was told nightly that "walls were closing in" on Trump, only for the report of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller to come up empty-handed. For over a year, the MSM dismissed the idea that Covid-19 originated in a Wuhan lab as a crackpot, racist conspiracy theory. Today, that theory has been vindicated by every major national intelligence agency in the world.

The BBC is the most watched and listened-to news source in the world. But its director-general Tim Davie and news director Deborah Turness both resigned last week in the wake of the leak of an internal dossier that described how two clips filmed 50 minutes apart of Donald Trump speaking to a crowd of supporters on January 6, 2020, had been spliced together in a BBC documentary to make it look like Trump was encouraging the mob to riot at the Capitol.

That same dossier also included criticisms of the BBC's coverage of the war in Gaza. Since October 23, the BBC has had to correct an average of two Gaza stories a week.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of numerous bestsellers and one of the highest-paid journalists in the world, confessed that he was ashamed of how he had executed his role as a moderator of a panel on men competing in women's sports three years earlier. He fully understood such participation to be inherently unfair, but had been unwilling to risk the calumny of the right-thinking class.

Liel Liebowitz was unforgiving: "Malcolm Gladwell does not see journalism as a tool for telling the truth; he, like so many of his colleagues, understands it as a pursuit of social clout, career advancement, and other earthly rewards by advancing dogmas that are popular among a certain class of people... Which in turn requires prevaricating until it is no longer profitable to do so."

A SMALL BUT revealing example of the legitimation of media mobilization for the cause comes in the form of the recent outcry after CBS Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan dared to ask a few tough questions of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. She began by pointing out that he once said that there are no "election deniers" on his side of the aisle, but of late had been warning of impending "rigged elections." Jeffries replied that he was referring to Republican gerrymandering.

Brennan countered by noting that Democratic states also engage in partisan gerrymandering, as in California where Gov. Gavin Newsom just pushed through a redistricting initiative which will almost certainly result in an electoral map with far fewer Republican-leaning districts than the electoral map previously produced by a bipartisan redistricting commission.

The questions were straightforward and logical, but they triggered a flood of comments attributing them to Bari Weiss's recent takeover as head of CBS News. Apparently, only Republican politicians are allowed to be challenged. (Does anyone remember Candace Crowley acting as if she was part of a tag team with Barack Obama, as moderator of the second Romney-Obama debate in 2012?)

Park MacDougald in Tablet pointed to a funny example of the way the media shifts the narrative according to whose ox is gored. No Republican has been subjected to more media ridicule — admittedly, justified — than Marjorie Taylor Greene of "Jewish space lasers" fame. According to a 2022 Politico article, the Biden White House intended to make her the poster child for the Republican party in the same way that Republicans would now like to make Zohran Mamdani the poster child for the Democrats.

Yet she is earning a "strange new respect," according to a recent New York Times profile, because she has been attacking President Trump for straying from the MAGA messages and positions, most notably by attacking Iran and supporting Israeli "genocide" in Gaza. The change in the NYT is not because MTG had grown suddenly sane. The day after the Times profile, she tweeted her 1.6 million Twitter followers that should anything happen to her, they should "find out which foreign governments or powerful people" would kill her to prevent her from revealing the truth about Jeffrey Epstein.

In a similar vein, the Times, which once extensively covered anti-Semitism allegations against Tucker Carlson for his promotion of the "anti-Semitic" Great Replacement "conspiracy theory," did not even mention his comment at the Charlie Kirk memorial service about "hummus eaters," whom he suggested were involved in Kirk's assassination. MacDougald points out that the left-wing Media Matters is today less likely to speak of Carlson's "Nazi apologia" and "Holocaust revisionism," than in the past, and more likely to cite favorably his opposition to the US's Iran air strikes and Israel's war in Gaza. His anti-Semitism is suddenly not an issue when he is on their team in criticizing President Trump.

THE DAMAGE from the loss of trust in the MSM goes far beyond specific instances of "fake news." It has given rise to all sorts of insanity on the other side of the political spectrum. For if nothing can be trusted, perhaps the wildest conspiracy theories are really true, no matter how little evidence they invoke. The title of a work on Putin's Russia captures this phenomenon precisely: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

Meaning the likes of Candace Owens and Alex Jones owe their huge followings to the breakdown of trust in traditional news sources. Nothing, literally nothing, is too insane for them to advance as a theory. Recently, Owens announced with total confidence that Tyler Robinson did not kill Charlie Kirk, though he may have been involved, despite his own communications to his "friend," on whose behalf he said he was acting, setting out his intentions.

Those communications, according to Owens, do not bear time stamps, and thus were obviously created by "the feds." When a CNN interviewer informed her that they were not communicated on a platform with time stamps, she was briefly taken aback, before resuming her confident assertion that the feds were involved, while at the same time claiming the assassination was an "inside job" by someone in Turning Point USA. And by the way, Israel and pro-Israel Jews were also involved.

Every plot she uncovers is offered, in the words of National Review editor Rich Lowry, "with near-sociopathic self-confidence." Among her revelations: Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon, rather Stanley Kubrick filmed a fake landing for NASA; Harvard is a Mossad base; Jews killed JFK — and also, wouldn't you know it, Michael Jackson.

This woman, incidentally, has millions of listeners. As Lowry remarks wryly, "It takes considerable talent to take an open-and-shut murder case [i.e., the Kirk assassination] and turn it into a whodunit and you've-got-to-listen-to every episode-true-crime mystery."

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, "You're entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own acts." The trouble is that today everyone has their own "facts," and it is making us all crazy.