The Irreparable Fourth Estate: A Case Study
Imagine the following scenario.
The daughter of a police captain decides she wants to grow up and become a journalist. The first paper she works at gets shut down. She works briefly for a national publication but can't cut it there and leaves after two years. She then ends up at a world-renown newspaper but struggles to make inroads and separate herself from her peers. She wallows in this situation for 4 years unable to rise above her colleagues. Roughly 14 months before a presidential election, she has become a backbencher during a time when there is little to no news or movement. As candidates visit Iowa she has nothing to report and no prospects for advancement. She's stuck with no hope for her floundering journalism career.
Until she receives a phone call.
It is a phone call from the campaign manager of a rival campaign insinuating that one of the high-rising candidates plagiarized a speech at a recent Iowa campaign event. Were this to get out, it could derail this candidate's campaign. The journalist listens intently. The campaign manager offers to document the similarities. Time is ticking. The journalist knows she is not the only one who has been offered this tip. Should she wait to verify and then publish? Should she ignore the request due to it being dirty politics and below what she stands for with her journalistic integrity? The journalist knows this could potentially be her big break. But is it worth it to make a name for oneself by dragging down others?
For The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, the answer was a resounding yes.
On September 12, 1987, Maureen Dowd with the help of Michael Dukakis' campaign manager, published this exact article. The up-and-coming candidate in question was none other than Joe Biden, a rising U.S. Senator from the state of Delaware. Despite having properly cited him numerous times before, Biden failed this one time to cite the words of British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock, an act that led Dowd and her Times colleagues to open the floodgates. Four days later The Times claimed Biden had failed to cite Bobby Kennedy during a speech back in February. Biden's law school was contacted about an article he had failed to properly cite as a student, a mistake common enough but one that was now being magnified on the national scale. By September 24th, Joe Biden had withdrawn from the race and Maureen Dowd was on her way to becoming a staple at The New York Times for the next 35 years.
I bring up Dowd's beginnings because her story very much dovetails from LL's piece on Friday. Because while it could be argued that Dowd followed in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein during her initial reporting, what has happened to Dowd in the years since bears zero resemblance whatsoever to the Post's famous duo. Over time, Dowd has used her platform for partisan purposes under the guise of nonpartisan reporting. In fact, it has become so blatantly obvious that even her own Wikipedia page has an entire subheading dedicated to her politics, especially a confounding hatred of Hillary Clinton. From that page:
Other commentators have criticized Dowd for having an obsession with Bill and, especially, Hillary Clinton.[38][39][40][37] During the 2008 Democratic primary, Dowd published an article titled "Can Hillary Clinton Cry Herself Back to the White House?", which a 2016 study said "[serves] to reinforce the stereotype that tears and visible emotions are feminine traits and signs of weakness".[41] She also published a column where she likened former Senator Clinton to the "Terminator", a ruthless cyborg where "unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave"; in 2013 Jessica Ritchie, a research assistant at the University of Leicester, argued that portrayals such as these sought to portray Clinton and her presidential bid as improper and unnatural.[42][43] According to then-public editor of The New York Times Clark Hoyt, Dowd's columns about Clinton were "loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband".[31] A 2014 analysis by the advocacy group Media Matters of 21 years of Dowd's columns about Hillary Clinton found that of the 195 columns by Dowd since November 1993 containing significant mentions of Clinton, 72 percent (141 columns) were negative towards Clinton.[44].
References:
- 38. Msopine, "Maureen Dowd - From respected columnist to Mean Girl", Daily Kos, April 23, 2013.
- 39. ^ Arthur Chu, "Maureen Dowd vs. Hillary Clinton, MRAs and the Honey Badger Brigade: The dazzling glare of sexism and the alluring 'gender-blind' lie", Salon, April 24, 2015.
- 40. ^ Brennan Suen, "New York Times' Maureen Dowd Writes Yet Another Anti-Clinton Column", Media Matters, July 10, 2016.
- 41. ^ Jones, Jennifer J. (2016). "Talk "Like a Man": The Linguistic Styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013". Perspectives on Politics. 14 (3): 625–642. doi:10.1017/S1537592716001092. ISSN 1537-5927.
- 42. ^ Dowd, Maureen (March 23, 2008). "Opinion | Haunting Obama's Dreams". Retrieved August 6, 2018.
- 43. ^ Ritchie, Jessica (2013). "Creating a Monster". Feminist Media Studies. 13 (1): 102–119. doi:10.1080/14680777.2011.647973. ISSN 1468-0777. S2CID 142886430.
- 44. ^ Willis, Oliver; Groch-Begley, Hannah (June 18, 2014). "The Numbers Behind Maureen Dowd's 21-Year Long Campaign Against Hillary Clinton". Media Matters.
Can a journalist ever truly separate himself or herself from their own biases?
The hope was always yes, that journalists could, in fact, do this. But as we have seen with Dowd, this clearly isn't the case. And this is somebody who is a professed liberal or at least someone who at one point identified as such. In 2004 Dowd said, "The only difference is that I've gone from Democratic readers going 'Dear Media Whore' to conservative readers going 'Dear Liberal Slut.'" Yet as we can clearly see when 72%(!) of your columns are negative toward a particular Democratic candidate then you can't in good conscience claim to be unbiased in your work. If you have your own personal agenda then you are creating news rather than reporting it. That is when it becomes dangerous to the health of the republic.
That is when you end up writing articles like "Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk." And that is when you and your publication go all-in on discrediting a candidate simply to make a presidential race that much more competitive.
The idea of resentment politics is what fueled the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Fear is one of the strongest human emotions. But for a democracy to thrive, its media should not be subject to that same fear. Sadly, that's what all this has become. Publications like The New York Times are fearful that their (perceived) ideology could turn away subscribers. Fewer subscribers mean less ad revenue. Less ad revenue means a lower stock price. A lower stock price means upset investors. Upset investors mean more calls to managing editors, asking them to "temper down" the way in which they present the news. And "tempering down" the news creates a lane for journalists like Maureen Dowd to be openly hostile to Democrats to reassure subscribers that The Times is equally critical of both Republicans and Democrats.
I'm ever the optimist. But the truth is our media has failed the American people this past decade. While CNN was the latest public debacle, journalists like Maureen Dowd, Peter Baker, Seung Min Kim, Ashley Parker, and others continue to be given a platform despite clear and obvious disdain for the Democratic Party. When supposedly neutral journalists inject their biases into their reporting, it changes the narrative. Critical information consumers like us on this blog lose confidence and rightfully so. You all know LL and my politics. But we're not writing for the "newspaper of record" or the paper that insists that "democracy dies in darkness." We have a clear agenda: to create a safe and vibrant community of pragmatic Democratic voters. Those that do not share that view simply bypass our site. Yet here we are with anti-Democratic journalists being given a national platform to inject their politics through the work with zero repercussions. We have reached unprecedented times in our nation's history.
At the end of the day, we have to recognize that The Fourth Estate is now a failed state. It can no longer be trusted to present the news without a biased agenda. Whether it's the embedded biases of journalists like Maureen Dowd, the desire for access journalism of folks like Maggie Haberman, the withholding of critical information to later use it in a book like Peter Baker, or the need to inject themselves into the story like Seung Min Kim, we no longer have unbiased reporters at the country's most visible and influential newspapers. Combined with the consistent drumbeat of public polling and it can and should be argued that our media is nothing more than entertainment news; that it is creating stories and horse race narratives simply to drive up ratings and drive away any semblance of journalistic integrity. Democracy may die in darkness as The Washington Post byline says, but it also dies in broad daylight due to an incessant desire to play both sides. But as a viral 2018 Tweet says: "If someone says it's raining and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which one is fucking true."
A lesson our most influential newspapers and media outlets refuse to learn.