No doubt you recall how Donald Trump spent much of the 2016 presidential campaign playing the (liberal) media for useful idiots. This, by getting them to report and comment on Hillary’s hacked e-mails as if they were more incriminating than Nixon’s tapes.
As it happened, I spent much of that campaign trying to get my comrades to stop doing so. Unfortunately, they couldn’t care less that they were not only peddling idle gossip as breaking news, but aiding the distribution of stolen property and advancing Trump’s patently hypocritical narrative about Hillary.
Here, for example, is what I wrote in “Hey Media, Wikileaker Assange Is Still a Self-Promoting, Bail-Jumping Rape Suspect!” August 29, 2016:
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Yet, like a self-appointed messiah of transparency, Assange is sharing his hacked loot with any news organization prepared to facilitate his self-aggrandizing crusade. And far too many news anchors and political commentators are playing along — like disciples spreading his gospel.
You’d think they would want to hide in shame after foraging through the e-mails of DNC staffers, then reporting and commenting as if they’re ‘shocked, shocked’ that those staffers were doing, well, as staffers do.
What’s more, all of the leaked ‘bombshells’ pertain to nothing more than mundane gossip, intrigue, griping, and backstabbing among those staffers and officials. Which explains why news anchors are reading these e-mails live on air as if they were nothing more than passages from Mark Leibovich’s 2014 bestseller This Town, which fairly lampoons Washington, DC as a veritable Peyton Place.
Nonetheless, this is what is passing for ‘Breaking News’ every day now — as Assange leaks a new cache of hacked e-mails like manna from heaven for lazy, unconscionable and myopic journalists. But what do you think CNN, Fox News, the BBC, The New York Times, the Guardian, and other news outlets would do if Assange were leaking hacked e-mails of their anchors and reporters — purportedly to expose bias in the media? The obvious answer only hints at why my disgust with the news media compelled me to write commentaries like “Journalism Is ‘Having a Very, Very Pathetic Moment,’” November 13, 2013. …
The real story here is the media’s complicity in propagating hacked documents that do far more harm than good. For just as Assange will leak anything for attention, news organizations will broadcast any leak for ratings – even the national security of the country be damned.
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Of course, we now know that, thanks to the media, Hillary’s e-mails became a decisive campaign issue, which probably cost her the election. Everyone in the media knows this. And I suspect most of them harbor regrets. But I never expected any of them to ever say so.
This is why I am so heartened by Joe Scarborough’s mea culpa. After all, he is arguably the most influential liberal-media personality in the country.
Joe Scarborough expressed regret on Tuesday for how much coverage his MSNBC show dedicated to covering the Hillary Clinton email controversy during the 2016 election. …
‘[O]bviously looking back on it, we on Morning Joe, and others in media, paid way too much attention to that,’ Scarborough added. ‘Especially if you look at what we’ve been through over the past four or five years.’
(Daily Beast, December 8, 2020)
Mind you, I doubt anyone in the media, including Scarborough, would’ve harbored any regret if Hillary had won. But, as he intimated, they all know they have blood on their hands. This is just his way of seeking forgiveness. And I respect the courage it took for him to seek it so publicly.
I forgive you, Joe.
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