Last week in Chronicles, Mark Judge took on the onerous task of reading longtime journalist/scold Margaret Sullivan’s Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (2022), a book I ignored. I’ve had my fill of Sullivan’s Democratic propaganda from her stint as The New York Times’ Public Editor and subsequent Fantasyland columns in The Washington Post and The Guardian. Judge, who often writes for Splice Today (among other outlets), was semi-famously fucked by the media in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, a vicious lynching that left him bloodied and broke, which was of no concern to the mainstream media that opposed Kavanaugh (who went to high school with Judge in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s). After a period of retrenchment, Judge wrote The Devil’s Triangle—a worthwhile read for the few young men and women considering a career in the cratering industry of newspapers/websites.
It’s Judge’s contention that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Washington Post reporting on the Watergate scandal—and despite what some conservatives say today, it was a scandal as well as an enormously entertaining saga that lasted for two years—poisoned journalism with eager-beaver well-educated and sanctimonious reporters trying, and mostly failing, to strike Watergate gold. I was in high school and college when it all happened, and as a Nixon opponent the weekly revelations—from the televised hearings in 1973 (still the best reality series ever aired) to the comically corrupt Spiro Agnew’s resignation for petty corruption in Maryland, to Nixon declaring he wasn’t a “crook,” the Saturday Night Massacre, and then his smarmy leaving-office address on August 8, 1974.
I was working at Princeton University that summer as a science lab janitor—mostly treated like dirt by the grad students who experimented on rats, cats and monkeys—and on the night of Nixon’s resignation, after work there was a really, really fun party on Princeton’s Nassau Street. The following month, back at Johns Hopkins for sophomore year, some friends and I, hanging out on the Lower Quad, learned from The Evening Sun that Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon. Despite all the events that preceded Ford’s blunder, this news was jaw-dropping.
I don’t agree with all of Judge’s essay—it’s too pat an explanation for the media’s bias—but this point he made was mostly on-target: “Like other highs, the high reporters were seeking for decades after Watergate consumed them. It wasn’t enough to write well about sports, or community events, or the often-boring grind of ordinary politics. Everything had to be compared to Watergate. Everything had to give writers that next high—be the next high—be the next Watergate. Whether it was Iran-Contra [which both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush survived with mere flesh wounds], the Bork hearing, Hurricane Katrina, or Russiagate—being a journalist was like being a crackhead, and the only satisfaction would come from torching another Republican leader.”
I’m not sure about “crackhead” crack—a white-wine spritzer was more common—and journalists, the most ambitious of which were shameless in their zeal for notoriety, did go after Democrat Bill Clinton (taking a cue, and not always attributing, the once-groundbreaking Matt Drudge, who’s since disappeared). And the affixing of –gate to any story that was mildly salacious was more a function of laziness. Judge is correct about how out-of-control every branch of media was after the January 6, 2021 Trump-inspired riot, disgustingly comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
It’s said, not without merit, that John F. Kennedy’s election and short administration in the early-1960s inspired an untold number of young Americans to enter public service, whether in government or programs like the Peace Corps, and that’s understandable, although it was irritating that the media highlighted—for two decades—the “up-and-coming” politicians who copied the mythologized JFK’s hand gestures and cadence. It was pretty funny when a Congressman from, say, Colorado, spoke with a Boston accent.
Likewise, in the mid-1970s, print journalism was the “hot” post-university destination, not unlike the finance industry in the 1980s, and newsrooms (often re-modeled to reflect a new “professionalism) were littered with self-righteous and upwardly mobile reporters who hoped a 10-part series on malfeasance in the County Supervisor’s Office would lead to a Pulitzer. It was a summer job at The Baltimore Sun in 1976—as a well-paid library clerk—that confirmed my suspicion that I’d never fit in a stifling atmosphere where editors and sub-editors (this was when news organizations employed such people) would lop off half a completed story, often to justify their employment. I started my own weekly newspaper; this also wasn’t uncommon, as the advancement from “hot” to “cold” type in the late-1960s allowed even cash-strapped entrepreneurs across the country to provide an “alternative” to the fusty and self-important dailies.
Anyway, Judge includes this prediction: “Four more years under President Trump are going to be an eternity for [the media], and as often happens with addicts, they have run out of tricks to improve their fading high. Phony scandals don’t work. Impeachment doesn’t work. Russiagate II won’t work. The ultimate junk supplier, the deep state, is going out of business.”
I don’t believe Democrats have a monopoly on Deep State machinations, but the recalibration of the media, as they reckon with “vibe shifts,” is at least bleacher-seats entertainment.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023