Wolff Did What Every Other Reporter Is Too Cowardly to Do

Trump and Michael Wolff

Having been around politics for decades and also been authoring a blog and columns for over a decade as well, one of the games that is played all too often by members of the media and reporters is that of scratching each others backs.  From the politician's perspective, it helps keep coverage more favorable while for the reporter it keeps the doors and access open to the politicians they write about.  In the process, coverage of the unvarnished truth often gets lost in the process as reporters put continued access above their duty to the public to expose corruption, incompetence, sexual misdeeds, etc., etc.   In his new book, Fire & Fury, Michael Wolff threw this game of protecting future access out the window and laid bare what far to many reporters are afraid to do and in the process centered a spotlight on the foul cesspool that is the current occupant of the White House and his enablers and sycophants.  A piece in GQ lays out this premise and explains what so many journalist who play the access game are acting as if someone pissed in their Cheerios and assailing Wolff.  Here are excerpts: 

All of Wolff’s excerpts from Fire & Fury . . . . . it confirms what we have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the cognitive ability to do this job, and that he [Trump] is surrounded at all times by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves. As much as I wanna discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff got it all. Wolff nailed them.

And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then taking full advantage of the administration's basic lack of knowledge about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim to be unaware that they were on the record. Wolff denies this, but he's very much up front in the book's intro about the fact that he was able to exploit the incredible "lack of experience" on display here. In other words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.

Thank God for that. Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.

Everyone around Donald Trump is too polite to Donald Trump. Democrats, foreign dignitaries, underlings… all of them. And the White House press is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with Sarah Sanders during press conferences—conferences where Sanders openly lies and pisses on democracy—to access merchants like Maggie Haberman doling out Trump gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist, dysfunctional, and corrupt. And for what purpose? It’s clear to me that Haberman and the like aren’t saving up their chits for just the EXACT right time to bring this Administration down. No, the only end goal of their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.

But Wolff didn’t do that. He did not engage in some endless bullshit access tango. No, Wolff actually USED his access, and extended zero courtesy to Trump on the process, and it’s going to pay off for him not just from a book sales standpoint, but from a real journalistic impact. I am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve to be torched.

Will the Media Do Its Job and Save the Nation from Trump?

I criticize the mainstream media regularly for its failure to do its job and report the facts and not just provide a platform for blowhards and hate merchants.  As I note repeatedly, had the media question the lies being disseminated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and provided full coverage to critics of the rush to war, the Iraq War.  Now, with the GOP's surrender to the dark side (see the previous post), the only thing that may save the nation from disaster is the news media - assuming it does its job unlike what happened in the run up to the Iraq War.  A column in the Washington Post suggests that perhaps Trump has unwittingly sent the media down a reporting road that may prove fatal to Trump's candidacy - especially if the Democrats help feed the media with stories that need to be pursued.  I hope that the column proves prophetic.  Here are excerpts:

The news media have come in for a lot of criticism in the way they’ve reported this election, which makes it exactly like every other election. But something may have changed just in the last few days. I have no idea how meaningful it will turn out to be or how long it will last.

But it’s possible that when we look back over the sweep of this most unusual campaign, we’ll mark this week as a significant turning point: the time when journalists finally figured out how to cover Donald Trump.

They didn’t do it by coming up with some new model of coverage, or putting aside what they were taught in journalism school. They’re doing it by rediscovering the fundamental values and norms that are supposed to guide their profession. 

If this evolution in coverage takes hold, we can trace it to the combined effect of a few events and developments happening in a short amount of time. The first was Trump’s press conference on Tuesday, the ostensible purpose of which was to answer questions about a fundraiser he held in January to raise money for veterans’ groups. In the course of the press conference, Trump was at his petulant, abusive worst, attacking reporters in general and those in the room.

These kinds of criticisms are not new — anyone who has reported a Trump rally can tell you how Trump always tosses some insults at the press, at which point his supporters turn around and hurl their own abuse at those covering the event — but Trump seemed particularly angry and unsettled.

It happened because the Post’s David Fahrenthold and some other reporters did what journalists are supposed to do. They raised questions about Trump’s fundraiser, and when they didn’t get adequate answers, they investigated, gathered facts, and asked more questions.

It was excellent work — time-consuming, difficult, and ultimately paying dividends in public understanding. And Trump’s attack on them for doing their jobs the way those jobs are supposed to be done couldn’t have been better designed to get every other journalist to want to do the same. . . . Trump may have wanted to intimidate them, but it’s likely to have the opposite effect.

The same day as the press conference, a trove of documents from Trump University was released as part of a class-action lawsuit accusing Trump of fraud. The documents revealed allegations as to just what a scam that enterprise was . . . .  questions are now being raised about an investigation the Texas Attorney General’s office undertook of Trump University, which concluded that it was cheating Texans out of large sums of money; the investigation was dropped by then-AG Greg Abbott, who later got $35,000 in contributions from Trump and is now the state’s governor.

Plenty of presidential candidates have had shady doings in their pasts, but can you think of anything that compares to Trump University? A party’s nominee allegedly running a con not just on unsuspecting victims, but on victims specifically chosen for their vulnerability and desperation?

Then you had Trump’s continued attacks on the judge presiding over that fraud case. It’s unusual enough for a presidential candidate to be publicly attacking a judge in a case he’s involved in, but what’s most appalling is the blatant bigotry at the basis of Trump’s criticisms. 

Put together this series of developments coming one after together, and I suspect that many journalists are deciding that the way to cover Trump is just to do it as honestly and assiduously as possible, which would itself be something almost revolutionary. If the tone of his coverage up until now has been “Wow, is this election crazy or what!” it could become much more serious — as it completely appropriate given that we’re choosing someone to hold the most powerful position on earth.

Trump himself probably finds such treatment grossly unfair, since to him “unfair” coverage is anything that doesn’t portray him in the most glowing terms. But it is perhaps ironic that after all this time of wondering how to cover this most unusual candidate, Trump has shown the press that the best way to do it is to cover him like every candidate should be covered. That means not just planting a camera at his rallies and marveling at how nuts it all is, but doing to work to fully vet his background, correcting his lies as swiftly and surely as they can, exploring what a Trump presidency would actually mean, and generally doing their jobs without letting him intimidate them.

If they can keep doing that, they’ll bring honor to their profession — and I doubt Trump’s candidacy could survive it.

Catholic Clergy Sex-Abuse Remains Pervasive and Needs to be Spotlighted

The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy continues to wage a war against the LGBT community and women and clerics continue to wrap themselves in feigned piety and religiosity.  Meanwhile, as a grand jury report from Central Pennsylvania which I have mentioned before shows that the church hierarchy despite the more open attitude of Pope Francis remains a moral cesspool.   Sex abuse and the cover up of past abuse remains rampant and will never be stamped out without (i) vigorous efforts of police and civil authorities, the Church being unable/unwilling to police itself, and (ii) a drastic change in the Church's sick, psychotic approach to sexuality in general.  I remain convinced that much of the cause of priestly sexual abuse traces to the emotional and psychological damage done by being raised in Catholic schools and seminaries.  A column in the Washington Post looks at just how pervasive the abuse of children and youths has been in a central Pennsylvania diocese, much of it shielded by undeserved deference to the Church.  Here are highlights:   

Like many longtime reporters, I celebrated the Oscar victory for “Spotlight” and the fearless journalism that exposed the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse scandal.

I would soon see the story, and the scandal, from a very different perspective.

Two days after the Oscar ceremony, news broke about another widespread church coverup. I found myself poring over a grand jury report outlining in sickening detail the abuse of hundreds of children by at least 50 priests and religious leaders in western Pennsylvania’s Altoona-Johnstown Diocese — in my hometown.

I moved away long ago, but I still have family there. I visit regularly, and my mom was a devoted parish volunteer during her lifetime. I figured I might recognize a few of the accused or some of the churches. I quickly realized things stretched far beyond that.

The names of priests and parishes from my childhood appeared, one after another, all familiar. My grade school priest. Not one but two pastors from my neighborhood parish, a half block from my childhood home. The principal, vice principal and music director from my high school. A priest I once met with to consider officiating my wedding. The priest at the church my four nieces and nephews attended. The chaplain of the nearby Catholic hospital, where my mom volunteered.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Two of the priests, leaders at Bishop McCort High School, where my parents sent me and my three brothers in the 1970s to receive a quality religious education, were “sexual partner[s]” who worked together to molest a 13-year-old boy, the report said. They coordinated visits to his house. Once one priest had “satisfied himself,” the report said, the other “took advantage of a victim he believed to be compliant.”

One had been my religion teacher.

First, I called my brothers, to vent. Then I tried comprehending the scale of the abuses. The Spotlight team identified about 80 predatory priests in an archdiocese of 1.8 million Catholics. The grand jury report found at least 50 priests and religious leaders in a diocese of fewer than 100,000. That was stunning enough. But there was more.

“Spotlight” depicted the Catholic clubbiness of Boston that allowed for abuse. In small-town Pennsylvania, corruption extended into all corners of the community. The church exercised “overwhelming access and influence,” even handpicking community leaders, including the police and fire chiefs. “The mayor would have them come to me, and I would interview them and I would tell him which I would pick,” a top bishop’s aide testified.

George Foster, manager of an outdoor billboard advertising company and a former high school classmate of mine, emerges as the hero — not an investigative reporting team.

Foster’s brother was a priest; the two heard rumors of abuses and began looking into them. In 2002, Foster wrote an op-ed for the local paper, calling on the church to clean up its house.

Immediately, he was inundated with tips and evidence from victims, attorneys and even the police. He also did something no journalist had: He went through the files at the Blair County Courthouse from the 1994 civil trial of the Rev. Francis Luddy, a priest accused of molesting boys. The lawsuit against Luddy was filed in 1987, but records were sealed at the church’s request. They became public during the trial.

Foster found in the files documents showing church officials knew of credible allegations against many additional priests but kept them secret. He confronted then-Bishop Joseph Adamec. If this were a movie, outraged authorities would have taken action. But that didn’t happen. Adamec rebuffed him.

Finally, in 2014, state investigators in a different child abuse case contacted Foster, and he provided his files. The report cited them extensively and called Foster’s actions “nothing short of heroic.”

I wondered where the journalists had been.  I called Richard Serbin, the attorney in the Luddy case, who regularly represents clergy sex-abuse victims. There wasn’t a paper with the prestige of the Boston Globe to make an impact, Serbin said. It happened in a small community in decline, and few noticed or cared. “The facts were all there, back in 1994,” Serbin said. “And no one bothered to look at them.”

Again, I ask myself how a decent moral person can remain part of a church that is so utterly bankrupt morally?  Similarly, why do politicians continue to fawn and give deference to high clerics who have been part of a world wide criminal conspiracy?  Is it really that frightening to let go of brainwashing that one received as a child?  And as with the author of the column, why are journalist so afraid to take on such and evil empire? 

Spotlight Wins Best Picture

The one thing that I hope to see at the Academy Awards last night happened: the movie Spotlight won best picture.  To me, this is a hugely important movie and I urge readers who have not seen it to make a point of doing so.  Not only is the movie an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, but it also shows the importance of investigative journalism - something in all too short supply nowadays when reporters, especially in the political realm simply repeat the talking points of politicians and never bother to verify the real facts.  Demagogues flourish when investigative reporting is diminished. Please see this movie!

How a Victim Culture Gone Mad Harms Real Victims

Not to beat a dead horse, but in follow up to the last post, a piece in The Daily Beast - authored by a woman - looks at the risks of jumping on the band wagon of every self-professed victim without at least pausing to make sure the alleged facts and the story line match up with objective facts.  With two daughters and a grand daughter, I am certainly sensitive to women's issues and hold a deep disgust for those (typically heterosexual males) who physically and/or sexually abuse woman. But, perhaps due to the attorney in me, I know that it is critical to check out the facts.  Blindly believing your client without asking hard questions can leave one to find themselves ambushed in court or torn apart in an opposing counsel's brief.  The same holds true in journalism (which, by the way, I believe includes blogging - especially since readers will quickly tell me when I'm wrong) and is something Rolling Stone and Fox News need to learn.  Here are highlights from The Daily Beast article:

When Rolling Stone first published its explosive story detailing UVA student Jackie’s alleged gang-rape by seven fraternity brothers, few in the mainstream media doubted its veracity.

And by giving blind faith to Jackie’s story, Erdely obfuscated some of the truth, leading Rolling Stone to acknowledge “discrepancies in Jackie’s account” on Friday.

[I]n valorizing Jackie’s trauma as a victim of rape (never mind that she was and remains an alleged victim), Rolling Stone ignored glaring holes in a story that was too good to check.

Erdely’s story did damage to University of Virginia’s reputation, but more importantly, the story has done a tragic disservice to other victims of sexual violence who might be prevented from coming forward out of fear that their stories will have to withstand the scrutiny and default skepticism of police, university officials, and reporters.

Rolling Stone should be shamed for egregiously poor reporting, failing to fact-check important details like the date of the night Jackie claimed she was violently raped for three hours in a Phi Kappa Psi frat house (the fraternity did not, in fact, host a party that evening).

But of the hundreds of thousands, including journalists, who read the Rolling Stone story, few noticed Erdely’s failure to interview any of the seven men who participated in the attack on Jackie or corroborate many of the other easily corroborated details she reported.

When journalists did scrutinize what they viewed as weak and one-sided reporting, they were met with accusations of victim-blaming.
When Worth magazine editor-in-chief Richard Bradley voiced his skepticism in a blogpost, he was immediately declared a “UVA truther” by New York magazine contributing writer Marin Cogan, who compared him to 9/11 conspiracy theorists for even questioning Erdely’s story, despite including plenty of caveats that she might be telling the truth.

Cogan has since apologized for using the term and acknowledged she was wrong about the UVA story.

Jezebel’s Anna Marian attacked Reason writer Robby Soave for taking a similar stance as Bradley (in Marian’s words, Coave “takes Bradley’s giant ball of shit and runs with it.”) Marian too has since apologized, acknowledging that she was “dead fucking wrong.”

But others, like feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, have merely shifted focus to how “rape apologists” will greet the news of Rolling Stone’s admission of their report’s shortcomings, while still believing Jackie’s story . . . 

The lesson Marcotte drew from the magazine’s climbdown was that it was “interesting that rape apologists think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” She cited no examples. While others were debating the failings of Rolling Stone’s process, Marcotte was railing against “rape apologists [who] are so sure rapes are hoaxes...”

Still others attempted to turn the focus away from Jackie onto the magazine that credulously told her story. 

Of course Rolling Stone’s reputation should—and has—suffered from the Jackie debacle. And it will likely have a disastrous effect on Erdely’s career.

But writers like Marcotte and Valenti still cast Jackie as a victim, despite the growing evidence casting serious doubt on her story.

We live in a culture that valorizes victims—where to question one woman’s claims of sexual abuse is to be a “rape apologist,” someone who effectively dismisses heinous crime under any and all circumstances. If Jackie is lying, she will likely—and sadly—suffer for it. And she has already put herself in an unenviable position by reaffirming her version of events as described to Rolling Stone in a subsequent interview with the Washington Post.

The problem with valorizing the victim, as a “victim culture” does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim’s narrative is cast as an attack on that person.

Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming.” Of course, the flip-side of a victim is a bully, and it is notable that today, everyone rushes to be a victim—the right wing under attack from the left, the left under attack from the right, bigots still seeking to attack gay people, and claiming they cannot voice their bigotry.

The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

I often bemoan the fact that we have so little good investigative reporting nowadays.  Perhaps, that is what Erdely thought she was doing.  But by not doing her fact checking and corroborating statements easily verifiable, she ended up acting no better than Fox News and pushing the story she perhaps wished was true and most certainly wanted readers to believe was true.  She did a huge disservice to everyone.

Bradley Manning Verdict: Not Guilty of Aiding the Enemy

Bradley Manning was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act by a military judge but was acquitted of the separate and far more serious charge of “aiding the enemy.”  Manning now “faces a possible maximum sentence of more than 130 years in military jail when his sentence is handed down.  Personally, I hope Manning receives a light sentence.  I believe that he was a whistle blower who provided an invaluable service in exposing some of the war crimes committed by American troops in the fool's errands launched by the feckless Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  What I find most disturbing is that while Barack Obama has feign horror at the war crimes authorized by the Bush/Cheney regime, his administration has spent more time and effort prosecuting those who have exposed the crimes rather than prosecuting those who committed or authorized the crimes in the first place.   The end conclusion?  First, that Barack Obama is morally bankrupt and is not much better than Bush/Cheney in this regard.  Second, that a harsh sentence for Manning will be one more step towards totalitarianism which will intimidate the press.   A piece in The Guardian looks at Obama's unrelenting war on whistle blowers and, by extension, the press.  Here are highlights:

The American journalism trade is breathing a collective – but premature and, in many cases, grossly hypocritical – sigh of relief today. A military judge has found Bradley Manning guilty of many crimes, but "aiding the enemy" isn't one of them.

Had the judge found Manning guilty of aiding the enemy, she would have set a terrible precedent. For the first time, an American court – albeit a military court – would have said it was a potentially capital crime simply to give information to a news organization, because in the internet era an enemy would ultimately have been able to read what was leaked.

However, if journalism dodged one figurative bullet, it faces many more in this era. The ever-more-essential field of national security journalism was already endangered. It remains so. The Obama administration's war on leaks and, by extension, the work of investigative reporters who dare to challenge the most secretive government in our lifetimes, has been unrelenting.

The Manning verdict had plenty of bad news for the press. By finding Manning guilty of five counts of espionage, the judge endorsed the government's other radical theories, and left the journalism organization that initially passed along the leaks to the public, Wikileaks, no less vulnerable than it had been before the case started. Anyone who thinks Julian Assange isn't still a target of the US Government hasn't been paying attention; if the US can pry him loose from Ecuador's embassy in London and extradite him, you can be certain that he'll face charges, too, and the Manning verdict will be vital to that case.

The military tried its best to make life difficult for journalists covering the Manning trial, but activists – not traditional journalists – were the ones who fought restrictions most successfully.

National security journalist Jeremy Scahill summed it up after the verdict when he told Democracy Now: "We're in a moment when journalism is being criminalized."

For those who want to tell the public what the government is doing with our money and in our name, there are new imperatives. Governmental secrecy, surveillance and the systematic silencing of whistleblowers require updated methods for journalists and journalism organizations of all kinds. Americans pursuing this craft have to understand the risks and find countermeasures.

That is not enough. The public needs to awaken to the threat to its own freedoms from the Obama crackdown on leaks and, by extension, journalism and free speech itself. We are, more and more, a society where unaccountable people can commit unspeakable acts with impunity. They are creating a surveillance state that makes not just dissent, but knowledge itself, more and more dangerous. What we know about this is entirely due to leakers and their outlets. Ignorance is only bliss for the unaccountable.

Yes, I supported Obama over Romney, but in politics, often one has to pick the lesser of the evils.  Obama's persecution of whistle blowers and his refusal to sign and ENDA like executive order speak volumes and none of it good.   This portion of a piece in the Virginian Pilot on the verdict continues to haunt me:

Manning acknowledged giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

The video released by Manning showed the American military members involved exulting in the deaths of totally innocent civilians.  It makes me very ashamed to be an American.