When you work in a corrupt system, your own corruption becomes invisible to you. You know yourself to be an essentially good person. Your friends like you. You’re nice to your wife. You have professional accomplishments. And if you take a bribe now and then or lie or otherwise abuse the public trust, well, you’re a cop in 1960s New York, you’re a Soviet bureaucrat, you’re a Chicago Democrat – everyone around you is doing the same thing, and the only people who complain about it are the others, the non-cops, the counter-revolutionaries, the Republicans, the bad guys. You don’t have to listen to them. They’re beyond the pale.
Occasionally, this leads to moments of mordant humor, when the corrupt person is brought outside of his system and the corruption he can’t see suddenly becomes starkly visible to everyone else. This happened when the dirty Tammany Hall political boss George Plunkitt tried to publicly explain the difference between honest graft and dishonest graft. What was the problem? “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” Plunkitt famously said.
It also happened this week when New York Times Editor Dean Baquet tried to publicly explain why Times coverage of sex charges against Joe Biden has been so different from their coverage of those against Brett Kavanaugh.
The networks have ignored the charges against Biden and the Times has soft-pedaled them because Biden is the presumptive Democrat nominee for president and they want him to win. They all hammered Brett Kavanaugh because he was a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court and they wanted him to lose. Approximately zero people believe there is any other reason for the difference.
Tara Reade’s accusation that Biden pinned her to the wall and put his fingers inside her is unproved, but she did work for Biden and she did tell people about it back in 1993 when she says it happened. Christine Blasey Ford’s charge that Kavanaugh attempted to sexually assault her when they were both teens has no corroboration whatsoever. As Mollie Hemingway, who co-wrote the book on the case, points out: there is no evidence Ford and Kavanaugh ever met.
The coverage of Kavanaugh included wild, unsubstantiated charges by women, some of whom later recanted or were debunked. It included female journalists recounting their own experiences of being sexually assaulted in youth as if they were somehow evidence against Kavanaugh. It included the imbecilic call to “believe all women,” as if women were less prone to dishonesty than men, which is true in the experience of no one.
The coverage of the Biden charges looks pretty much like the space between the last paragraph and this one. But on Easter Sunday, on page 20, the Times did issue a story shrugging the charges off.
Baquet’s explanation of the difference in coverage was grimly hilarious in the manner of Boss Plunkitt.
“Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case.”
Joe Biden’s status as President of the United States may also be said to be in question. And if you want to know why the average person doesn’t know what he’s been charged with, it’s because Baquet and his cronies haven’t covered it. Baquet also, amazingly, admits he allowed the Biden campaign to review the story. On their suggestion, a true statement referring to other charges against Biden was dropped from the story.
Baquet doesn’t know that his faux explanations are transparently, not to say hilariously, dishonest and invalid. Everyone around him is making the same sort of excuses, lying about their motives, and creating self-righteous rationalizations for their attacks on their political opponents, which suddenly cease to be valid when their political friends do the same thing. Believe all women, then don’t.
I’m sure Baquet’s a nice fellow. The only people who reproach him are the others, the conservatives, the bad guys, beyond the pale. So what’s the problem? Like Boss Plunkitt, he thinks we need to make a distinction between honest dishonesty and dishonest dishonesty. If he ginned up the Kavanaugh story to get the nomination quashed, well, he seen his opportunities and he took em.
Who is there to condemn him after all? Whom that he knows? Who is there in his world to show him how far he’s strayed from what a journalist should be?
No one. Modern American journalism excludes such people. That’s precisely why it’s become corrupt.