There are days, so help me, when it becomes impossible for me to tell the difference between the daily satires I write to kick off The Andrew Klavan Show and the world as it actually is. Just when I think I’ve painted the left in the most extreme terms in order to highlight the absurdity of their ideas and actions, the left actually pushes their ideas and actions to those same extremes and becomes more absurd than I could possibly have imagined.
For instance, I frequently mock the New York Times as “a former newspaper.” I thought this was satirical overstatement meant to underscore the fact that the Times has descended over the last two decades from a great, if liberal-leaning, paper, to a second-rate and sophomoric collection of left-wing hit pieces.
But on Thursday’s front page, the Times actually completed that descent, becoming something other than a newspaper altogether and thus turning my satire to reality.
“Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed,” the headline read. And here’s the lede: “Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.”
Later the Times added: “The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained…”
So according to unnamed officials unnamed investigators told unnamed associates that the Mueller report was damaging to Trump but they won’t say how.
There are three bylines on this piece, and two more reporters are credited with contributed reporting. It took five so-called journalists to get a story that sounds like the old James Taylor lyric: “Someone said someone said something ’bout something else someone might have said about her.”
Now, this week I have been teaching at Hillsdale College as the Pulliam Distinguished Fellow in Journalism. And since I am such a distinguished journalistic fellow, I would like to use my moral authority to explain to the New York Times that one essential part of every news story is where the reported information comes from. Without that, how can the reader know what the story actually is? If anonymous sourcing is not a last-ditch technique used only under extreme conditions, it becomes a cheap trick that allows political stratagems to masquerade as news.
People — people in Washington especially — don’t speak to reporters out of the goodness of their hearts. They have agendas. They have motives. They have more or less inside information — maybe none. If I don’t know who they are and what they want, how can I judge whether they’re reliable and what they are trying to accomplish? In a story like this one — basically just a rumor passed along in a game of Telephone — that’s not merely an essential part of the story. That is the story.
At least the Times is honest about its own motives: “At stake in the dispute… is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history.” Stung by the fact that the whole world can now see that their two Pulitzer-winning years of reporting are in fact the biggest nothingburger ever seen outside of a state fair, the Times hopes that by piling on just a little more nothing, they can keep the hoax going until they can spin away their own journalistic malfeasance.
Donald Trump has a gift for making other people destroy themselves. Reeling under his bruising style, they try to remake themselves in his image in order to strike back — and instead they simply soil their own reputations.
The New York Times is now so steeped in Trump hatred, they have dragged themselves down beneath anything that can reasonably be called journalism. “Former newspaper” is not satire anymore.