“I Serve No Man.”
Mark Judge for The Stream
For some future historian writing the history of American journalism, 2021 will be seen as a pivotal year. It’s not only a year in which the liberal media again disgraced itself. That has been going on for decades. It’s also the year that conservative journalism started to come into its own.
Actually, I shouldn’t even call it “conservative” journalism. What bloomed in 2021 was simply journalism that revealed corruption and did so with accuracy, honor and fairness. Luke Rosiak, a reporter for the Daily Wire, uncovered an explosive scandal. School authorities in Loudon County, Virginia were covering up the rape of two female students at the hands of a boy who had put on a skirt and was claiming to be transgender. When the victim’s dad tried to talk about this at a school board meeting, authorities had him arrested, and the Soros-picked local prosecutor tried to send him to prison.
The Washington Post which supposedly owns coverage not only of D.C, but Loudon County and other suburbs, completely missed the story.
Censoring Justice Ginsburg
At around the same time, podcast host Joe Rogan was microwaving CNN, a network that had lied about him. In addition, liberal darling Katie Couric admitted that she had deceptively edited an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The left-wing but sane justice had actually criticized athletes who kneel for the national anthem.
On top of that, the mainstream media are still denying their part in the Russian collusion hoax. In 2016 they were fed a garbage conspiracy theory by the Hillary Clinton campaign. And they ran with it. They have not, and most likely will not, ever admit to wrongdoing.
The paper trail of media corruption goes back decades, including Slate’s “monkeyfishing” debacle, and before that Stephen Glass, and before that Walter Duranty. Now it’s getting exposed, so 2021 may represent a genuine shift in the media landscape. Conservatives now have the resources to not just complain and issue white papers, but to report and break news. Rosiak’s scoop is huge. With equal resources we can compete with the big boys, who in fact are very, very small. (The staffs of major papers are now mere skeleton crews, by historic standards.)
Newspapers Once Valued Truth-Telling
It’s hard to believe just how different things were when I was a kid in the 1970s. I held the Washington Post in awe. My father worked at National Geographic, just a couple blocks from the Post. In grade school we went on a field trip to the paper, and I remember the holy solemnity we observed entering the halls of 15 and L. Watergate had made journalists famous, and a lot of cool kids wanted to be reporters.
Then in 1989 I got a call from the Post. I was working at a record store. I had written a letter complaining about an essay they had run. They liked my letter and wanted me to come in and talk. I was 25. I met with the editors of the Outlook section — the Sunday op/ed part — who invited me to write “about whatever you want.” I was elated as I walked from the Post building to my dad’s office at National Geographic for a congratulatory lunch.
I did wind up writing several pieces for the Post, for the Outlook section and some record reviews for the Style section.
Don’t Mention Morality
Than I ran up against the liberal orthodoxy there. In 1994 Outlook ran a full page essay of mine about saving the Howard Theater, one of the oldest historical black theaters in America. Yet something strange happened to my copy. I had referred to the “moral and cultural collapse” that had destroyed the Howard and surrounding neighborhood — the drugs, rioting, and black racism that had brought down that part of Washington in the 1960s. The night before the paper came out, I was called and told by an editor that the phrase “moral and cultural collapse” had been changed to “social upheaval.” This was an editorial in the editorial section.
That was a turning point. I said goodbye to the Post. I would abandon what appeared to be an an enviable career path because I wanted to write in freedom and truth. Often working for literally nothing, I managed to break a major story and interview celebrities who revealed things the mainstream media censored. But I was way out of the mainstream, and earned accordingly.
The Media as Clinton Operatives
In 2016, the media helped sell a lie concocted by Hillary Clinton. The Clinton oppo research army claimed that Donald Trump was working with the Russians to flip the election. As Matt Taibbi recently wrote:
Russiagate was a daisy-chain of deceptions. The Clinton campaign systematically planted phony stories about things like the Trump-Alfa business, the pee tape/blackmail tale, and Carter Page’s supposed role as a Trump-Russia conduit; the FBI went along with the fiction that inquiries launched on these matters did not originate as paid research from the Clinton campaign; and a parade of news media figures were culpable either as dupes or witting participants in these frauds, which in the case of the Alfa stunt was executed in a ‘hurry’ to affect a presidential election.
He went on:
The only thing preventing all of this from being thought of as a scaled-up version of Watergate is the continued refusal of institutional America to own up to the comparison… . If the target had been anyone but Donald Trump, no one would bother even trying to deny how corrupt all this was, and continues to be.
Our Stasi Media
Then came 2018 and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. As most people know, I was dragged into the fight when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexual assault as teenagers in the 1980s and claimed that I was in the room when the attack took place.
The media went full-on Stasi. The main thing that helped me survive was I had no illusions about what they’d be willing to do. Still, I was shocked at the lengths they went to. The media and their DNC masters used opposition research, extortion threats and an attempted honey trap. Our Stasi media charged that I’d presided over ten gang rapes and bought and sold cocaine. They used as sources people I’ve never met.
They Tried to Assassinate Me
On the morning of September 16, reporter Emma Brown broke Ford’s story in the Washington Post. Brown also emailed me to ask about the allegation. But her questions diverged from what was published in her Washington Post article. In one email to me, which was leaked to the media, Brown referenced a girl named Leland Keyser. She was allegedly at the party that Ford, Brett and I also supposedly attended.
In the Washington Post piece published hours later, there was no mention of Leland Keyser. At the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel noticed this. Why was there no mention of Leland Keyser in the official Post piece? Why didn’t Post reporter Emma Brown cite Keyser, who according to Ford was at the party in question?
On September 22 the Post answered. From Fox News:
Ford, The Post acknowledged in an article by reporter Emma Brown on Saturday, had told the paper more than a week ago about Keyser and said ‘she did not think Keyser would remember the party because nothing remarkable had happened there, as far as Keyser was aware.’
But The Post did not mention Keyser specifically or Ford’s preemptive dismissal of her memory in its original recounting of Ford’s allegations, a bombshell story that has threatened to upend Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. The story mentioned only that ‘Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party’ and that ‘[t]hose individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.’
As Kimberly Strassel put it on Twitter: Wow. Ford said Leland Keyser wouldn’t remember the party, and Brown just decided to believe her and not mention Keyser at all. Keyser, it turns out, was a disaster for Ford’s credibility. In 2019 Keyser revealed to Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two reporters for the New York Times, that she did not believe Ford’s story. Further, Keyser said she felt pressured to change her account to match the published stories. “We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it,” Pogrebin and Kelly reported. “In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. ‘I don’t have any confidence in the story.’”
They Can’t Memory-Hole Everything
Now take a few seconds, sit back, and contemplate the following hypothetical: What if the internet did not exist? What if the media landscape was the same as when I was a kid?
We all know the answer. The Washington Post and the New York Times would have buried me and left no trace.
Instead, we have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a million other ways to get information out there. Anyone can be a reporter. We may not like Twitter or Facebook, and they’re trying to silence us. But despite themselves, social media have proven useful to conservatives — and anyone else who wants to report fairly and honestly. Mollie Hemingway, Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald reach exponentially more people on Twitter than CNN and the mainstream media do. And these writers have more credibility than party-line publications.
What’s Next for Me? Not Much.
In early October 2018, a reporter named Brittany Shepherd, writing for Washingtonian magazine, asked: “What is Next for Mark Judge?” Her answer: “Not much.” My ribald sense of humor, sometime salty mouth, and political incorrectness had doomed me to the far reaches of the lunch room, away from the cool kids. I was too crazy for the conservatives and too right-wing for the liberals. It’s a spot I’ve occupied for years.
However, the world is different now than it was when I was first approached by the Washington Post in 1989. In the last two years I have written a series for the Stream exposing my attempted murder at the hands of the American Stasi. It will be a book.
When last seen, Brittany Shepherd was on CNN complaining that the Biden administration was not giving out any information. I can only say that seeing her flail, I think I got the better deal. I’m reminded of a line Aragorn says in The Lord of the Rings: “I serve no man, but the servants of Sauron I pursue into whatever land they may go.”