William L. Andersen for Mises.org
With the recent news of massive layoffs at the venerable Washington Post, we are hearing from many corners that democracy itself is under siege, the earthquake being the Donald Trump presidency. We already are seeing the narrative forming: the billionaire Jeff Bezos apparently gutting his own newspaper in order to appease the anti-democracy factions of the Trump administration, as decent people look on with horror.
Pundits and public intellectuals are having a field day with their post-mortems (no pun intended) of the demise of the newspaper that gave us the famed team Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that helped bring down Richard Nixon’s presidency, but perhaps the saddest obituary came from Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal, which is ironic, given the leadership of the Post had always given her the back of the hand. Noonan’s account is one that gives homage to journalism’s past and laments what it has become.
Like anything that conjures up a romantic history, Noonan’s piece is part fiction and part fact, and though she is an eloquent writer, she fails to understand that American journalism for more than a century has moved well away from its Jeffersonian ideals and has served as a tool to promote state power. Indeed, established mainstream journalism today still clings to its progressive roots all the while attempting to protect elites that have run government and many of our social institutions into the ground. Noonan writes:
…the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.
She claims that having such a paper is important because, as Thomas Jefferson said, a free press provides a vital check on government, or at least that is what the press is supposed to do:
I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.
You have to think of it as part of your country’s survival system. Maybe the government will or won’t tell you the truth about what’s going on, maybe the Pentagon will or won’t, but if you know you’ve got this fabulous island of broken toys, professional journalists working for a reputable news organization, you’ve got a real chance of learning what’s true.
It takes years to make good reporters—people who are trained, who love getting the story so much, who love the news so much, that they will wade into the fire, run to the sound of the guns. They are grown only in newsrooms, not at home with laptops. They are taught by older craftsmen and professionals, through stories and lore.
The Post’s greatness and expertise can’t easily be replaced and perhaps can’t be replaced at all, or at least not for decades of committed building.
This could only be written by a Washington insider, someone who truly believes that the Post and its competing newspapers like the New York Times are actually doing what she claims. Then, as one might expect from a modern mainstream journalist, she brings up the hackneyed claim that mainstream journalism is “protecting our democracy”:
…this will have an impact on our democracy.
Why is the end of a great newspaper not good for democracy? Let’s journey back to Thomas Jefferson, in Paris in 1787, as American minister to France. Back home they were debating the U.S. Constitution. In a letter dated Jan. 16 to his friend Edward Carrington, a member of the Continental Congress, his thoughts: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” He wasn’t being flip. He understood journalism was a defense against tyranny.
Government by its nature always wants to accumulate power and use it. A watchful press slows this process, sometimes stops it, by exposing its abuses.
If citizens are informed, they can self-govern from a rough baseline of realism. “The good sense of the people,” Jefferson wrote, is always “the best army.” True, they can be “led astray,” but their mistakes will be limited and can be corrected through information that can “penetrate the whole mass of the people.” When the public is uninformed, those running government “shall all become wolves.”
To be honest, the wolf has been running the show for the past $38 trillion of ruinous federal debt, all incurred in the name of protecting “our democracy,” and cheered on and supported by those journalists that Noonan fetes. And while Noonan’s tears for the demise of the Postmight be sincere, they describe journalism that never was and certainly has not been part of the American experience for more than a century.
Noonan then tries another tact: appeal to the wealth of the Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos:
But what is he about right now? I can’t believe the fourth-wealthiest person in the world (and in history) would dash his own historic reputation to curry favor with the (Donald) Trump administration.
Her statement reminds me of leftist writer Mary McGrory’s response in 1981 when her employer, the Washington Star, was shuttered. Speaking of the newspaper’s owner, Time, Inc., she said, “They have gobs of money,” insinuating that even though the paper lost money, they should continue its publication because, after all, it was good for democracy, and “good for democracy” really means subsidizing journalists that people are not willing to pay to read.
Lest one believe that the Post has been a stalwart of democracy and free speech, one only needs to look at its actions during the first Trump administration. First, the Post vigorously pushed the false story created by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Trump was a Russian agent who won the 2016 election because the Russians interfered with the election. For those efforts, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize, which was reminiscent of when the NYT won a Pulitzer in 1932 for the dishonest coverage its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, wrote to deceive readers about the Ukraine famine.
While the Post adopted its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” mantra during the Trump years, it championed the trashing of democracy during the Covid-19 panic from 2020 into the Joe Biden presidency. The Post enthusiastically endorsed the liberty-crushing lockdowns, forced masking, and other draconian restrictions on ordinary Americans. At the same time, the Post marched in lockstep with officials that insisted that the “lab leak theory” of how the Covid virus was released was false, with the paper claiming on numerous occasions that the “lab leak” hypothesis had been “debunked.”
Today, the “lab leak” theory is taken seriously, and always should have been. But had the Post had its way, Americans would still be in darkness about Covid.
When I was in journalism school at the University of Tennessee more than 50 years ago, our professors regaled us in the work of the “Muckrakers,” who supposedly “exposed” the abuses of America’s “rapacious” and “monopolistic” business enterprises. However, when one looks at the examples of these journalists, one finds that they were mostly progressives or socialists writing something akin to fiction. For example, Ida Tarbell supposedly exposed the wrongdoing of John D. Rockefeller and his oil empire in The History of the Standard Oil Company, which journalists cite even today as a model for journalism. Of course, as Burton Folsom writes in The Myth of the Robber Barons, many of the accusations made by Tarbell and others were just plain false.
We were taught in our American History classes that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle how the meat-packing industry was sweeping dead rats and even dead people into the meat vats, leading to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Folsom points out that Sinclair was lying and investigation after investigation proved his fictitious allegations to be untrue.
In my criticism of Alex Jones’s book, Losing the News, I took issue with his claim that the mainstream media is the great bulwark pushing back against the enemies of democracy. Instead, as I wrote, mainstream journalists like him have sought to preserve the regime of progressive governance:
The progressives envisioned a country with a powerful executive branch, a relatively weak Congress, a court system that places the burden of proof on private parties and gives the benefit of the doubt to government, and government bureaucracy staffed with “experts” who would run the daily affairs of individuals. As part of this vision, the Fourth Estate has publicized the brilliance and exploits of “good government” and has tried to keep government on that narrow “progressive” path.
For many years, this arrangement worked well, at least for the media. Reporters had cozy relationships with government officials (and many still do) who were happy to feed them stories, and in return the media promoted those officials and their friends, and punished their enemies. The broadcast media, protected by the Federal Communications Commission, had an even cozier arrangement. Broadcasters acted within a government-defined sphere of “public interest,” and progressive journalists had no argument against what essentially was state censorship of broadcast news.
However, the dependent relationship between mainstream newspapers and progressive elites ran into two problems. First, production costs skyrocketed in part because of the high cost of paper (made more expensive by many of the environmental laws that progressive journalists supported) and because so many of the large papers were unionized. Second, the internet made it possible for people interested in journalism to seek alternative employment and to use internet-based platforms to get around the barriers that mainstream media had set up.
I saw this firsthand 20 years ago when I became involved in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case in which three lacrosse players from Duke University were falsely accused of raping a black stripper at a party. The accusations were demonstrably and transparently false right from the beginning, but the Duke administration and much of its faculty, along with the Durham Police Department and the district attorney’s office, decided that they wanted them to be true.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media, and especially the New York Times, ran with the story, ignoring even basic forensic evidence because the rape accusations account fit the modern journalistic worldviews that now shape the newsrooms. Every major news organization went full speed ahead on assuming guilt and all of their stories pointed in that direction.
On the other hand, a few of us dissented and we published counter articles on websites like Lewrockwell.com (my base) and Durham-in-Wonderland, published by K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College. Others became involved using still more websites and it didn’t take long to present a solid case that the entire thing was a hoax. While the NYT, the Post, Newsweek, Time, and ESPN tried to push the leftist guilt narrative, many of us pushed back.
In the end, the case fell apart, but not before the players had to spend a total of $5 million on their attorneys to defend themselves against the false charges. But despite the best efforts by the NYT and other media entities, none of them were convicted or sent to prison.
It was a telling moment for the power of the internet and for the partial demise of the mainstream media. That same power of the internet is what makes it highly unlikely that the fall of the Washington Post will lead to more government corruption and power. If anything, those independent journalists so despised in the newsrooms of the NYT and the Post, will do a much better job of uncovering government malfeasance than we would ever see from the mainstream.
