Daily Archives: 6 March 2025

Ignorance of Opinionators

Posted on by
Reply

In the excerpt of her opinion piece in the New Yorker that is quoted in The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable and Quotable section last Sunday, Susan Glasser decried the relative quiescence in DC compared to other nation’s capitals regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) foreign policy moves.

There were no major protests in the quiescent capital…. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.

Unilaterally reoriented? Never mind the petty cultural differences between the United States and European nations. Those nations’ governments do not have their legislatures and Executives as separate, coequal branches of government. Instead, those nations blur the lines between the two, with many explicitly subordinating the Executive function to the legislative.

The United States is the only nation that separates the Legislative, Executive—and the Judicial (see Great Britain for a subordinated judicial function)—into their separate and equal authority branches. In our Executive in particular, those functions with foreign policy input—State, Defense, Commerce, and some others—are explicitly subordinate to, not equal functions with, the Chief Executive of that Branch, the President of the United States.

And yet she bleated, how dare the chief of foreign policy in our system of governance be the one making foreign policy decisions instead of surrendering that responsibility to a subordinate or to a committee of subordinates?

Glasser’s ignorance of the hierarchical nature and structure of the American Executive Branch is astounding.

Don’t Care? Or Don’t Care?

Posted on by
Reply

Gerald Baker, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, worried that no one cares about news writers and news opinionators “harrumphing” about the doings of the Trump administration. His subheadline:

Journalists harrumph at Trump’s actions, but no one cares anymore. I say that with no satisfaction.

He then listed some horribles committed by those news writers and opinionators:

Moral affront that a president who has already answered more questions from reporters than his predecessor did in four years should choose which subgroup of White House journalists gets even closer to him. Panicked warnings about access to national-security information when the new team at the Pentagon moves some of the most entitled titles out of their privileged real estate in the building. Bilious incomprehension when a newspaper owner who has kept them in jobs for the last decade has the temerity to say he has a right to determine what editorial stance the paper should take.

Baker then lamented:

The ability of the traditional media to influence events is attenuated to the point of near extinction….
No one cares anymore.

That’s only the latest beginning, though. This crop of writers and opinionators have too often lied to us, whether by commission or omission:

• lying about Trump’s collusion with Russia over the 2016 election, when it was the Clinton campaign doing the colluding
• spiking the Hunter Biden laptop story
• lying about which “good people on both sides of the question” in a Trump Charlottesville speech, claiming he was talking about rioters when he was talking about the debates over which statues to take down, if any statures were to be
• lying about Trump’s claim that the Wuhan Virus was a hoax when he had plainly said that Democrat hyping of the virus was the hoax
• LATimes announcing that it would no longer print letters to the editor disputing, much less refuting, the idea that the climate crisis was overblown
• NYTimes announcing early in the 2016 campaign season that there could be no objectivity in news reporting; journalists had to pick sides in their reporting
• a major broadcast news speaker announcing that there were not two sides to every story, only one, the news speaker’s
• a major cable news opinionator smearing Tea Partiers as tea baggers
• spiked stories regarding ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) mental decline

That list goes on and on.

This remark of Baker’s, though, is central to his own egregious bias and why we don’t trust his “media:”

Holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported was always the most important role news played.

The most important role of honest journalists—a vanishingly small group—is most assuredly not holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported, and it never has been. Their role, their job, is—always and everywhere—to report the news objectively and completely, to provide their opinionating on separate pages from their reporting and to keep their opinionating solely informed by balanced facts and logic. Holding powerful people accountable will fall out of that naturally, and it is we consumers of news and opinion—actual, honestly presented news and opinion—who will do the accountability holding, not arrogant, self-important news writers and opinionators.

It’s not that no one cares about the harrumphing, however justified or not that harrumphing might be. It’s that no one cares about anything news writers and opinionators spill pixels and ink over—they’ve shown themselves as a group to be wholly and intrinsically dishonest.

No one believes what news writers or opinionators say or write or post. Baker closed his piece with this:

Can we get back to a healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism, so that it again becomes a vehicle for accountability?

He then proceeded to claim that AI could help today’s writers and opinionators achieve this. He’s wrong on both accounts. The current crop of news writers and opinionators have shown themselves too dishonest to ever be trustworthy again. A healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism cannot be achieved so long as these remain on our pages and televisions. They must be replaced en masse by an entirely new population of journalists, schooled in objectivity, factual and complete reporting, logical and factually informed opinion writing, and the ethical necessity of both.

This new crop, on taking their office, must do one thing immediately. Since journalists have long since walked away from their editorial requirement of at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims, the new crop must state in clear, concrete, and measurable terms what new standard of journalistic integrity they will follow and that us news and opinion consumers can follow and assess their performance.

That the current crop is incapable of satisfying Baker’s question or of satisfying the standards requirement is further illustrated by Baker’s repetition of his basic thesis in that last clause of his question. I repeat, then: it is not the job of journalism to hold anyone accountable; that’s the job of us consumers of news and opinion. It is the job of journalists to report and separately to offer opinion. Nothing more. Nothing less.