Journalists Used to Correct Their Mistakes

T he narrator of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a novel set against the depravity of 1980s New York, works in the “Department of Factual Verification” at a magazine that sounds conspicuously like the New Yorker. There, a fact-checker has “the sole aim of sorting out matters of fact from matters of opinion, disregarding the latter, and tracking the alleged facts through dusty volumes, along skeins of microfilm, across transcontinental telephone cables, till they prove good or are exposed as error.” This is how many of us grew up thinking about publications like the New Yorker — well, as much as any average person would ponder such things. Whatever the magazine’s politics, surely the veracity of every contention was cycled through layers of editing, every data point triple-checked and every semicolon properly placed.

This kind of professionalism was probably something of an illusion even back then. Who knows what kind of shoddy, unethical work writers got away with in the pre-Internet era? There were little means of finding out, and little recourse if you did. I was recently researching the roots of the Roe v. Wade decision, for instance, when I came across Walter Cronkite’s 1965 program on abortion, which had greatly exaggerated the number of back-alley abortion deaths. That stat, incessantly repeated thereafter by the media, then went on to help shape public opinion for decades.

I suspect journalism was initially improved by the Internet — especially by bloggers who held reporters accountable, most notably Cronkite’s successor, Dan Rather. The blogosphere would shame you into fixing your mistakes, as would social media, at least initially. As I learned working at a newspaper, filling out a correction form and explaining a blunder to editors was a humbling experience. But when facts were muffed, the reputation of the paper was at stake.

During the Trump years, however, this accountability was ditched. Anything goes when you’re in an imaginary fight to save democracy.

This past week, two incidents illustrated the shamelessness of contemporary journalists. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, whose sloppy, ideologically motivated reporting on conservatives has been so relentlessly misleading it’s more metafiction than journalism, rhetorically asked, “Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?” Yes, is her answer. (Mayer is apparently unacquainted with Betteridge’s law of headlines.) In the piece, Mayer argues that Ginni Thomas’s activism should compel her husband, Clarence Thomas, to recuse himself from a slew of important cases. Mayer, it seems, subscribes to the reactionary notion that a judge’s wife must abandon all public expression and sit dutifully at home.

Mayer’s piece leans into some preposterous guilt-by-association. Did you know that Ginni Thomas once presented former congressman Mark Meadows with “Impact Award” at an event sponsored by the social-conservative group United in Purpose? Did you know that the same Meadows “became Trump’s chief of staff” and that in December of last year “refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee that is investigating the Capitol attack”? And did you know that Clarence Thomas also once allegedly attended an Impact Award luncheon? Yes. The nexus is clear: Clarence Thomas might as well have participated in the riot at the Capitol.

As if this sort of thing weren’t ridiculous enough, Mark Paoletta notes in the Federalist that Mayer couldn’t even get her facts straight:

In one example, Mayer even falsely claims that Justice Thomas attended a luncheon, Impact Awards. Ginni Thomas emceed the event where awards were given to conservative leaders. Mayer writes that a guest at the luncheon, Jerry Johnson, who was then the president of the National Religious Broadcasters, “later recalled that the Justice sat in front of him and was a ‘happy warrior,’ pleased to be watching his wife ‘running the show.’”

Mayer’s claim is 100 percent false. Justice Thomas was not at this Impact Award ceremony. In fact, he has never attended an Impact Award luncheon ceremony. I spoke with Johnson, and he told me Justice Thomas was not at this luncheon. Moreover, Johnson told me that neither Mayer nor anyone from the magazine ever attempted to contact him to ask him if he saw Justice Thomas at this event or made these statements.

No transcontinental telephone cables to root out the veracity of this contention, I guess. It is unlikely, if Paoletta is correct, that there will be any clarification or correction.

Only a few days earlier, Nina Totenberg, who’s spent decades filing partisan dispatches from the Supreme Court, reported that Justice Sotomayor had been compelled to take part in oral arguments and conferences remotely, because a merciless Justice Neil Gorsuch declined to wear a mask. What’s more, Gorsuch’s refusal came after the chief justice had, “in some form,” asked the other justices to do so.

After the story, the two justices released a rare statement saying: “Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends.”

Left-wing Twitter pounced: Totenberg never claimed that Sotomayor had directly requested that others mask; the story was that Roberts had done so on her behalf. Yet just a few hours later, the chief justice released a statement of his own: “I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.”  

The central claim of Totenberg’s reporting was debunked by all the parties allegedly involved. Maybe everyone is lying. Maybe Totenberg can prove it. But NPR stood by the story right away, because why not? When NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, gently argued that the confusion merited a “clarification,” Totenberg, as one of the “founding mothers” of NPR, attacked the ombudsman. Rather than concern themselves with unprofessionalism, journalists remarked on how “weird” the Court had acted.

These two incidents happen to be part of concerted effort to delegitimize a Supreme Court that has the propensity to adhere to the Constitution — perhaps the greatest threat to the progressive project. But we can lump all these pieces into the larger trend of dramatic scoops that have either been debunked or have fallen apart, from “Russiagate” to the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh. Virtually all of these “mistakes” skew in the same ideological direction. And, not since three CNN reporters resigned after retracting a bogus story about a Russian investment firm having ties to Trump officials in 2017 has there been any genuine effort to stem the activism that’s displaced journalism. To the contrary.

Bias is but a quaint notion these days. Increasingly journalists have become self-appointed adjudicators of appropriate speech and thinking, obsessing over alleged misinformation as a means of shutting down debate. If they were truly concerned about the corrosion of truth, they would first work to preserve the credibility of their own institution.