It’s a sign of how bankrupt—not just figuratively—the American media is today (never mind onetime respectable UK publications like The Financial Times, The Guardian and the weekly Economist—at one time welcome “homework” for serious readers) that a slogan coming to mind is from an old 1960s Neil Young song, “Be on my side and I’ll be on your side.” I’ve noticed this prominently in what The American Conservative, founded in 2002 and now run by Curt Mills, an intelligent Millennial. TAC is dead-set against the Trump/Netanyahu war against Iran, a defensible and not uncommon position, but its ramped-up social media presence in the past two weeks resembles a speed freak who’ll tout any person or organization that agrees with it, including The New York Times and barely-believable websites like Axios and Politico that post bite-size “scoops,” and aggregated “news,” which resembles the heyday of USA Today in the 1980s and 90s. (I’ve always despised that hotel-room daily, but give it credit for either presciently or accidentally foreshadowing the current digital environment.)
Mills’ tweet on X are something else. A sample: “Imagine if Trump didn't bizarrely throne-sniff/social-climb as president of the United States, didn't care what Euro elites think of him, and had spent the year acquiring Greenland, instead of this. We might even be out of NATO. Instead: a third Gulf War, maybe the worst yet.”
After less than two weeks, and it might be the “worst” Gulf War? I’d say that’s jumping the drone.
Another: “The Axis of Autocracies. Simultaneously more dangerous than any threat in human history and a house of cards.”
And: “It took the US 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, but only 9 days to replace Khamenei with Khamenei.”
Mills looks for people/websites that’re on his side. On the bright side, his X feud with John Podhoretz, one of the nastiest (at least online) guys in the business, is entertaining.
Basic facts are, increasingly, incidental. I was surprised last Friday, when John Tamny, a smart fellow who writes for Real Clear Markets, botched an otherwise sensible article about the nearly-complete defenestration of the press by misattributing the author of a column that he took issue with. He wrote: “Take a recent column by The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins. In ‘Why Netflix Lost Warner Brothers to Paramount,’ Jenkins quips toward the end that ‘The left-leaning press, which means most of the press, is preoccupied with what will happen to CNN.’” Tamny’s point, and he’s not wrong, is that the left-wing press, aside from The New York Times (which “thins every day,” completely ignoring the reality that the Times Co., as I’ve written lately, is unconcerned about its print edition and editorial vision in general, it’s just a cover for all the money-making extras on its website) doesn’t really exist anymore. One could say that about the Journal as well, which no longer wields the influence it once did.
But the problem is that the words Tamny attributed to Jenkins were in fact from a Journal editorial, and not from Jenkins’ semi-weekly column. It could be Tamny has a pipeline to the Journal’s editorial page and discovered that it was Jenkins who wrote the opinion, but it’s doubtful: even the remaining non-propagandist journalists have an itchy trigger finger on their “post” button.
Tamny’s apparent goof is small potatoes stacked against The New York Times: In Maureen Dowd’s “Journalistic Ethics” blurb that precedes her list of columns, she writes: “You have to be Caesar’s wife at The Times. No one can achieve the purity of Bill Cunningham, the great Times street fashion photographer, who refused to even take a drink of water at parties he covered.”
Dowd fancies herself as a humorist (as well as delivering “all the opinions that are fit to print”), but that dry nonsense—name a “pure” Times writer in four hours flat, and win a letter of commendation from the paper’s in-name-only White House correspondent Peter Baker—is, I just know, written on a Brooklyn subway wall.
For example, in a column puffing up James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, the slippery alleged conservative David French writes: “One reason that politics has been so exhausting—and even so frightening—is that we often know that opposing politicians don’t just disagree with us, but that they hate us.” That’s boilerplate demagoguery: politics is only “exhausting” to those who make it so, who want their team to win. I “oppose” most politicians, and don’t think at all that they “hate” me. And I don’t “hate,” for example, Brandon Scott, the sleazy mayor of Baltimore. I’ve never met the man.
French says that Talarico gives people “hope.” Maybe that allows desperate Texan “progressives” to indulge the unlikely fantasy that Talarico will flip the Senate seat blue, but it’s hard to believe a winning coalition in that state will back a man who’s said, “God is non-binary,” is pro-abortion, and, in addition believes “our trans community needs abortion care.” Talarico ain’t no Beto!
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023