“Journalists”

A senior Times journalist has been caught on tape admitting his paper overreacted to the Capitol riot.

It was like a scene from a political black comedy: a senior journalist for the most powerful newspaper in the world getting doorstepped, like a grubby politician caught with his pants down.

Matthew Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war journalist turned national-security correspondent for the New York Times, was secretly recorded running his mouth to an unidentified female companion. Videos of their conversations were released last week by the controversial group Project Veritas. And in one in particular, Rosenberg gives a jaw-dropping interpretation of the events of 6 January 2021, when some Trump supporters rioted at the US Capitol building as Congress was voting to ratify the 2020 election. What makes Rosenberg’s interpretation so shocking is that it is quite at odds with his own reporting in the Times.

“Once a tool to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, today American journalism comforts the comfortable, speaks power to truth, and insists on an orthodoxy that protects the interests of the elites in the language of a culture war whose burden is given to the working class to bear,” writes Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book.

We seem to be entering a new era of yellow journalism, in which ad hominem attacks and conspiracy-mongering are more valued than truth and accuracy.

In my optimistic days as a young journalist, I believed that if only the public had access to more information the nation would enter a golden age of better government and more-thoughtful political debates. This was before the internet, cable news, and talk radio came into bloom—when newspaper and TV gatekeepers controlled what we’d read and hear.