Dowd is partly right on this. As I recently wrote in the Washington Examiner, today's journalists are boring compared to the crazy and swashbuckling writers of the past. The digital revolution keeps everyone's hands clean in today's media.
However, Dowd never addresses what is killing newsrooms every bit as much as technology and good manners: corruption. The media are made up of ideologues, and they have become too corrupt to be trusted.
The evidence is in Dowd's very own piece. In it, she interviews three fellow journalists: Michael Isikoff, Jane Mayer, and Mark Leibovich. All three rhapsodize about the good old days of typewriters and beer in the newsroom. Yet all three reporters themselves exemplify how the media have killed themselves over the last several years and why the rise of the internet and social media has stripped reporters of the credibility they used to have. The ink-stained wretches just can't get away with anything anymore.
The reporters Dowd interviews for her piece represent exactly why no one trusts the press anymore and why their replacements, which include people such as Matt Taibbi, Aaron Matte, Mollie Hemingway, and even Joe Rogan, are better, more accountable reporters and pundits. "Community Notes," the new feature that lets users correct false claims in real time on Twitter, has done more for journalism than MSNBC and the Washington Post combined.
Isikoff and Mayer, in particular, were main drivers of the Steele dossier, the absurd 2016 opposition research file paid for by the Clintons and used against former President Donald Trump. Isikoff would finally admit that he made a huge mistake in falling for the dossier — but only after it had been publicly debunked.
The mea culpa came in an interview with veteran journalist Barry Meier. In his book Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies, Meier writes, "Investigative journalists normally rely on court records, corporate documents and other tangible pieces of evidence. But the dossier took them down a very different path, one into the shadow lands of intelligence, a realm where documents don't exist and where reporters often can't independently confirm what their sources are saying."
In a glowing March 2018 profile of "the ex-spy [who] tried to warn the world about Trump's ties to Russia," Jane Mayer of the New Yorker assured readers that "a number of Steele's major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures." This turned out to be false . Even the Washington Post was forced to admit that the dossier was "absurd on its face."
There's more, and while personal, it's worth recalling. In the fall of 2018, Mayer went on MSNBC's Morning Joe and, after spending several minutes spewing about Russiagate, detoured to address what were then accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. As a high school friend of Kavanaugh, I was in the crosshairs of that media hit. On Scarborough, Mayer announced that a source had told her that Mark Judge "had sex when he was at Georgetown Prep with some his friends all with the same drunk woman at the same time." Mayer had left me a message asking me about these accusations, but when I called her back to deny the allegations — I tried three times — Mayer never answered her phone.
Leibovich's problem is less glaring but still notable. In 2016, some emails were leaked that revealed Leibovich, a national correspondent for the New York Times, had killed a joke about Sarah Palin he had been told by Hillary Clinton. Leibovich was writing an article in which he attempted to "re-introduce" Hillary Clinton to the American public. Clinton told him a story about visiting Alaska, where she encountered a moose, and then added a joke about Palin. A leaked email from Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri read as follows: "Fine to use the moose, but appreciate leaving the mention of Sarah Palin out." Leibovich complied.
In the days of the rowdy newsroom, journalists at least had a spine.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
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