Dear CCI friends,
While Rachel Maddow’s nomination for an Emmy Award spreads through the news, Paul Saunders, Executive Director of the Center for National Interest, calls us to sanity.
This is the same Saunders who, a few months ago, openly called for “people diplomacy.” I had an opportunity to meet with him in Washington and found a highly-educated, lucid watcher of the whole political spectrum. He was obviously deeply worried about our nation’s state of affairs and, as a result, the fate of the whole world.
If you want some important middle-of-the-road sanity in today’s reporting, go to the National Interest site. Meanwhile read the following article…
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The National Interest
August 13, 2018
Why Bloomberg Got It Wrong
By Paul Saunders
George Orwell was never overly impressed with the news media, which he considered often more interested in advancing preferred narratives than reporting the facts. Working for the organization that hosted Donald Trump’s first and only foreign-policy speech during the 2016 presidential campaign—and having considerable experience with the media since then—I can’t say that I’m all that impressed either.
Orwell’s tart assessment of the reaction of the British press’ response to the Spanish Civil War sounds somewhat familiar in an era when a new media cohort often seem to abandon their professional standards, at least if “Trump,” “Russia,” or both are in the headline. As Orwell noted,
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
Today’s dominant “party lines” are likewise often shaping reporting to a greater extent than the facts. Yes, President Donald Trump went too far in branding the New York Times , CNN, and NBC News as “the enemy of the American people.” But it is no exaggeration to say that many reporters have become witting or unwitting enemies of truth.