Why Have So Many Really Smart Journalists Sold Their Souls to Trump?
Please Do Not Feed the Whores, Part II:
In a profile of Fox reporter Maria Bartiromo this week, The Washington Post relates how the ex-CNBC star went from a highly respected groundbreaking business journalist to a zombie-shill for Donald Trump. Her recent interview with the president comprised wiffle ball pitches, allowing an uninterrupted Trump monologue of self-serving falsehoods, followed by her own confirming atta-boys. "What happened to Maria Bartiromo?" asks the writer.
In response to Trump's lava flow of nonsense about the Democrats having stolen the election, Bartiromo drones, 'This is disgusting, and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted." The day after another fluffy interview with Mike Flynn, she told her audience "an intel source telling me that President Trump did in fact win the election."
And it gets worse. According to the Post, "She was one of the few to offer her solid approval of Trump’s disastrous August 2017 news conference in which he insisted there were 'some very fine people on both sides' of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville: 'T[oday] @POTUS @realDonaldTrump fights back w[ith] excellent press conf[erence] & facts',” she tweeted. One journalist described her on Twitter as "basically a North Korean news anchor now."
Bartiromo is one of a number of serious, respected journalists who, for whatever reason, embarked on the dark road to becoming propaganda mouthpieces for Donald Trump.
Lou Dobbs reported on business news for most of three decades for CNN. His reporting and commentary were solid and insightful, untainted by marked political bias. CNN gave him an $8 million golden handshake in 2008 after he began spouting off about Obama's birth certificate. Then untethered on Fox News, Dobbs not only continued with the Big Lie about Obama's place of birth, but went on to falsely accuse immigrants of spreading leprosy in the United States, urged the president to declare war on China and wallowed in the equally nutty "deep state" conspiracy claptrap. And now he is one of Trump's loudest mouthpieces on the "stolen election" canard. A Harvard education seems to have been a waste of time and money for this 75-year old Trump shill. So, frankly, is that spent on his hair colorist.
Tucker Carlson's Fox show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," has an average audience of 4.33 million viewers, the largest for any program in the history of cable news. Early in his journalism career, wrote for Esquire, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Daily Beast. He worked for five years with CNN and three with MSNBC as a broadcast journalist. Carlson did serious reporting with a conservative slant.
Hired by Fox at about the same time as Dobbs, Carlson has been able to feel at home unconstrained in his natural paleoconservative habitat and since 2016 is, as POLITICO described him, "perhaps the highest-profile proponent of Trumpism." More than that, he has become a Trump confidant and informal advisor. Carlson unsurprisingly trumpets the whole array of latter-day Republican tropes about the "deep state," "stolen election," etc. He once sparked a serious corporate advertising boycott of his show after he decried immigrants for making America "poorer, dirtier and more divided." It's fair to place Carlson in the same Faustian basket of Trump propagandists as Sean Hannity, Dobbs, Bartiromo and the "Fox and Friends" puppetry. And they aren't alone.
A student of history, I've always been fascinated with those who know better who sell their souls to the devil, some of the smartest people who end up whoring themselves to a false god or bogus ideology. In a recent essay, Why Do So Many Really Smart People Work for a Dumbass Like Trump?, I explored why such folks with sterling elite educations as Kayleigh McInany, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, Mike Esper and others made themselves servile to an obvious "f------ moron" as Trump. I concluded:
History is replete with smart, hyper-ambitious men and women who whore themselves to power. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Speer and Goering, Kirov and Molotov, Wolsey and Cromwell. Many don't end well, winding up imprisoned or executed. It's hard to say what precisely drives Trump's minions to unblinkingly repeat his brazen lies, insist up is down and down is up, enthusiastically defend the indefensible, such as caging children.
Albert Speer was well educated and cultured, having grown up in an upper middle class household. So, why did he loyally serve an evil, thug-led regime? E. Jack Neuman, who produced a documentary on Speer, concluded: ''He knew exactly what he was doing, and he wasn't duped or anything else. He was a sinner by omission and commission, and he went wading right in. His problem wasn't blindness. It was blind ambition.''
I wonder, "Don't these otherwise highly intelligent professionals worry about their legacy? That they'll be lumped in the same sorry menagerie as Father Coughlin, Axis Sally, Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose?" Future textbooks will not treat kindly their rancid performance as dancing bears for a gas bag of a president, one who brought us plague, depression and civil strife." There's a supply & demand dynamic going on here. An alienated populace, deprived of opportunities, vulnerable in their frustrations to right-populism crave easy answers to complex issues, demand blood to slake their thirst for revenge against the elites. And the supply of facile answers pops up like toad stools in a dark forest in the form of silver-tongued purveyors of falsehoods, myths and apocrypha. Hello Sean, Tucker, Lou and Maria!
Then one recalls that Bartiromo, Dobbs and Carlson each pulls down $6 million a year. Reach your own conclusions. In my book, they are all engaging in the proverbial oldest profession, only on a higher scale.
As P. J. O'Rourke noted, "Every government is a parliament of whores." Include those who attach themselves as paid shills to a rotten regime.