MARK JUDGE: The Claudine Gay story isn’t Roots, it’s Shattered Glass.
Roots was the epic 1970s miniseries that traced several generations of black Americans from slavery to modern times. It dramatized the resilience of Africans brought here in chains as they triumphed despite brutal racism.
The Claudine Gay story, on the other hand, is about how elites at one of America’s most respected institutions forfeited honor, integrity, and truth to virtue-signal their holy liberalism.
In fact, the Claudine Gay movie has already been made. It was called Shattered Glass and came out in 2003.
In 1998, New Republic writer Stephen Glass was found guilty of making up many of his pieces. Glass’s fabulism was so blatant and widespread that even his liberal colleagues had to take action — but not until after Glass’s lies had already been published.
In its best scene, the film depicts the moment when editor Charles Lane explodes at reporter Caitlin Avey, who has been defending Glass. Lane, the one honorable person left on staff, has to jackhammer through the liberal groupthink to find Avey’s conscience — and her sense of honor. “He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact, just because we found him entertaining,” he says. Then he drops the bomb: “It’s indefensible. Don’t you know that?”
A lot of today’s journalists still don’t know that — or they don’t care.
Just ask former CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter, who failed upward while trying to revive the career of newsreader turned failed propagandist Dan Rather to…teaching wannabe television pundits at Harvard: “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”