MATTI FRIEDMAN: When We Started to Lie.
The ideas I saw shape Israel coverage, in other words, have spread through the press and tamed the formerly independent and unruly world of journalists—a world where we may have been wrong most of the time, but not all the time, and never all in the same way.
In some cases, it’s not just the ideas that have moved from here across the media world, but the same people. One example is the editor who oversaw all Mideast coverage for much of my time at the AP, and who bore overall responsibility for much of the reality I described in my essays. From the Mideast, that editor, Sally Buzbee, went on to head the AP’s Washington bureau as most of the American press botched coverage of the 2016 election in an attempt to help the right people. She was then promoted to lead the entire Associated Press. More recently Buzbee became executive editor of The Washington Post, which has descended into a state of abject ideological confusion that became acute during Israel’s current war with Iran and her proxies, and which has been hemorrhaging money and readers. (She resigned in June.)
It’s not that ideological fantasy doesn’t afflict outlets affiliated with the right—just last week Tucker Carlson enthusiastically introduced his mass audience to a “popular historian” more sympathetic to the Nazis than the Allies.
The world has always been rife with fantasy and conspiracy, but the mainstream press was meant to be where you went to become oriented—to get what journalists called “the first rough draft of history,” that is, an account of what happened as best understood at the time of telling. The activists who now hold sway have mostly abandoned that role but still want to claim the mantle, appending the attribution “experts say” to their own ideology, and dismissing dissent as disinformation.
That’s why the transformation I witnessed matters. When I began working for the American press in 2006, someone with my center-left Israeli opinions may have been someone to disagree with, like a conservative Democrat or moderate Republican. In 2024, someone like me is a suspected racist who probably wouldn’t be hired. With some exceptions, the institutions have sunk into the Manichaean fantasy world they helped create.
It took me several years at the AP, and then a few more after I left, to grasp the change and put it into words. What was true of the Israel story ten years ago is now true of almost everything. Most journalists have abandoned “What’s going on?” for “Who does this serve?” The result is that huge swaths of the public know what they’re supposed to support, but lack the tools to grasp what’s going on.
Friedman’s piece is titled “When We Started to Lie,” but the DNC-MSM lying for partisan purposes isn’t all that new a development. Walter Cronkite was essentially a DNC mouthpiece during his entire career. Dan Rather famously imploded in 2004 for attempting a false late hit on George W. Bush. The media lied about the state of his father’s economy in 1992. Global warming should have killed us many times over, considering how many times we’ve been told since the 1970s that “we only have ten years to save the earth.”
Tucker playing footsie with the Reich Stuff is simply the flipside of Cronkite claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi in 1964, except now there are loads of media outlets willing to point out that the man with the microphone is lying to his audience.