DAVID REABOI: The Van Jones Rule.
In January 1998, when the internet was in its early days, Matt Drudge had made his reputation as an adversary—and competitor—of the mainstream media by publishing a giant newsworthy scoop about President Bill Clinton that Beltway reporters and editors had spiked merely for partisan reasons. Drudge’s story suddenly flashed on newspapers and television screens across America and the world: The sitting president’s affair with a young White House intern consumed headlines for the next year and a half. Even as the leftwing mainstream media tried to protect a Democratic president, making the scandal disappear was impossible. It was a morality tale, a detective story, and a courtroom drama, and it ended, finally, in a cliffhanger of an impeachment vote that nearly brought Clinton down.
A decade later, in early 2009, recently inaugurated President Barack Obama had appointed little-known leftwing radical activist Van Jones as his “Green Jobs Czar.” Even as most Republican politicians feared opposing the new president and exposing themselves to accusations of racism, the reaction from the conservative press was swift and impassioned. On his nightly Fox News show, Glenn Beck railed against Jones’s appointment, pointing to a disqualifying 9/11 conspiracy petition he’d signed several years before. It began to look like a feeding frenzy, as the mainstream media began reporting on the growing backlash on the Right.
And then Obama blinked. Under pressure from other cable news and talk radio voices on the Right, the White House felt the heat from the hostile media coverage and hastily withdrew Jones’s name. Obama instinctively did what nearly every politician had done before: When heat came down on one of his people, he looked to stop the bleeding and move on by cutting him loose.
Almost immediately, though, the White House realized that it had made a tactical mistake by caving—or even reacting—to its critics in conservative media. The people fuming about Van Jones in rightwing media, it had realized, were already sworn enemies. Tossing one of its own to the wolves wouldn’t halt or slow down the enemy’s advance; it would do the opposite and encourage more. From then on, not only would the Obama administration refuse to bend to pressure on appointments, nominations, or criticism from adversarial media, it treated right-leaning media itself—and, by extension, its audience of millions—as illegitimate.
Even as the White House clung to the “Van Jones Rule” and refused to give the Right an inch, conservative media remained potent. While Drudge had put the media on notice as gatekeepers of information, he was less a reporter than an editor; together with his then-unknown sidekick, Andrew Breitbart, The Drudge Report took the raw materials provided by the traditional media and presented the news in a provocative way by collating links to existing reporting—and, crucially, re-contextualizing it based on catching essential details buried deep in the middle paragraphs. And, as websites proliferated, the internet allowed everyone with a blog to become an instant media critic, fact-checking, debunking, and commenting on the media’s daily reporting.
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Though it’s often been pronounced dead or debilitated, the leftwing Corporate Media remains the most powerful political and cultural force in America, capable of steamrolling the Right and quickly moving public opinion into spasms of hysteria, fear, self-righteousness, or near-ubiquitous virtue signaling. Its ability to create and solidify narratives across the population was in evidence throughout the presidency of Donald Trump.
Perhaps nothing in modern American history caused a greater erosion of social cohesion than the years-long false narrative about the elected president being an agent of a foreign enemy power. “Russiagate” was an epic tale, with a cast of hundreds or even thousands of players; it was a bona fide information campaign, unfolding and rising with daily intensity, like the most potent scripted drama.
From the start, the Left and its media allies were in control.
Read the whole thing, which is an excerpt from the new book edited by Michael Walsh: Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You, which I reviewed in late October.