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IS REHAB EVEN AN OPTION? Mark Judge: The Media Have Turned Into Bottomed-Out Drunks.

The implosion of the press over the last several years has been the final act in a story that resembles the stories that recovering addicts tell. . . .

For most of the 20th century, the press was liberal but also skillful and responsible. Communists like Walter Duranty balanced out by better reporters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Lippmann. Mistakes were made, but there was a code of honor, a core integrity that made it necessary to issue corrections and make every effort to represent people accurately and humanely.

Then came the first drink — Watergate. The 1970s scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office was a great party. The atmosphere in the media and on the left was glamorous, filling writers with a sense of intoxicated invincibility. Read Batya Ungar-Sargon’s new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. She recounts how journalists went from working-class Joes who covered foreign wars or boxing bouts to elites who attended the Ivy League and congregated at cocktail parties in Georgetown and Manhattan. Being a journalist was suddenly sexy.

For the past 50 years, the press has been trying to replicate the buzz from Watergate. Journalism is no longer a way to convey news from your community to the masses. It’s a means to destroy someone powerful and become a celebrity. Just as an alcoholic will start to cut ethical corners and need more and more booze for less and less effect, reporters post-Watergate became sloppy and even disinterested in facts. There was Stephen Glass, the UVA rape hoax, and New York Times fantasist Jayson Blair. Mistakes and lies became more and more common.

For the media, the arrival of Donald Trump represented the mad final lap in end-stage addiction. That’s where the drug has completely taken over the user’s body and soul. The moments of bliss are harder and harder to capture despite the oceans of booze put to the task. Still, there is no stopping now. Just the idea of impeachment or removal from office was enough to blow through any and all guardrails, like presenting a boozehound a glittering bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. . . .

The Russia dossier, a sordid collection of lies about the president that was created by Hillary Clinton and her bootleggers, was pure backwoods grain alcohol. The kind of stuff that could make you go blind. It didn’t matter. To reporters there was still that sweet, distant memory of Watergate. That first high which cracked open the sky five decades ago. Like Gatsby gazing at the distant green light across the river, there had to be a way to recapture that magic.

Indeed. Of course, even the Watergate reporting is looking kind of dodgy now.

AS DEEP THROAT NEVER SAID, FOLLOW THE MONEY: Three Foreign Billionaires Finance the Dem Dark Money Machine.

HMMM: Richard Grenell Calls Report About Milley Helping the Chinese ‘Gossip and Innuendo:’ “Bob Woodward has become the Michael Wolff of Washington, DC. It’s hard to believe anything the two of them write. Trump isn’t a war starter and I don’t believe Milley thought he was.”

Flashback: Bob Woodward Has A Trail Of Accuracy Issues That Nobody Is Talking About.

UPDATE: This quote by Woodward is accurate, however: “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

(Updated and bumped.)

BROKEN RECORD: Brian Stelter Puts On Carl Bernstein to Call Trump a Domestic War Criminal.

Flashbacks:

● The Five Times Carl Bernstein Bellowed ‘Worse than Watergate!’ at Trump.

● Carl Bernstein: Bush [43] More “Disastrous” Than Nixon.

● “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”

—Carl Bernstein, 1992.

MARK JUDGE IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Journalists Can Learn from The Night Stalker.

Carl Kolchak might seem crazy, but as Lucas observes in the audio commentary, “pause to consider what historians now tell us about what was really going on between the White House and journalists at this particular time.” It was a paranoid time in the United States, but people were afraid for good reason. Lucas cites Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein’s book about Richard Nixon and the media. Nixon planted stories and letters in the press to try and undermine the reporting of Jack Anderson. The President even considered plans to poison Anderson. “Ratf**king,” the precursor to today’s opposition research, was destroying lives.

America in the early-1970s was the time of Vietnam, Watergate and Robert Altman’s Nashville. Like Nashville, The Night Stalker is both “anti-establishment and pro American Dream.” It fits into the “shadow cinema” of the 1970s, movies that were countercultural while also celebrating the values of more traditional and patriotic Middle America. Authority everywhere was eroding, but people still loved the country.

Kolchak is a perfect character to represent both sides. As Tim Lucas notes, the reporter “appeals to both sides of what was then called the generation gap.” In Kolchak, “there is something of the countercultural reporter. He’s not just filing his stories, he’s finding the stories of coverups approved by the local police and government.”

Yet Kolchak also has a conservative cynicism: “He’s not just doing this to tell the truth, he’s doing this for reasons of self-interest.” Like Glenn Greenwald or Tucker Carlson, Kolchak has been fired from several places, “all presumably for trying to get the truth past his editors.” Kolchak, who is “hell bent on getting the last laugh and coming back in style,” is “a charismatic grab bag full of contradictions, panache, [and] bad taste.” He doesn’t like authority but has “an all-American love for the goddam capital-T Truth.”

Read the whole thing.

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: Insidious: Off-hand references signal deep embedding of prominent media myths.

The disclosure about the existence of Nixon’s tapes was pivotal in the Watergate saga — and it was a disclosure not by Bernstein and Woodward or by “Deep Throat,” but by a former Nixon aide in testimony before a U.S. Senate select committee. (In a book about their Watergate reporting, Bernstein and Woodward claimed to have had a lead about the existence of the tapes, but did not pursue it because the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, didn’t think it would lead to a high-quality story.)

The “Deep Throat” source was W. Mark Felt, a senior FBI official who fed Watergate-related information, and sometimes misinformation, to Woodward (as well as a reporter for Time magazine named Sandy Smith). Felt was motivated not so much by altruism or distate for Nixon’s White House as by ambition to become director of the FBI, a position that opened up in May 1972 with the death of J. Edgar Hoover.

By leaking to reporters, Felt believed he could undercut his rivals for the FBI directorship. Those motives were persuasively described in Max Holland’s 2016 book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.

It’s useful and revealing in this context to recall what Woodward once said about the notion that he and Bernstein toppled Nixon. Woodward told an interviewer in 2004:

“To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

Plus the reality of another long running media myth, LBJ’s apocryphal “Cronkite Moment.” Read the whole thing.

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Book Review: Rock Me on the Water Hails 1974 Los Angeles.

“The movies produced by this process were, with rare exceptions, not quirky, idiosyncratic or experimental,” Brownstein writes sadly, preferring “big-budget, mainstream productions that aimed to captivate audiences, not challenge them.” It’s a familiar lament, but why Hollywood is constantly pushed to be the one business on earth that is supposed to antagonize rather than gratify its customers remains a mystery to me. (Moreover, just 15 years later the indie-cinema revolution created a second, artistically focused track for those who prefer depressing and eccentric movies to formulaic or entertaining ones, in many cases featuring the same talents who made the blockbusters.) Brownstein tags George Lucas as the kind of artist who steered Hollywood off the track of social relevance, but Lucas would disagree strongly that his career equals escapism; Apocalypse Now was his idea, and even Star Wars was a Vietnam allegory.

I agree, however, that early-Seventies Hollywood now looks like a discrete period compared with what came before and after; even the political undertone, which had been overtly revolutionary when hippie taste ruled, turned into a less obviously dated combination of generalized youthful angst (Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge”) and a frustrated sense of seeping and uncontrollable corruption (the makers of Chinatown marveled at how what they were filming seemed to echo the concurrent Watergate hearings). Brownstein grieves the turn away from early-Seventies films “that fundamentally challenged America’s self-image as an equitable society and a force for good in the world,” but there has been no shortage of those in recent decades. And as Brownstein grudgingly admits, television got far better, not worse, starting in the Nineties.

And California’s been living off the fumes of the 1960s and ’70s ever since. As Reason TV asked at the start of the month: Is California Over?

WHEN HOLLYWOOD WENT NUTS: The Swimmer.

The film was not a success when it was released in 1968, but its narrative ideology and influence would be lasting. The 90-minute story, a mix of Narcissus and Odysseus set to a backdrop of class anxiety and cultural decline, is basically the same one that would take place over seven seasons of Mad Men; if you knew your Cheever, it was easy to imagine Ned sharing the commuter train into Manhattan with Don Draper. When the AMC series began, it even had Don and his family living in Ossining, NY, the same bedroom community Cheever called home when he died.

I was born the same week Cheever’s original story was published in the New Yorker, seven months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic whose family had excelled in their imitation of high WASP style. Ten years or so later, a teacher at my Catholic grade school would screen a very expurgated 16mm print of the film to us during English class. I remember finding it baffling, even scary; if this was what being an adult involved, I was in no hurry to grow up.

The world of The Swimmer was recognizable to me years later, when Ang Lee made a movie out of Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm, set in a Connecticut commuter suburb less than a decade after The Swimmer. It told a similar story from a very Generation X perspective – the unsupervised kids growing up with Watergate and stagflation, their parents active soldiers on the front lines of the sexual revolution, hooking up and coming apart.

When we talk about the youthquake that unsettled and remade Hollywood in the late ’60s, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider gets cited inevitably. But in hindsight it’s difficult to see that the story of Wyatt and Billy crossing America on their motorcycles was more influential than a flop like The Swimmer, made by a movie star, a post-studio mogul and a pair of middle class bohemians that helped fix the image and pass judgment on a whole social class that, just a decade earlier, was certain that it had taken the commanding heights of society.

As James Lileks recently wrote on advertising in the 1950s and ’60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”

JIM TREACHER: Was Cori Bush Cured of COVID-19 by One of Her Fellow Faith Healers?

Before today, I didn’t know much about Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) except that, because she’s a black woman, anything I say to rebut or criticize her is automatically racist and sexist. For example, recently Rep. Bush referred to pregnant women as “birthing people” — apparently to avoid offending the 0.0001% of Americans who are or have been pregnant, but somehow identify as male — and all the people who slammed her for it were motivated only by her race and gender.

* * * * * * * *

But back to the point here: Cori Bush is a faith healer. There’s a faith healer in Congress. Possibly more than one, but Bush is the one we know about.

How did we not know this until today? Isn’t this newsworthy?

Can you imagine the media firestorm if a congressional Republican was a faith healer who claimed to have cured him- or herself of COVID-19? CNN, MSNBC, the NYT, and all the rest would present it as evidence that Republicans are a bunch of drooling redneck rubes. The guffaws from the #PartyOfScience would be deafening. The late-night comedians would show clips of convulsing Pentecostal snake-handlers and quip, “That GOP retreat looks like fun, huh?” I can just picture the smirk on Stephen Colbert’s face, although it’s impossible to picture him without it.

Oh sure – next you’re going to tell me that the editor of the Washington Post during its Watergate heyday was married to a birthing person who believed in seances, Ouija boards, and hexes.

DEEP THROAT HAS LEFT THE PARKING GARAGE: RIP Hal Holbrook, famed Mark Twain and Deep Throat actor, dead at 95.

All the President’s Men is a great movie, but it is a movie, not a history lesson:

● Mark Steyn’s article on Mark Felt, the real “Deep Throat.”

● “‘Deep Throat’ never advised [Bob] Woodward to ‘follow the money.’”

● Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. “‘[T]o explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic journalist,’ I wrote, ‘is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth’ — one that even Woodward has disputed. He told an interviewer in 2004: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.’”

● “The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often inaccurate, Watergate source.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: MSNBC Goes Full Nazi in New Ad: It’s Like These Conservatives ‘Just Following Orders.’

MSNBC went full Nazi in a new ad, bizarrely linking conservatives Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy to the Third Reich. The spot promoting host Lawrence O’Donnell began with text reading, “Straight to the heart of moral corruption.”

Then, the liberal host lectured, “’We were just following orders’ is a statement that is indelibly etched in our consciences as what we should never become. We are following orders is now and always has been the last line of defense for the indefensible here and around the world.” During his commentary, pictures of Iran-Contra figure North, as well as Watergate’s Liddy appeared on-screen. That shifted to images of actual Nazis during the Nuremberg trials.

Just imagine if Fox News ran a spot comparing Stalin-era communists to Democratic operatives or politicians. What, exactly, to Liddy and North have to do with the actual Nazis? That these two were following orders connected to their respective scandals makes them like… Nuremberg trial Nazis? And what does any of this have to do with 2021 Republicans?

It’s all pretty rich coming from a network that believes your children are not your own, has a weekly show hosted by a legendary anti-Semite, and has another host who famously said:

“I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive. Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals, okay.”

— Lawrence O’Donnell, November 5^th, 2010.

SHOP-OCALYPSE NOW: NYC businesses board up for possible election unrest.