The media used to be biased, presenting news that favored the political proclivities of those doing the reporting. However, it has moved far beyond that into advocacy and sometimes outright deception. My personal experience with the media is a window into that change and into the current attacks on conservatives.
As I began my career as a documentary filmmaker in the late ’70s and ’80s, already the conservative complaints of bias were loud and also justified. Bias was easy to spot. Reporters covered stories and were sympathetic to one point of view, call it the “pro” side. So, the story would lead with the “pro” side and end with the “pro” side, sandwiching the “anti” side into the middle and giving it much less coverage. All the good quotes would come from the “pro” advocates, while the “anti” advocates were reduced to defending themselves or offering simple denials. Reporters for all three major TV networks and for all the prominent newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, used these same techniques. As a simple illustration, they would characteristically refer to the “conservative Heritage Foundation” while labeling the Brookings Institution as a “Washington think tank.”
As a documentarian with right-of-center sympathies, I knew I could not look to the networks for work, given their bias. Instead, I turned to PBS, which was legally obligated to be objective and balanced. PBS was open to at least some token conservative programs, such as Firing Line with William F. Buckley. As a result, our company, Manifold Productions, made many award-winning documentaries over the years, all nationally broadcast via PBS. Sensitized to the issues of bias, I determined that our films would air all sides of issues in a fair manner.
Now, the era of bias is over, and the coverage of Donald Trump dealt it a death blow. The left-wing media no longer slant to one side, the very definition of bias, but omit in its entirety the “wrong” side. Viewers and readers are offered no clue as to why a rational person would oppose the reporter’s point of view. Journalism has turned into advocacy, moving beyond bias. Bias is now old-school, fit for amateurs.
In the Trump administration, I served as CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees five international broadcasters: Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. They are collectively one of the world’s largest broadcasters, reaching over 350 million people a week in over 70 languages, with an annual budget of more than $850 million.
Although I was only in office for eight months, and the media had rarely covered my agency over the previous decade, I garnered vast media attention. My goal was simply to return this agency to fulfilling its legally mandated mission to tell America’s story and promote American ideals, such as freedom and democracy, worldwide. There was bipartisan agreement that the agency had lost its way, straying from its mission and beset by scandals. This led the Obama administration and Congress to create the new position of Senate-confirmed CEO, of which I was the first.
Yet, the Left could not abide a Trump appointee running such a vast media empire, attacking me and retrospectively portraying the previous scandal-ridden years as if the agency was a finely run enterprise fulfilling its mission.
There are personal connections in the landscape. My predecessor, John Lansing, left to run NPR. Amanda Bennett, who chose to resign as director of VOA the day before I started, is married to Don Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post. Not surprisingly, these two outlets took the lead in attacking me. During my tenure, the Post devoted over 40 articles to me, including three editorials and four op-eds, including one by Bennett herself, with no mention of her connection to the Washington Post. NPR gave me the equivalent airtime, only mentioning the Lansing connection after pressure from my agency. My legal team was overseeing an investigation into the incompetent and ethically questionable work of Lansing, Bennett, and their principal lieutenants, which was triggered by a series of damning reports by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Personnel Management, and other agencies covering the 10 years before I arrived.
This may have affected their attitude toward us. To be fair, it wasn’t just NPR and the Washington Post; their colleagues at the New York Times, CNN, Politico, and the rest followed suit with identical coverage, just somewhat less frequently.
Every new initiative of my administration was attacked, with the implication that it was part of a Trump administration conspiracy to turn these broadcasters into propagandists for Trump, a manifestly impossible task even if Trump had wanted to do it, which he did not. Our only goal was simply to ensure our broadcasters followed the law.
They did not deign to present two points of view while favoring one, as in the old days of mere bias. They offered only one point of view — attacks on my administration’s work. In all this avalanche of coverage, never did a journalist interview anyone sympathetic to our point of view who could offer arguments supporting our work. Our supporters could easily be found, as they were featured in the trickle of positive coverage that we received from conservative media outlets. I will note that I refused to speak to these journalists, whom I did not trust. However, that does not relieve them, were they following traditional journalistic ethics, from finding a way to present the other side. In the end, we posted on the USAGM website four memos laying out our policies and reasoning in all controversial areas, which received no ink at all.
But, these journalists did their work with a willingness to print or broadcast what they knew to be false or, at best, distorted. The examples are numerous, and many concerned misleading and outright false statements about our policies, errors that my communications team painstakingly corrected to reporters, only to be ignored.
Let me offer a few simple examples from NPR’s longtime media correspondent, David Folkenflik. While Folkenflik might have been the most egregious reporter, he was far from alone.
Folkenflik wrote in a report that I did not cooperate with the Biden USAGM transition team. This was false. I named the transition team’s point of contact, and I directed her to be fully cooperative within the guidelines issued to us by the White House, including providing hundreds of pages of internal documents. This is required by law. In addition, my communications team informed Folkenflik fully about our transition work, so he knew better.
I wonder if Folkenflik had any sources confirming his story. When I met with the head of Joe Biden’s transition team, Richard Stengel, he seemed embarrassed by the NPR story, assured me that the point of contact was cooperative, asserted that no one from his team would have said anything to the contrary to NPR, and offered to correct the record after the transition ended. But now it is way too late. Folkenflik connected his false account of my team’s work to the broader story that the Trump administration wasn’t cooperating with the incoming Biden administration due to claims of a stolen election. Several acquaintances and neighbors have asked why I was obstructing the peaceful transition of power as required by the Constitution. Once out, rumor and innuendo cannot be contained.
An even bolder and more vicious lie appeared in a David Folkenflik NPR piece that referred to a podcast I appeared on called The Federalist Hour. Folkenflik wrote, “Pack joked with The Federalist’s host, senior editor Chris Bedford, about deporting his employees and forcing them to adopt unsafe workplace practices that could expose them to COVID-19.” So naturally, other outlets picked this up, absurdly accusing me of wanting to kill my employees by exposing them to COVID, a “policy” not even attributed to Trump or anyone on the American political spectrum. After all, no sane person endorses mass murder.
In reality, I was trying to ignore host Chris Bedford, who was the one making a feeble joke, after asking me about bringing employees back after COVID. I tried to slough him off. However, his light tone is apparent listening to the audio. There were no jokes about “deporting employees” but a serious question about the right way to renew J-1 visas as required by law. My communications department provided David Folkenflik with a podcast transcript, but he refused to correct his piece.
Maybe Folkenflik was not technically “lying,” but his purpose was to deceive. He knew perfectly well what I was trying to say in that podcast. As a reporter, why would he knowingly distort the truth?
Sadly, it got worse. Folkenflik, in several pieces, reported on the personal lives of some of my political appointees. For example, he mentioned one employee’s messy divorce settlement, and another’s dispute with his father resulting in a temporary restraining order. In three cases, they broke down and cried upon reading the pieces. A young man was unable to work that day or the next. Not only were they mortified that their families would read the stories, but they knew that future employers would Google them and retrieve these salacious stories that have nothing to do with their work or that of USAGM.
My communications department begged Folkenflik not to put this material in his pieces since this gossip had no bearing on our policies or controversies surrounding international broadcasting. Instead, he simply noted that “the public had a right to know.” Indeed, he had a right to publish it, and his reporting was factually accurate in these cases, but what was the point?
What motivated these low personal attacks? I can only surmise that Folkenflik wanted to terrorize these young people, to strike fear into their hearts, to inhibit their ability to function. And it worked. Those attacked were more fearful, more cautious, and less effective.
This kind of journalism is so beyond bias that I have trouble thinking up a name for it. It veers into Sopranos territory, journalists as hit men — thugs with a pen, not a gun.
Folkenflik himself did not have to suffer for his lack of journalistic integrity. On the contrary, he was rewarded. For his reporting, he won the Scripps Howard Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment. The judges of the award stated: “David Folkenflik’s amazing reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to obliterate Voice of America falls squarely into the First Amendment aspirations of this award category.”
Needless to say, never did we try to “obliterate Voice of America,” which I love and which is protected by law. Perhaps coincidentally, Folkenflik’s boss at NPR and my predecessor, John Lansing, worked at Scripps for over 20 years, rising to serve as president of the Scripps Networks.
I wish I had an easy solution to this problem. Our republic, founded as it is on the consent of the governed, cannot thrive without an informed public, for which we need a responsible media. The first step toward that end is to see clearly what kind of media we do have, which is now well beyond biased.
Michael Pack is a documentary filmmaker, president of Manifold Productions, and former CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He has produced over 15 documentaries for public television, most recently “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”
