The news that former national security adviser Susan Rice was responsible for “unmasking” the identities of associates of President Trump in government surveillance reports sent shockwaves through Washington. But almost as newsworthy was the identity of the man who got the scoop: vociferous Trump booster and blogger Mike Cernovich.
Though it was Bloomberg’s foreign policy reporter Eli Lake who nailed down the details of the Rice story on the morning of April 3, the evening before Cernovich had published a short report on Medium, an Internet platform open to anyone, headlined “Susan Rice Requested Unmasking of Incoming Trump Administration Officials.” The post had a few original details, but beyond the revelation in the headline, the article was notable for its attack on New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. According to Cernovich, Haberman had been sitting on the story “in an effort to protect the reputation of former President Barack Obama.”
Then, the day after Lake had produced his much more credible and detailed account, Cernovich lashed out at him, claiming Lake, too, had been sitting on the story.
“Eli Lake had it. He didn’t want to run it and Bloomberg didn’t want to run it because it vindicates Trump’s claim that he had been spied upon. . . . I’m showing you the politics of ‘real journalism.’ ‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump.”
Haberman tells me she “first heard the Susan Rice detail in the Cernovich piece.” Lake says, in no uncertain terms, that Cernovich’s grasp of “real journalism” is wanting. “I don’t think Cernovich understands what we do,” he says. Lake notes that he had to nail down the facts before publishing. “I get information and verify it,” he says. “Why would I sit on it? It’s a huge story. He’s a fake news artist.”
There’s no question who the White House thought deserved the most credit for the Rice story. On April 4, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “Congrats to [Mike Cernovich] for breaking the #SusanRice story. In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
Cernovich claims he got the story “from somebody who works in one of those media companies. I have spies in every media organization,” which is implausible. Less implausible is that Cernovich might have sources in the White House. Given that the Trump administration and national media establishment are combative to an unprecedented degree, should it be a surprise if the White House hands off a big story to a blogger whose fealty can be counted on? Cernovich has over 250,000 Twitter followers. In the 21st century, you don’t need Bloomberg or the New York Times to break a big story. And the media can be obnoxiously self-congratulatory considering how many political “scoops” involve little more than waiting by the phone for the next big leak from a partisan source.
It would be hard, in other words, to begrudge the White House its bestowing a scoop on a friendly blogger. Except that’s not all Cernovich is. He’s also a crackpot. He’s the author of the self-published books Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions, Improve Your Health and Fitness, Make More Money and Live Life on Your Terms and MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again. Among the self-improvement ideas he pushes are claims of astral projection and instructions to men on developing “super serum” that makes women addicted to them (you don’t want to know the details).
As for his other thoughts on women, Cernovich is a real charmer. On his blog, Danger and Play, there are such notable entries as “Misogyny Gets You Laid,” “When Should You Compliment a Woman?” (A: “During or after sex”), and “How to Cheat on Your Girlfriend.” And he was also one of the major promulgators of the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which held that the Democratic party was involved in a pedophile ring run out of a Washington eatery. The whole thing seemed too bizarre to take seriously—until a man spun up by the hoax drove to the restaurant and fired multiple rifle shots (he was arrested and pled guilty to assault).
Cernovich is not the only iffy blogger the Trump family has decided to elevate. In January, it issued White House press credentials to Jim Hoft, aka Gateway Pundit. Like Cernovich, Hoft is undeniably popular. “During the election, I had one million readers a day come to Gateway Pundit,” Hoft bragged at the “Deploraball” inauguration event. “And the reason was because I was telling the truth, and the mainstream media was telling the fake f—ing news.”
Whatever one might say about the lousy performance of the mainstream media—and there’s quite a lot to say—a blogger who propagated the lunatic claim that President Obama was Photoshopped into the famous picture of the White House Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid isn’t in a strong position to lecture on “fake news.” (The list of similarly dubious stories Hoft has run with is far too long to detail.)
As with Cernovich, there are good reasons to believe Gateway Pundit has a following in the White House. On March 3, as the investigation into Trump and Russia was heating up, the president tweeted, “We should start an immediate investigation into [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!” Attached to the tweet was a photo of a smiling Schumer and Vladimir Putin, enjoying donuts and coffee in New York in 2003. Gateway Pundit had featured the photo on its home page the day before. And Gateway Pundit is undeniably influential in the Trump-friendly media ecosystem. In February, Sean Hannity tweeted a Gateway Pundit story to his 2.3 million followers about “globalist war criminal John McCain” soliciting campaign donations from Russia. Hannity’s comment: “Wow if true.”
If journalism in the Trump era had to be reduced to one slogan, “Wow if true” would do the trick. Whether by design or not, Trump appears to have broken the media in ways from which it will be difficult to recover. As troubling as the White House’s ordaining Mike Cernovich and Jim Hoft into the Beltway clerisy might be, the traditional media have reacted to Trump’s desire to operate outside the usual journalistic rules by further eroding their own credibility.
CNN responded to Cernovich’s scoop by trying to discredit it, never mind that Rice isn’t denying she’s the unmasker and that it had been verified and detailed by Eli Lake, a reporter with an established record of breaking big foreign policy stories. Multiple network personalities dismissed the story and defended Rice on air without any substantive reason for doing so. CNN even referred to the story as “false” in the chyrons on the bottom of the screen.
And of course, the left is rallying around their own Cernoviches and Hofts. Louise Mensch, a former Tory MP, is running a conspiracy-laden investigation of Trump on social media. Mensch did some reporting last fall that appeared to have some germs of truth regarding probes of Trump’s Russia connections. Since his inauguration, though, she’s seemed to be having a public meltdown on Twitter. BuzzFeed has documented at least 210 people and organizations Mensch has accused of being under Russian government influence—the longest list of supposed foreign agents uncovered by one person since Joseph McCarthy waved his infamous list of 205 Communist moles in the State Department at the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling.
Despite this, there’s a huge cult of people who should know better sharing Mensch’s increasingly wild theories. The New York Times published an op-ed by her on Trump and Russia in March. Online, everyone from Hollywood actor and director Rob Reiner to the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review has been touting her theories of pervasive Russian influence.
Former National Security Council spokesman and longtime CIA analyst Ned Price earned quite a lot of media attention for resigning in protest over Trump’s policies in February. On April 19, Price tweeted out this blog headline: “Intel source: FBI discovers Kremlin is blackmailing [resigning congressman] Jason Chaffetz over Donald Trump and Russia.” Price’s comment on it was less concise than “Wow if true” but amounted to the same thing: “Interesting, if single-sourced, article from a few days ago. Just getting around to sharing it now cause, well . . .”
Speaking of single sources, the article Price linked was from something called the Palmer Report, one of the exhibits in a recent Atlantic article on “fake news aimed at liberals.” The Daily Caller observed that the Palmer Report‘s lone source was . . . Louise Mensch. Price defended his comment, saying, “every once in a blue moon, the tin hat can fit.”
The Trump administration may end up regretting its unorthodox media strategy. Trump’s friends in alternative media can be remarkably effective, but some of them are “alternative” not because they are brave dissenters but because they’re unhinged—and that makes them unreliable. When Trump bombed Syria in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack, two of the loudest critics were former allies: Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory network InfoWars and none other than Mike Cernovich.
In the course of ranting about how the “deep state” had tricked Trump into war, Cernovich speculated that Syria’s chemical weapons attack was faked. “Did McCain give ‘moderate rebels’ (ISIS) in Syria poison gas and Hollywood style film equipment?” he tweeted on April 6. The relationship between Cernovich and the White House was briefly strained but now appears to be on the mend. On April 25, Cernovich reported on Twitter that after a “misunderstanding” he had been granted a White House press pass.
The media, however contemptible they can be, remain a vital American institution. And the Trump presidency has Washington journalists in disarray in ways that are deeply worrisome for those who think news should be grounded in reality, and reporting skeptical and rigorous. On April 13, Charlie Spiering, the White House correspondent for Breitbart News—the wildly pro-Trump media outlet previously steered by Steve Bannon, now senior adviser to the president—reported that the president made a point of calling the reporters in the White House press pool “very honorable people.” It was probably sarcastic, but wow if true.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
