If the purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, journalist Michelle Kosinski is in the wrong line of work.
Kosinski, who is now self-employed after stints at both NBC News and CNN, believes that government dishonesty and malfeasance are unique byproducts of the Trump administration. This is disturbing, considering that she reported on the White House well before Donald Trump’s presidency.
“As an American journalist,” Kosinski said on social media this week, “you never expect: 1. Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly 2. Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know 3. Your own govt to spy on your communications.”
Journalists should expect exactly all of those things. It’s why they have work in the first place.
“Trump’s unAmerican regime did all of these,” she added. “No one should accept this.”
Kosinski, by the way, is the former NBC News correspondent who became a laughingstock when she appeared on national television paddling in a canoe in New Jersey “floodwaters” that were no deeper than a couple of inches:
<mediadc-iframe data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1620762876633,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07c3-d172-a563-4feb224a0001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1620762876633,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07c3-d172-a563-4feb224a0001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"title":"MK","iFrameEmbedCode":"","_id":"00000179-5cb6-d8d5-afff-7eb764730000","_type":"00000161-b425-d761-a563-f7e77e270000"}”>MKNot to lay it on too thick, but has Kosinski ever read a book? Has she really no idea what goes on in Washington, D.C.? Does she not know what her obviously more competent peers do for a living?
How can one allege with a straight face that U.S. journalists never expect to be lied to by the federal government? How can she allege that journalists never expect the government to withhold information or spy on reporters? This is exactly what good reporters expect, because this stuff has been going on for as long as power has been a concept.
Plucking examples almost at random, I can list at least a dozen moments in which the federal government has done exactly what Kosinksi describes — moments that long predate the Trump presidency.
In 1968, for example, the Pentagon covered up the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers slaughtered nearly 500 Vietnamese villagers. It wasn’t until a dogged reporter named Seymour Hersh uncovered the truth of what happened that the public even heard of the small village.
The Washington Post and the New York Times later published what is known colloquially as the Pentagon Papers, which show the federal government had quietly broadened the scope of the Vietnam War with illegal bombing runs in Cambodia and Laos. The public knew about none of these actions until the press blew the lid off the story.
Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still dining out on the credit they earned for bringing down President Richard Nixon’s administration over the Watergate scandal, which involved a whole hell of a lot of lying and obfuscation on the part of government officials.
Years later, in 1992, Common Cause magazine founder Florence Graves launched an investigation into sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. Her investigation uncovered plenty, which led eventually to the first-ever Senate Ethics Committee investigation of sexual misconduct in Congress. The investigation also led to the passage of the Congressional Accountability Act.
In 2013, the Washington Post and the Guardian uncovered the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance program.
More recently, former Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria, revealed that unelected bureaucrats undermined former President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw from Syria simply by lying about the actual number of U.S. troops in the area, avoiding a total withdrawal merely by fudging the data.
Are we really going to blame Trump for that one?
There’s so much more lying and government malfeasance where this stuff comes from — it’s difficult to keep track of it all.
There’s the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Iran Contra scandal, Abscam, the Waco massacre, former President Bill Clinton perjuring himself, the launch of the forever wars based on possibly falsified intelligence, the federal government’s culpability in the financial crisis, the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the attempted cover-up, and the U.S. government spying on Associated Press reporters during the Obama years.
If Kosinski doesn’t understand this, then what good is she as a journalist?
