CNN contributor Carl Bernstein believes now may be time for reporters to start outing anonymous Congressional sources who knowingly promote and enable “disinformation.”
Don’t worry, Rep. Adam Schiff. He obviously doesn’t mean you.
Bernstein suggested Sunday that journalists should give serious consideration to the idea of naming Republican senators who use the cloak of anonymity in news reports to enable or promote “disinformation” regarding alleged voter fraud and legal challenges to the 2020 election.
“We have had a cold civil war in this country,” said Bernstein, “and, under Donald Trump, he has poured fuel on the fire of that cold civil war and ignited the cold civil war, and that includes a civil war of untruth conducted by untruth by a president of the United States and those who follow and enable him.”
Protecting the identities of sources who wish to remain anonymous is apparently sacrosanct except for when it is not, according to the guy who helped break open the Watergate scandal.
“There is another factor that we’re not covering well enough,” Bernstein said, “because there is one institution that continues to enable this disinformation, disproportionately, and that is the Republican Senate of the United States.”
He continued, saying, “Because I can tell you, having talked to these senators, members of their staff, the Republicans perhaps half of the Republican members of the Senate despise and disdain Donald Trump. They were happy to see him lose as long as they could hold on to a Senate majority. And it’s time that we start calling these senators out, perhaps by name in terms of what they really believe, what they tell us as reporters on background, because they have enabled part of this disinformation campaign.”
“On background” is a reference to when a source agrees to divulge certain information to a reporter with the agreement that the source’s name will not be used in the subsequent news report.
Republican senators “know what’s going on,” Bernstein concluded at the end of his winding monologue. “They won’t speak out. The dirty secret is perhaps these Republicans in the Senate, and we have to figure out a new way to cover them and what they are really saying to each other.”
An interesting idea!
This would have been useful during any of the first three years of Trump’s presidency, back when credulous reporters published basically whatever they were told by anonymous congressional staffers and intelligence officials about the dead-end Russian collusion conspiracy theory. For the record, we still don’t know who it was that fed both MSNBC and CNN the same bogus story alleging Donald Trump Jr. and various Trump 2016 campaign advisers received an email before the election indicating that they were offered advance access to an impending WikiLeaks dump of emails stolen from Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
At any rate, if Bernstein is serious about naming and shaming members of Congress who spread nonsense on background, he can start first with the anonymous Republican lawmakers who supposedly told him in October 2019 that they seriously questioned Trump’s “sanity and his stability.” Bernstein is always free to give up those names, and he should, as it seems the Trump-is-mentally-unstable narrative is a work of fiction.
We must get the truth out there now! It is for the good of our democracy. Your move, Bernstein.
