The opposite of journalism: CNN is encouraging government officials to lie

“No, sir. … Not wittingly. There are cases where it could, inadvertently perhaps. But not wittingly.”

This was a blatant lie, told knowingly and willingly, in public and under oath. Just months later, Edward Snowden’s leaks proved it. Clapper had been exposed, and he could have been prosecuted, if not for the chummy Washington culture in which the powerful protect one another. Yet, this posed no problem for him after his career in government ended. CNN hired Clapper as a commentator in 2017. As Jonathan Turley pointed out, this was before the five-year statute of limitations had even run out on his perjury.

Last week, CNN announced that it is hiring Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI. According to the FBI inspector general, McCabe lied repeatedly to investigators, including FBI Director James Comey. Some of the lies were under oath. McCabe’s lies were designed to cover up “misconduct” on his part: He had violated FBI policy by leaking information about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation to the Wall Street Journal during the 2016 election. The leak was “designed to advance his personal interest at the expense of department leadership,” the IG reported.

Naturally, McCabe also lied to the public immediately after his firing, claiming it had been some form of political retaliation. That gained him a lot of sympathy, until the inspector general’s report showed otherwise. McCabe has in fact been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution and is still, to this day, under federal investigation.

So, if one day he suddenly has to stop appearing on CNN, that might explain why.

If you’re wondering why people don’t trust the media, look no further than the hiring of these two liars. CNN has sent a clear message to those in government: If you lose your position of public trust because you lie under oath, you can always land a job at CNN — at least as long as your lie was for a good cause, such as the resistance to Trump, or presumably to whatever Republican presidents are elected in the future.

It is incredible that many of the same people rightly sneering at Fox News’ earlier hiring of Sarah Huckabee Sanders are incapable of understanding the problem with hiring actual under-oath liars like Clapper and McCabe. But it gets much worse than that.

CNN is making our country worse by creating an incentive for public officials to engage in similar misconduct. That’s the opposite of what journalism should do.

To the extent that it has a direct effect on the public sector, journalism should create incentives for probity and integrity. It should champion and amplify the charges of whistleblowers, providing a counterpoint where necessary to those in power who hold the microphone: people like Clapper and McCabe, who told lies under oath to conceal their own and the government’s misconduct.

Some would argue (and they have a point) that the transition from government to journalism is one of the less-harmful revolving-door maneuvers. After all, most government officials go on to generous remuneration in the world of lobbying and K Street “consulting”: potentially a repayment for services rendered in the crafting of legislation and regulation while in office. Many of those involved in crafting Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill did exactly that.

But journalism is supposed to be about the truth. Even when it is opinion journalism and television commentary, at times tendentious and prone to spin, the viewers deserve to hear the honest opinions of those involved, not the sort of self-serving posturing that those implicated in government misconduct have to resort to when personally uncomfortable topics arise.

In short, there are more than enough Trump-haters for CNN to hire who can offer honest anti-Trump opinions. Why create a market for perjurers in public office by hiring these two?