Two longtime foreign policy journalists maintained this week that they were never contacted by the New York Times Magazine prior to its publishing a report alleging they aided the White House in spinning the Iran nuclear deal in a positive light.
“Nope,” the Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg said Monday in a note to the Washington Examiner’s media desk, “[they] never contacted me.”
Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen meanwhile told the Examiner she received only an email saying the show would be “name checked” in the Times’ report, adding this did not provide her an “adequate chance to respond and object.”
Goldberg and Rozen said elsewhere that the NYT Magazine’s claim that the White House used them to push fictitious talking points is 100 percent false.
“This is an unsupported, defamatory allegation that somehow slipped into The New York Times Magazine by a guy, it should be pointed out, who has had a grudge against me for several years,” Goldberg told the Huffington Post.
He explained further in a post at the Atlantic why it was incorrect for the Times to accuse him of playing along with White House narratives.
Rozen added in a separate note to the Huffington Post that, “The New York Times Magazine editor has already acknowledged to me that the magazine made a mistake by failing to give me a serious chance to respond and offer my blanket objection.”
“The magazine slandered me without speaking to me; or giving me a reasonable chance to strongly object,” Rozen said. “It was a drive-by shooting.”
Their protestations came after the NYT Magazine published a lengthy article last week profiling Ben Rhodes, President’s Obama’s Deputy National Security adviser.
The top White House spin doctor bragged at one point in the 10,000-plus-word report that he uses his position of power to shop carefully constructed talking points to reporters who are gullible, lazy or complicit, and plays the more inexperienced members of the press for “chumps.”
For example, Rhodes bragged, he concocted a series of fictitious talking points about the controversial Iran nuclear deal, handed them to journalists he was certain would “report” them uncritically and kept the media spinning the story in a positive light.
One of his colleagues even said they are careful to pick journalists who are well-respected in media circles so as to make the talking points more believable.
The author of the article, David Samuels, named Rozen and Goldberg specifically as two supposed White House lackeys.
Samuels reported:
As [Director of Digital Response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy Tanya Somanader] explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about.
“People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.”
For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”
Goldberg and Rozen maintained this week that Sameuls’ claim is utter tosh.
Though NYT Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein conceded Monday in a note to the Huffington Post that his publication really should have reached out to Goldberg and Rozen prior to publishing the Rhodes profile, he said they aren’t backing down from their reporting.
“Put simply: we stand behind the story, and David’s extensive reporting backs up everything he wrote,” the editor told the Examiner.
Rhodes meanwhile has been left to spin his own media profile, and wrote a lengthy blog post Monday explaining away questions about his treatment of the press and White House talking points.
