It’s hard to know if these are hard times or triumphant times for the mainstream news media. On the one hand, major news organizations—the New York Times, say, or the Washington Post—have a brighter future and command more respect than they did a generation ago. These and other news companies boast a multitude of tireless and competent reporters, editors, and producers. On the other hand, an unscrupulous agitator won the presidency largely by fulminating against the news media, so unpopular have mainstream news outlets become.
The weekend was a sharp reminder of the negative side of the ledger. At Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an event that used to be quietly ignored by everyone other than its attendees but now earns headlines thanks to the unseemliness of its comedy routines, a comedienne named Michelle Wolf subjected White House officials Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway to a barrage of cruel and obnoxious jibes. Wolf ridiculed Sanders for her eye makeup, and said of Conway: “If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree?”
Not a fine moment for the Washington press corps.
More unsettling, though, was MSNBC host Joy Reid’s bizarre quasi-admission on Saturday about blog posts she seems to have written a decade ago. Last year, remember, Reid was criticized for old blog posts in which, among other things, she derided former Florida governor Charlie Crist for being a closeted gay man and expressed disgust at the sight of a man kissing a man. These online remarks did not suggest that Reid possessed a high degree of judiciousness, but by themselves they didn’t amount to a firing offense.
Last week, yet more posts were publicized by an anonymous Twitter account. But this time Reid chose not to apologize. Instead she claimed that her blog had been hacked by some nefarious actor in an attempt to associate her with “hateful references” that “run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.” “The manipulated material,” she claimed, “seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.”
How she could acknowledge and apologize for one collection of posts, but claim another collection was the result of a hacker, is not immediately clear. The latter claim certainly appears to be hooey. By Saturday morning it seemed even more improbable. “Many of you have seen these blog posts circulating online and on social media,” she said on her weekend show, AM Joy. “Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory, and outright weird and hateful. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts.”
She went on to explain that she’d hired “cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words.” The result? She has “not been able to prove it.” She added: “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me. But I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past why some people don’t believe me.”
Count us skeptical.
What appears to have happened was something altogether different and, to us, more unsettling: Reid was terrified of the accusation that she is anti-LGBT—but not bothered much at all by the accusation that she’s a liar. She viewed the revelation that she was not an enthusiastic supporter of the LGBT agenda as potentially career-ending, but wasn’t afraid to invent a preposterous lie. She seems to have concluded that being skeptical of the gay rights agenda will get you canned, but lying about it will not. And she may have judged correctly: As of Sunday, she was still a host for MSNBC.
To the extent Joy-Ann Reid’s sense of journalistic ethics reflects those of her media colleagues, it’s no wonder so many Americans loathe the media.
