Two years ago, a significant segment of the American news media was transfixed by the idea that the nation had entered a new “post-truth” era. The term was Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 “international word of the year.” The fear, made acute by the unexpected ascendancy of Donald Trump, was that factual accuracy and verifiable truth no longer mattered; only partisan spin and ideological obfuscation remained. “Post-truth” was always a silly concept, generated by and for the chattering classes. But the term’s popularization was evidence of a feeling on the part of many Americans that politics had become a place of mendacity and deception.
Many people in the mainstream media want badly to pin the blame on politicians for this state of affairs. That elected officials and their staff bear much of the blame is undeniable. But it’s hard to take the news media seriously as long as major media outlets exhibit so little regard for basic standards of veracity.
We’re thinking especially of MSNBC. Its employment of Joy-Ann Reid, host of weekend current-events show AM Joy, continues to besmirch the network’s reputation. A little over a month ago, responding to revelations that she had made seriously ill-advised remarks on her blog in the years 2005 and 2006, she claimed her blog had been hacked by some nefarious actor seeking to discredit her. That claim appears to have been an invention. This weekend, yet more remarks by Reid came to light—she seemed to endorse a video claiming the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the U.S. government, and compared Sen. John McCain with the Virginia Tech mass murderer.
Reid’s claims from a decade ago aren’t so much the problem. They don’t suggest her to be a judicious person, but by themselves they may not merit her firing. The problem is that she lied about them by claiming her blog had been hacked—and the news network for whom she works seems not to care. MSNBC issued a statement conceding that “some of the things written by Joy on her old blog are obviously hateful and hurtful” but insisting that she “has apologized publicly and privately and said she has grown and evolved in the many years since, and we know this to be true.”
She has apologized for saying dumb things a decade ago, yes. But she hasn’t apologized for concocting a preposterous lie about it. That is what MSNBC should care about—but doesn’t.
As we were considering the Joy Reid debacle over the weekend, news reached us that the same network has decided to hire Ben Rhodes, former foreign policy aide to Barack Obama, as a political contributor. Readers may remember Rhodes as the man who, in a profile by the New York Times, boasted that he and his White House communications office staff had bamboozled the media into supporting the Iran nuclear deal. Rhodes and his team, he told the Times, promoted an assemblage of Middle East and Iran “experts” to the media, which then quoted those “experts” as authorities. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes said in the interview. “They [the media] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
One might think the news media would shun Rhodes, if for no other reason than that he bragged openly of manipulating them. Nope. The man is now employed by the very media he misled in four years ago.
This is the network, remember, that currently employs the infamous fraud Al Sharpton as a host and features the discredited hack Dan Rather as a media critic. If anybody’s gone full-on “post-truth” in American politics, we’re afraid it’s MSNBC.
