Long time no post. Sorry. You can imagine, these take up most of my day.
But I wanted to give you a preview of the lead on tomorrow’s podcast (after the encouraging post-convicting polling from The New York Times). I caveat the hell out of this: this is my instinct and my theory and I have no inside knowledge and in many deep ways I truly hope this is more my weary cynicism and even paranoia.
But I don’t think so.
What would the editors of The Wall Street Journal do if Convicted Felon Donald Trump went to them and said I can get Putin to send home his American hostage, your reporter Evan Gershkovich? What would the editors then do if Trump paused and added "I would like you to do us a favor, though."
And what would the editors do if Trump then paused again and said ‘you need to help get me elected. i need you to join our Biden Age Plot. I need you to write a piece that restarts this Biden Age thing. I'm a convict. I need to change the topic immediately. I need you to publish this by Wednesday.’
This… bluntly… is the WORST thing I have ever THOUGHT about any journalists, any news organization. Through half a century of cynicism that has only grown by dint of the decades of personally witnessing the horrible people and horrible acts; grown through three years of working for a Rupert Murdoch company and then being personally fired by him because I exactly followed his instructions, even through all THAT…I have never even thought this badly of HIM and his journalistic prostitutes.Then it turned out The Washington Post buried Trump's foreknowledge of the horrors of Covid, and The Alito Flag Scandal, and the New York Times let a multitude of its reporters sit on vital and exclusive Trump news - possibly vital to the safeguarding of the democracy - for months, for years, for book deals.
And then the Wall Street journal printed a piece on President Biden's age; a piece that is as journalistically bankrupt as anything I’ve ever read in American media; a piece which quoted ONLY Republicans, including Kevin McCarthy but NOT Kevin McCarthy's other comments that no, Biden is sharp, after which the co-author Siohban Hughes went on CNN and dismissed McCarthy’s sharpness comments by insisting “McCarthy was doing that tactically because he also had to get ALONG with President Biden”– in other words she was acknowledging that McCarthy either lied to her about Biden or lied to Biden everybody else on Biden but they believed him credible enough to serve as the primary source for this piece when McCarthy is in fact a worthless, bitter and broken man too sleazy even for his own Republican Party; a piece for which Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray and Senator Jack Reed were interviewed but when they said – on the record - no he's fine were edited out of the piece and several dozen Republicans who would NOT go on the record were permitted to slander the president anonymously; a piece so bad, so devoid of even the attempt to make it NOT look like something written by The Gateway Pundit; so bad that it was defended by Chris Cillizza.
And still I hesitated to even suggest that this Wall Street Journal piece did not occur in a vacuum but in perhaps a quid pro quo. Because to do that would require a DEGREE of moral corruption, a kind of terrible, disqualifying conclusion to the entire ethical construction of the lives of not just the writers Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes but every editor, and every publisher, AT The Wall Street Journal. It requires them all to have sold their souls in exchange for a promise by two of the worst human beings who ever lived.
It requires The Wall Street Journal to literally be just as subhuman and as selfish and as corrupt... as Trump.
The saddest thing here is the possibility that these events are NOT connected but it will always look like they are. The SADDEST thing is that the corruption unleashed upon this country by Trump, by Murdoch - personifications of evil and immorality – is so great that this exchange (true or not) is PLAUSIBLE: if you hurt Biden for me, I'll make sure Putin doesn't kill your friend, is entirely plausible. Especially - and yes I hesitate about THIS part too because to the core of my being I hate conspiracy theories and the conspiracy theories I hate most are that ones that seep into journalism and into life because of timing - because of the logical fallacy that B follows A therefore A caused B - there is the timing.
On May 23rd, Trump suddenly started talking about Evan Gershkovitch and bringing him back and how the only way TO bring him back was to elect HIM because Putin will send him back but only to him not to Biden and he'd be back after a Trump election but before inauguration and almost nobody pointed out that by saying this Trump was implying that actually he COULD convince Putin to send Gershkovitch home NOW but he won't. And nobody pointed out that in doing so, TRUMP had made himself part of the Russian gang holding Gershkovitch hostage.
And yet it WAS late Tuesday night – 9 PM Eastern - that The Wall Street Journal's genuinely unbelievable attempt to reignite what even Politico termed "The Republicans' Biden-Age-Plot" - for whom editors on my high school newspaper would've been fired and probably expelled - dropped like excrement from Rupert Murdoch's soul. And WHAT had happened EARLIER Tuesday? WHAT had happened at 11:22 A-M Eastern, involving Trump and The Wall Street Journal? Trump had dropped a video again promising that Putin would return the WSJ hostage, but to him and him alone. After he was elected. But before he was inaugurated.
Trump posts a video – out of nowhere, in response to no one – AGAIN dangling the carrot that he alone can free the WSJ hostage and 9 hours and 38 minutes later the WSJ posts an article in which facts and on the record quotes which contradict the Trump campaign lie were deliberately edited out. The. Same. Day. Would Trump have demanded this piece of fiction hit job on Biden be written - by Linskey and Hughes - or RE-written by editors and blamed on them - in exchange for ransoming their friend?
Well he already did something like this, didn’t he? He already offered to save somebody else from the evil of Putin. He offered it to President Zelensky on July 25th, 2019. "I would like you to do us a favor, though." He'd help Zelensky defend himself against Putin's crimes - as long as Zelensky concocted false evidence smearing Joe Biden. If you think he wouldn't call Murdoch - or WSJ editor Emma Tucker, a Murdoch import from his Times of London - and say I can get Evan home. On November 6th. I can help you defend him against Putin's crimes — if you think Trump couldn’t do that, you’ve been in a coma since 2015.
The question isn't whether TRUMP would do this. My God, it’s only a surprise he didn’t do it earlier. Given his statement in May, given this new video, I would be willing to wager he DID do this. The only question is whether The Wall Street Journal would do it with him. And if they didn't, and the Biden age plot piece was actually somehow published coincidentally NINE HOURS LATER, then perhaps the Journal and Rupert Murdoch and Emma Tucker are not so much soulless monsters, but utter morons. And amid the thousand terrible things I have accused Murdoch of, perhaps the only one I never have, is accusing him of being... an utter moron.
Now. About the authors of this piece and their willingness to manipulate the news. Or to be manipulated by Republicans or Trump cultists or whoever. There are significant reasons to be of doubt about the credibility of Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes. If you remember The Washington Post reporter who mocked Biden “walking through a graveyard”– that was Annie Linskey. “Biden goes to a church and walks through a graveyard in Wilmington as his legislative agenda is dying in Washington.” October 3, 2021. At face value, it was tasteless enough. But Linskey either didn’t know enough about her own job – or didn’t care enough – to know that the “graveyard in Wilmington” is the one in which his late son, his late daughter, and his late first wife are all buried. Linskey initially deleted the tweet without apologizing and then had to correct THAT tweet and put in an emotionless “I’m sorry.” The attack on Biden visiting the graves of his son Beau and his wife Neilia and his daughter Naomi – his daughter was one when she and her mother were killed in a car accident – the attack on him and the tasteless ‘ain’t I clever’ link between the graveyard and the “dying agenda” were actually worse than they seemed at the time. Linskey covered the 2016 Clinton Campaign for The Boston Globe and at a substance abuse event a woman in the audience stood and revealed her son was an addict and committed suicide. Annie Linskey, who would later mock Biden going to see his dead family, decided Hillary Clinton’s response was stilted and cold and her assessment of Secretary Clinton’s emotions was published on the front page of the Sunday Globe under a headline “In New Hampshire, Clinton is lacking in the art of contact.” This fiasco – this complete unalloyed appearance of a quid pro quo between her and her paper and the Trump campaign – is only the latest in this series of self-degradations which are the only stories of consequence in the entire career of Annie Linskey.
As to her partner in the piece, Siobhan Hughes, who seemed unconcerned that she was admitting on TV that Kevin McCarthy was a tactical liar while simultaneously evincing that it had not yet dawned - and may never dawn – on her that McCarthy may have been tactically lying to HER, her mediocre career is best summed up by this from the 13th of February, 2013. Assigned by The Wall Street Journal to cover reaction to the first State of the Union address of the second term of President Obama, her dispatch from Washington begins: “Ted Nugent, the rock star and gun-rights advocate, stuck to his promise to remain resprectful as U.S. President Barack Obama delivered the State of the Union address. But after the speech concluded, Mr. Nugent returned to form.”
I am still looking for reasons to believe my wild theory that The Journal is ransoming its reporter by servicing Trump is nonsense. That this deplorably bad story was co-written by The Journal’s resident expert on Ted Nugent’s response To State Of The Union Addresses… is not helping assuage my cynicism. Nor are the reporters who – before The Wall Street Journal story became toxic – decided to defend it. I mentioned Cillizza, the Kiss of Death. There’s also Boston Globe Washington bureau chief Jackie Kucinich, whose only concern was that the Democrats who were interviewed for the piece but whose quotes were then dropped because they disproved the Journal-slash-Trump narrative. Kucinich didn’t care about the journalistic malpractice. Her interest was what those Democratic protests said about Biden’s acuity. They don’t say a thing about his acuity; they say a lot of things about the Wall Street Journal’s HONESTY, and Annie Linskey’s HONESTY, and Siobhan Hughes’ HONESTY. More accurately – utter LACK of honesty.
The LAST straw was Ken Dilanian of NBC pimping the story by adding only the word “stunning.” When last we heard from this boil on journalism’s ass, Dilanian was defending Robert Hur, the corrupt partisan special counsel who turned his report exonerating Biden of all wrongdoing into a psychological evaluation of the president. I think Dilanian gave away – probably inadvertently (I mean who would deliberately include HIM in a media conspiracy) – what this is all about. Remember, in March Dilanian had written one of the most hilariously self-unaware paragraphs in recent American journalistic history. “The Robert Hur hearing is a perfect example of what American politics has become. A career public servant spends a year reaching conclusions that are inconvenient for partisans of each party. So they set about questioning his motives and ethics on national television.” Ah. There we are. The House is trying to get the Robert Hur-President Biden interview TAPES out of the Department of Justice so it can quote them and leak them and put them in Trump campaign ads. It is circling back to what – again, even POLITICO recognized this as “The Biden Age Plot”– because Biden has caught up to Trump in the polls, because Trump HAS been convicted, because Trump IS a convicted felon, because Trump IS a convict. It is trying to revive the Biden age question and yesterday it was the turn of The Wall Street Journal to carry water for Trump and his sycophants like Robert Hur and, oh yeah, who was the main named source in the Journal piece? Why it was Kevin McCarthy, ANOTHER Trump whore.
Make no mistake what The Journal did. It prostituted its news pages for Trump. The only doubt is PRECISELY why. I think the circumstantial evidence and the timing support the idea that there could be a quid pro quo over Evan Gershkovitch.
And it is with him I would like to leave it. I am NOT Annie Linskey. I am not going to mock the human concern for his well-being, his release, his SURVIVAL, as a prisoner of a man the world should rid itself of, Vladimir Putin. I am not going to mock even the thinking that must have crossed the minds of dozens of good people at The Wall Street Journal who said to themselves “I’d do anything to get Evan home.” I have only empathy. I had a POW-MIA bracelet as a teenager. If he were my relative, my friend, my colleague, I do not know how far I would go to get him back. But I still know that I would not do a deal with Trump and by extension Putin. And bluntly I have no idea whether or not people at The Journal would say the same thing. Or if perhaps they already faced that choice – and made that deal.