Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Biden hands the pen he used to sign the Democrats’ landmark climate change and health care bill to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in the State Dining Room of the White House, August 16, 2022.
The above quote is from a post on James Fallows’s Substack blog. I recommend reading it despite the fact that it also includes the following sentence: “There is no point in naming the writer.”
I beg to differ. The writer in question is Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, who, according to his bio, “has covered the last five presidents for the Times and the Washington Post. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, with Susan Glasser.” (I have corrected its punctuation.) The important point about the fact that Baker is the writer is that he is, by virtue of his position(s), likely the most influential of all reporters who cover either the current or ex-president. Less important, but worth noting, is the fact that he and his wife, Glasser, wrote the book that held onto the news about Trump demanding that U.S. generals act more like (Trump incorrectly thought) Hitler’s generals did until they could profit by its publication (with Baker giving that story to his employer’s competition, The New Yorker, where Glasser works).
Baker’s story, headlined “Even on Biden’s Big Day, He’s Still in Trump’s Long Shadow,” is a master class in how to bend reality to one’s prejudices: prejudices that dominate the Times coverage of American politics and—the Times being what it is—set the tone for the rest of the respectable mainstream media.
Let’s just glance at its opening—likely the part that Baker and his editors spent the most time on, as few readers can be depended upon to read much past that point. The piece’s first paragraph contains an anonymous quote:
“One of his congressional allies lamented that the president’s accomplishments are ‘often away from public view’ while another contrasted him with a former president who ‘relished creating chaos.’” Here’s my question: Why was anonymity given for this? Updated barely a month ago, the Times explained its use of anonymous sources as follows: “Under our guidelines, these sources should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.” How in the world do those criteria apply to that namby-pamby quote?
In the very next paragraph, Baker offers us his thesis: “No one mentioned Donald J. Trump’s name during the ceremony in the State Dining Room of the White House, but his presence was felt nonetheless as Mr. Biden enacted major climate, health care and corporate tax policies. One major reason Mr. Biden’s achievements often seem eclipsed in public view is because Mr. Trump is still creating chaos from his post-presidential exile.”
Two points about this egregious abuse of journalistic authority. When a sentence contains an alleged fact stated in the passive voice, followed by one in which the major verb is the time-honored journalistic weasel word “seem,” you can bet the whole thing is likely bullshit. In fact, Baker was describing his own “feelings.” We can be grateful to learn that this is what the New York Times chief White House correspondent thinks is the most important aspect to report on with regard to legislation that will affect the lives of millions of people and represents the most significant legislative accomplishment by a president since Obamacare, and before that—well it’s hard to remember anything. But no matter: Not only is Baker interested exclusively in show-business-oriented horse-race-driven coverage, but he also bases this judgment entirely on his own imagination.
Baker’s story is a master class in how to bend reality to one’s prejudices.
And yet, that’s the way it is these days. Politico Playbook reprinted these alleged insights as if that were the real story:
“And NYT’s Peter Baker takes on the backdrop that Biden found this week: ‘No other sitting president has ever lived with the shadow of his defeated predecessor in quite the way that Mr. Biden has over the last year and a half. Regardless of what the current president does, he often finds himself struggling to break through the all-consuming circus that keeps Mr. Trump in the public eye. Even the bully pulpit of the White House has proved no match for the Trump reality show.’”
This quote—and the piece that follows—also demonstrates what might fairly be termed the lust that reporters feel for the good old days of the Trump presidency, when CNN’s and MSNBC’s ratings were sky-high, and the world was focused on what these insiders—mostly Beltway gasbags and late-to-the-party “Never Trumpers”—had to say about the next 15 minutes. Biden, amid all that talk about this or that policy, rather than complaints about cancer-causing windmills and paid-off porn stars, cannot compete. That Trump’s winning the war for the journalistic mind by committing potentially treasonous crimes could not be more beside the point in this narrative. He’s winning because we’re talking about him—and as Fallows pointed out, that’s because we’re talking about him.
P.S.: I searched for Baker’s name in the long section on Trump’s presidency in my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—And Why Trump Is Worse and found this: “In another front-page analysis, Times White House correspondent Peter Baker described the drama of impeachment as playing out against ‘conspiracy theories,’ which he said were ‘everywhere,’ adding that ‘conspiracy theorists are in the White House and Congress,’ though he neglected to point to a single ‘conspiracy theory’ that did not emanate from the Republican side of the aisle.”
It would be inaccurate to say that the members of the mainstream media do not cover one another. They do so, often to an obsessive degree. (I see in Thursday’s Politico Playbook, there is even some heavy breathing about … wait for it … who will be the media spokesperson for, um, Jill Biden. Credit Max Tani and Alex Thompson for this earth-shattering scoop.) What these same journalists do an absolutely terrible job of, however, is covering the manner in which the media matters in politics. We learn also from Baker that “The challenge for Mr. Biden is acute. Only 41 percent of Americans said they were even familiar with the legislation signed on Tuesday, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.” Turns out that “its major elements enjoy strong support among voters when informed, with 62 percent to 71 percent in favor of provisions like allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and expanding incentives for clean energy.” If only there were some mechanism for people to find out what was in this legislation, rather than who or what is “haunting” the White House in the overactive imagination of its top reporters.
I became a big fan of Pink Floyd late in life. In high school, liking The Dark Side of the Moon too much ID’d you as a hopeless stoner. In college, I deeply objected to hearing the words “We don’t need no education” over and over, particularly as it identified it with “thought control.” (The terrible grammar of that sentence indicates its falsity, by virtue of its misplaced use of the double negative.) In my dotage, however, I have come to love the band. I’ve gone to a few concerts by both Roger Waters and David Gilmour and was even seated at a luncheon (actually for Waters) next to Nick Mason. (I am also a great fan of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ’n’ Roll, which is sort of about Syd Barrett, the band’s founder, who destroyed his mind with LSD, and who is also the subject of one of the band’s greatest songs, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”)
It’s no secret that the genius behind the band was Waters. This is sort of a problem because his politics are really terrible. I don’t mind if an artist has politics that contradict my own—it’s the art, not the artist, that matters—but Waters’s intense hostility toward Israel has tended to veer into antisemitic symbolism. In the visuals for one of his anti-war songs during his concerts, the screen is first filled with Jewish stars that are then turned into dollar signs and then falling bombs. Yet I remain a little reluctant to outright condemn the man, for three reasons. One is my love for his music. “Comfortably Numb” and “Wish You Were Here” are two of the most beautiful and powerful songs in the entire canon of rock music. Second, I’ve had a few social interactions with the guy, and he seemed really decent. (We were once shut out of a screening together and he did not throw a typical rock star fit. He gave up and left at the same time I did.) And third, at the December 2015 all-day conference on Israel and Palestine sponsored by Haaretz and the New Israel Fund in Manhattan, Roger spent the entire day there, listening and learning. That’s pretty unusual behavior for any genuine antisemite. That brings us to his more recent crazy comments about the Ukraine, China, Taiwan, and the Uyghurs, as well as terming Joe Biden a “war criminal.” The transparent silliness of these comments actually helps absolve him of the antisemitic accusations. Politically speaking, Roger is an all-purpose fanatic, albeit one who has earned hundreds of millions from his brilliant music. You know what that makes him? “Comfortably Dumb.”
