Rebecca Gibian/AP Photo
NPR’s Nina Totenberg, left, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stand onstage at the New York Academy of Medicine after a Q&A session, December 15, 2018, in New York.
Politico ran an extraordinary article last week. In it, Michael Schaffer, former editor of the Washingtonian, former editor of the Washington City Paper, and former editorial director of The New Republic, took a hacksaw to the reputation of the famed NPR journalist Nina Totenberg. The occasion was Totenberg’s publication of a book celebrating her friendship with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The book, entitled Dinners With Ruth, is widely viewed as a response to the criticism—including that from the NPR ombudsman—that Totenberg received upon revealing the two women’s closeness when Ginsburg passed away in 2020. It also seems to be a paean to the days of yore in D.C. when Democrats, Republicans, lobbyists, and journalists could all sit around the same table and tell their private jokes that were deemed inappropriate for the public at large.
As Schaffer notes, “In this universe, it seems, we’re all on the same team.” The “team” includes not only Totenberg and liberal favorite Ginsburg, but also everyone who occasionally reads their own name in Politico’s “Playbook” and is considered to be a “player.” Well-connected journalists like Totenberg exploited these friendships not only for status in a culture in which perceived proximity to power is itself a form of currency, but also for what were appropriately termed “buckraking” opportunities. As Schaffer notes, “Totenberg became part of the RBG hype machine. As the justice became an unlikely celebrity, she and Totenberg developed a sort of stage act, conducting public interviews before ticketed audiences. Totenberg would share questions in advance. The responses were more thoughtful that way, which it seems was really what the evenings were trying to show.” In other words, it was theater masquerading as journalism.
Schaffer also flags what he aptly terms “one particularly excruciating passage” in which “the Scalias come to a dinner party shortly after the conservative justice wrote the precedent-shattering decision striking down D.C.’s gun laws. Totenberg’s husband, a surgeon who she says has operated on hundreds of gunshot victims, adorns every guest’s soup bowl with a plastic squirt gun. Everyone laughs. Hilarious!”
The story Totenberg tells about Alan Simpson (a former Republican senator from Wyoming and co-chair of President Obama’s austerity commission) is more confusing, but also depressing, in a way she apparently does not understand. We learn that, in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the senator “followed Totenberg to her car following a Nightline taping, screaming so furiously that the network’s hired driver told her she ought to get a gun. Totenberg eventually got out of the car and yelled right back at the towering pol, calling him a ‘fucking bully.’” However, later, they became friends, and, one suspects, Simpson became a source. During one outing, the old fella “couldn’t have been a better date, picking me up, and even bringing me a corsage to wear for the evening.”
Schaffer notes how casually Totenberg references her close friendship with numerous judges. Her home was where “the likes of Nino Scalia (‘a mensch’), Stephen Breyer (he and his wife helped clean up after an I Love Lucy-style dishwasher disaster), and William Brennan (he wrote a thoughtful note to Totenberg’s niece) were holding court.” But as Jeet Heer points out at The Nation, this phenomenon goes deeper. Totenberg is one of those alleged liberals who feel it necessary to reassure the rest of us that, while a certain Supreme Court justice or nominee might appear to be a right-wing extremist based on their, you know, opinions, we can all relax because we are talking about a personal friend of the author whom he or she knows to be cool.
It’s interesting that liberals do this for right-wingers, but it almost never happens in the opposite direction.
Consider Neal K. Katyal, former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, writing in The New York Times: “I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law. His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial independence—a record that should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.”
A year later, Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar could be found writing on the same page of Brett Kavanaugh: “[I]t is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh. He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.”
If you thought it was impossible for a liberal to go to bat for Amy Coney Barrett, well, think again. Here’s Harvard law professor Noah Feldman writing in Bloomberg: “I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.”
It’s interesting that liberals do this for right-wingers, but it almost never happens in the opposite direction. This is due, I think, to the fact that (a) liberals feel a need to show how open-minded they are, and (b) many liberals think they derive a sense of legitimacy from their ability to embrace conservative nostrums and individuals in a sad “Thank you sir, may I have another” syndrome.
A century ago, John Dewey pointed out that democracy risked creating “a class of experts … inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge.” Another prophet, and lifelong adversary of this phenomenon, was my late friend and mentor I.F. Stone, who once warned: “You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.”
Schaffer hits the proverbial nail on the head when he castigates Totenberg’s misguided attempt to rejuvenate her reputation. He writes that her book “seems to be cast as a corrective against some national misapprehension that Washington is about nothing but bickering and partisanship. But that misunderstands why so many Americans are down on the capital. Instead, the rage stems from a conviction that the city is full of insiders who are all part of the same contented club, forever scratching one another’s backs.”
What’s so crazy about this is that the piece appeared in Politico, where, if its editors read it and took it to heart, they would either have to resign their jobs in shame or else transform the publication into one reporting the news in an entirely different—opposite, in fact—fashion. For no publication since the unlamented disappearance of (alleged serial sexual harasser) Mark Halperin’s “The Note” has done as much as Politico to reinforce the notion that political Washington is one big happy circus where gossip and drama matter far more than policy. When the publication provides constant updates on the newest promotions and parties among lobbyists, PR hacks, and other pollutants of the political process at the same time they write about journalism and politics, they imply that they don’t really see any important distinction between these jobs. Sure, gun violence may be out of control in our society and killing our children at an unconscionable rate, but wasn’t that a cute move by Nina to Nino at that wonderful dinner party she had? What, one wonders, are the favorite foods (and potential food allergies) of fascism?
It makes for a depressing contrast with dogged reporters like CNN’s terrific Daniel Dale, who always goes to the trouble to get to the truth of whatever the issue is, and how much bullshit surrounds the issue in question. One wonders if his voluminous fact-checking Twitter threads are not a quiet commentary on virtually everything else the network produces, where hosts and guests are invited to lie, without consequence, as often as they like.
Speaking of fascism, and the roles both liberal wimpiness and journalistic cluelessness are playing in helping to make it possible, take a look at this quote from Fox News contributor and former congressman Trey Gowdy on the Italian election: “If you are what the people want, at what point does that become the center? Who gets to say what is far-right or hard right?” The dude has a point, albeit accidentally. The far right has been engaged in a six-decade-long effort to redefine this revered notion of Washington insiderdom further and further into its own territory to the point where now The Washington Post can publish a pointless piece like this one without mentioning anywhere in it that one of the parties in question is in the indirect control of an insane criminal conspiracy and openly pledging to destroy what remains of our democracy if elected. But to those Post reporters, all that matters are the balls and strikes.
Oh, and thanks to the AP for telling us what was really important about the return of fascism to Italy: “First female premier poised to take helm of Italy government.”
Music to Improve One’s Mood By
- John Fred and his Playboy Band: “Judy in Disguise”
- Martha and the Muffins: “Echo Beach”
- Carole King: “One Fine Day”
- Raccoon Lodge member Bruce Springsteen with Ed Norton, Alice, and Trixie, apparently, doing “Brown Eyed Girl”
