When Journalism Spurns Truth

The MEAA, which represents clowns and journalists, instructs its members not to misrepresent themselves when chasing stories. The wording is all a bit vague, but you might easily conclude that assuming the identity of, say, a derelict to report on life on Melbourne’s mean streets wouldn’t these days be seen as kosher. Times have changed. Evan Whitton did just that in the early Seventies and collected a Walkley for his pains. Likewise the pioneer reporter and feminist Nellie Bly, who reported on the abuse of inmates at New York’s  Randalls Island asylum by feigning lunacy and having herself committed. For this, even while the reforms she championed were being advanced,  she was derided as a ‘muckraker’, most at home in polite society’s nightsoil. Bly and her fellow ‘Yellow kids’ took up the term and made it their own.

It’s fair to say journalists masquerading in the pursuit of truth have inspired mixed reactions, and a specific case that came to light over the past few days rather makes the point. Indeed, it raises broader questions than those involving media ethics, starting with public servants knowingly becoming instruments of deception, and the press, which might once have recoiled at retailing lies that are known to be lies, going all in to publicise and endorse the official narrative.

But first, let us set the scene. Picture a bar in the legal district of Lower Manhattan, the after-work happy hour is in full swing and just down the street is Foley Square, where Donald Trump spent much of this year on trial in various courtrooms and where he will return after the November 5 election to be sentenced for bookkeeping fraud by a hand-picked judge, Juan Merchan, who donates to the Democrats and whose daughter is a party lobbyist continuing to raise millions of dollars “to defend America from Trump and his extremist MAGA Republicans”.

Now picture a pretty girl commanding the attention of Justice Department’s spokesman who, perhaps to impress her or maybe due to a guilty conscience, commits that greatest of political gaffes and lets the truth slip out. What the DoJ publicity chief, Nicholas Biase,  doesn’t know is that the girl is miked-up, packing a hidden camera and working with conservative blogger and podcaster Steven Crowder. You can watch the video and Crowder’s commentary here.

Biase’s  well lubricated candour is the absolute opposite of the quotable lines and press releases he has been feeding the media about Donald Trump’s  convictions, criminality and the ‘threat he poses … to our democracy’. Here is a sample of the truth that emerges when the blur of spin is stripped away:

On  Trump’s conviction for overvaluing his properties to secure loans from banks, paid back on time as agreed, whose representatives testified on Trump’s behalf:

# “He [DA Alvin Bragg] was stacking charges and, like, rearranging things just to make it fit a case. No, honestly, I think the case [against Trump] is nonsense … Every real estate person in New York does what he [Trump] did. Nobody’s ever been charged with this. It’s all him [Trump]…That’s why, like, he’s [Trump] surging in the polls. You know, it’s a perversion of justice.”

On the Biden Justice  Department’s weaponisation of the bank-loan and ‘hush money’ trials, the political goal being to make Trump

 “a convict … it affects his candidacy if he’s a convicted felon.”

On DA Alvin Bragg’s eagerness to twist the law:

“Alvin Bragg, who I’ve known for 15 years, who used to work in my office … Alvin is very ambitious.”

          On the stalled prosecution in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election:

“…a travesty of justice. To put it mildly, it’s a mockery of justice. She is a joke…The whole thing is disgusting. They’re just out to get him.”

           On the perversion of justice they serve up in New York, where the state legislature narrowly extended the statute of limitations with the specific intention of charging Trump and only Trump: 

“The state level is like the f***ing Wild West. They are like idiots. They don’t care. They’re all political … They’re obsessed with getting him.”

Most likely you haven’t read about any of this in the Australian press. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so tirelessly repeated, that Trump is a “convicted felon”, “proven perpetrator of a sexual assault” and “bank-fraud offender”.

So, to amend the masthead motto of The New York Times, the truth is news not fit to print. No wonder the militantly left  MEAA doesn’t like reporters going undercover.