BLACKBALLING AN HONEST REPORTER
JOURNALISTS are pack animals. That’s especially true in Washington. Despite the hunger for scoops, when it comes to the substance of stories, few have the guts to go against the ideological groupthink that prevails in our nation’s capital.
That’s what makes CBS’ Catherine Herridge so exceptional. In an era when too many network journalists slant their reporting to serve establishment opinion, Herridge sticks to the facts. Her dogged determination to get to the bottom of stories has made her an invaluable source on the national-security beat.
Her sterling quality and integrity have also put a target on her back. When it came to the “collusion” hoax, she dared to let the truth guide her. Likewise with her reporting into government misconduct in the prosecution of President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Most of her colleagues reveled in collusion falsehoods — and ignored FBI wrongdoing. She did the opposite.
But there’s always a price to be paid for refusing to conform. If you expose documents that further discredit the already-exploded myth that Trump colluded with Russia, you are going to lose friends in Washington.
If you show that there was a concerted attempt to spy on his campaign and to leak information designed to paralyze his administration, you aren’t going to be popular with journalists who were part of this effort.
So it’s hardly surprising that Herridge — a star reporter at Fox News from 1996 until last year before moving to CBS — has been subjected to abuse by Joe Biden’s campaign mouthpiece and backstabbed by her colleagues in recent days.
Jealousy, and her association with ratings-champion Fox, no doubt motivated her mainstream colleagues to blackball her when she came under at- tack. This, even though her tenure at Fox was marked by admirable objectivity.
After Herridge beat other reporters to the news that Biden’s name was on the list of ex-officials who had asked to “unmask” Flynn, Biden flack Andrew Bates called her a “partisan, right-wing hack.” A scurrilous story appeared in The Daily Beast, in which various CBS journalists speaking anonymously voiced their disgust with her for not sharing their partisan prejudices.
That’s what happens when you play it straight rather than distort the news to serve anti-Trump talking points.
The Biden campaign’s attacks on Herridge, and the sniping at her from colleagues, also illustrated the appalling hypocrisy of most of the Washington press corps.
Whenever Trump talks back to relentlessly hostile reporters at news briefings, they denounce him for supposedly trying to destroy press freedom.
Some of his tweets on the subject, calling hostile journos “enemies of the people,” have been over the top. But the same can be said for the collective pearl-clutching on the part of his targets. Though they pose as victims, they have spent the last 3 ¹/2 years breathlessly pushing stories about Russia collusion that don’t withstand scrutiny. In the Flynn case, they (the media) have been the persecutors, which makes their collective shrug now all the more appalling — and telling.
While their colleagues have feted the objects of Trump’s ire as First Amendment martyrs, few have spoken up in defense of
Herridge. That was also generally the case when President Barack Obama routinely bashed Fox for reporting or commentary that contradicted his talking points.
Most mainstream outlets have tilted liberal for decades, of course. But today’s media bias is something else. Many supposedly straightnews reporters now openly see themselves as part of a project to delegitimize the Trump administration — and to humiliate its supporters. They are proud of this. They don’t even bother to hide it on Twitter.
The news business is paying a price for this ideological zeal. If much of the country doesn’t believe what the media tell them, it’s not because of Trumpian manipulation. It’s because Americans can see with their own eyes what happens when someone like Herridge steps outside the lines.
There is intimidation of the press in our time. But Trump isn’t the one who metes it out. It’s establishment reporters and editors who punish their own for questioning liberal orthodoxies — or following the facts to the unpopular conclusions.