Unmasking the Media: How Liberal News Fails to Report on Real Scandals
Imagine you pick up two newspapers that have, in past issues, covered the same news but generally disagreed on just about everything.
Splashed on the cover of one, in bold block letters, is a headline that announces a major political scandal with far-reaching and potentially criminal implications for the people involved.
The other paper, surprisingly, makes no mention of this incident whatever. Instead, it shows what amounts to the same stories that had been running the day before, with a few sidebars to let you know that the Oriels beat the Blue Jays in extra innings, a British actor is in legal trouble, and a new study was just released which reveals the 15 things that determine how empathetic you are as a person.
This confusing scenario is more or less what has happened this week with the Susan Rice story, which even by today’s polarized standards has been a remarkable Tale of Two Medias.
On Monday morning, Eli Lake ran a piece in Bloomberg that described how Rice, while she was Obama’s national security advisor, requested the identification of US persons in intelligence reports that were connected to the Trump campaign and transition team.
The act of revealing the identity of an American who has had their communications incidentally picked up during surveillance operations of foreign actors, a process known as “unmasking”, is legal in and of itself. But it raises eyebrows in a situation like this. Unmasking is generally reserved for cases where knowing the US person’s identity is necessary for security reasons. It isn’t clear whether or not that was the case here. If it was done for political reasons, it would be improper. Regardless, whoever took that information and leaked it to the press broke the law.
It’s too early to tell how significant Rice’s role in this will turn out to be. Again, there is currently no evidence that she did anything illegal. But whatever the result, the diametrically-opposed reactions of various media outlets has been newsworthy all by itself.
The response from the conservative side has been as enthusiastic and vocal as would be expected. Since the resignation of Michael Flynn, who was forced to step down after an unmasked version of his correspondence was leaked to the press, Republicans have been demanding to know how classified information of this sort is being uncovered by the media. Rand Paul called the Rice story a “smoking gun” with regard to an abuse of power in surveilling the Trump team, and the burgeoning scandal has dominated virtually every right-wing news site you can find. Headlines generally include expressions like “Bombshell” and “Explosive Revelation”.
Somewhat tellingly, the left-wing media’s response to this whole whirlwind has been, by and large, to act like it doesn’t exist.
In the days after the story broke, readers of CNN or The New York Times websites were greeted with stories of the Gorsuch hearings, the Bill O’Reilly sexual harassment scandal, and, of course, the ongoing investigation of Trump-Russia ties. The most prominent on-air reference to Rice on CNN was from Don Lemon, who quipped that his show would not “aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion.” Other than this curt dismissal, it was difficult to find even a casual reference to this apparent yawning gap in their coverage.
The small handful of liberal correspondents that have written about the story have kept mainly to criticizing the right-wing media’s reaction, chalking the whole thing up to a conservative tendency towards political bloodlust. Paul Waldman wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post (a paper which has, admittedly, covered the issue with a more even hand than most), where he fretted “Over at foxnews.com I count 11 separate articles about Rice on the home page. You can find similar screaming headlines at Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and all the other conservative sites.”
Left-leaning journalists may be annoyed that a story about unmasking and leaking intelligence information to the press is pulling attention away from what they consider to be the real scandal of Trump’s potential ties to Russia, but that doesn’t mean they should ignore it. This sort of lopsided coverage is one of the clearest examples to date of why so many Americans have lost faith in the mainstream media. Neglecting the Rice story to this degree is, to conservatives, tantamount to an outright lie. Rightly or wrongly, it sends the message that news outlets will only report on stories that fit in with their narrative. If these organizations want to be relevant outside their own echo chambers, this is a crippling self-inflicted wound.
Fake News, a term that has been dragged through the mud since the moment it was coined, comes in more than just one form. In some cases, it can be a story that is simply made up out of whole cloth. It could also be something based in reality, but deliberately skewed to paint a misleading picture. Or it might be the simple act of staying mum when something happens that you don’t like.
Committing any one of these acts is the best route a media outlet can take towards losing their credibility. The Rice story may or may not turn out to be the scandal conservatives are hoping for, but it is news. Every member of the media ought to treat it that way.
