Patterico's Pontifications

10/22/2008

Newsweek Reporter Outs Himself as a Hack

Filed under: 2008 Election,Current Events,Media Bias — Karl @ 2:27 pm



[Posted by Karl]

After publishing “Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter” in GQ, Newsweek journo Michael Hastings may never work in “this town” again.  Hastings joins the ranks of those confirming what most people think of the establishment media.  For example, after confessing that he fantasized about putting Rudy Giuliani out of commission “for a year or so,” he adds:

If that sounds like I had some trouble being “objective,” I did. Objectivity is a fallacy. In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren’t just covering a story, they’re a part of it—influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates—and despite what they tell themselves, it’s impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively. In some cases, you genuinely like the candidate you’re covering and you root for him, because over the long haul you come to see him as a human being. For a long time, this was John McCain’s ace in the hole with the press, whom he referred to as “my base.” Reporters rode along with him, and he joked with them, and that went a long way toward shaping the tone of their coverage. (Last January a group of reporters asked McCain’s staff to make McCain campaign press T-shirts for them.) And because your success is linked to the candidate’s, you want to be with a winner, because that’s the story that makes the paper or the magazine or gets you on TV.

Not that Hastings has any more respect for McCain than he does Giuliani:

I didn’t jump at the chance to cover him. I’d met him and thought he was affable, and I imagine he was at one time as honorable as everyone says. But his views on war and foreign policy, the way he fetishized the idea of sacrifice, unnerved me a little. He seemed to have gone just a little crazy, Captain Ahab–style.

One is tempted to note how similar this assessment is to the talking points issued by the Obama campaign, but the reality is that no such talking points are actually needed.  The establishment media groupthink supplies them naturally. But RTWT, to discover that “fidelity wasn’t exactly a prized virtue among reporters on the campaign trail,” Hastings’ use of XX pornography on the hotel cable, and so on.

It is a useful article to have handy when The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism claims that the overwhelmingly negative coverage of McCain since the conventions is not necessarily the product of a pro-Obama bias, but may be “a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage.”  Not only was McCain winning at the conclusion of the conventions, but there is also that not-so-small matter of the establishment media “influencing outcomes,” “setting expectations,” and “framing candidates.”  Those who wanted a T-shirt in January when McCain was a long shot likely adopted a quite different attitude once he became an obstacle to the ascendancy of The Age of Obama.

(h/t Insty.)

–Karl

32 Responses to “Newsweek Reporter Outs Himself as a Hack”

  1. Put him out of commission – in a nice kind of way I’m sure!

    Chalk up Hastings as another example of left wing hate.

    daleyrocks (d9ec17)

  2. Water is wet.
    JerrySpringer is everything that is wrong in politics.

    JD (c69925)

  3. True, but water does not often admit that it is wet so openly.

    Karl (f07e38)

  4. He does write for Newsweek. Isn’t this kind of a given?

    JD (c69925)

  5. The Newsweek folk are occasionally open about their bias. It was Evan Thomas who claimed that the MSM was worth 12-15 pts for Kerry-Edwards.

    But they generally don’t cop to wanting to physically harm someone, which is the clear implication of the comments about Giuliani.

    Karl (f07e38)

  6. But, Karl. It is the Republicans who are hate-filled violent misogynistic xenophobic jingoistic homophobic racists.

    JD (c69925)

  7. How strange. It’s like Olbermann and Matthews. It’s no longer enough for most of the media to be for Obama. They want to out themselves.

    DRJ (c953ab)

  8. DRJ – The proper term for Olby is either Olbergasm or Olberdouchenozzle.

    They want to out themselves.

    At this point, isn’t that the equivalent of Excitable Andy saying he may be a homosexual?

    JD (c69925)

  9. Yeah, I read this earlier and throughout the entire article, all I could think was “what a douchebag this guy is.”

    (Sorry, Patterico, it’s the most apt term.)

    Fitting that Hillary stuck them in the head.

    CW Desiato (614aa7)

  10. I thought it might be better jumping over to the Democrats; at least I wasn’t appalled by their basic ideas.

    I think this pretty much sums him up. Kind of an unpleasant sort of person, too. Interesting that he would expose himself this way. Sort of like the NY Times guy who wrote about his girlfriend’s abortion. Anything for a buck. Maybe he could make it as a fluff girl for gay porno movies.

    Mike K (f89cb3)

  11. That position is already taken by Phil, Mike. He’s been working on a new extravaganza featuring a Palin look – alike, titled North Pole. A George Soros production, opening in theatres soon!

    Dmac (e30284)

  12. I did RTWT and was struck by how matter-of-fact he is about his bias — “objectivity is a fallacy”, huh?!?! — like it’s no big deal, and heck we’re all democrats anyways, so it’s no big deal, right?

    V Nehring (6c107f)

  13. Back in the 80’s, I subscribed to GQ and enjoyed it tremendously. As I left studenthood and became a real person, I found I had less time for frivolous pleasure reading of the sort GQ offers so I let my subscription lapse.

    This year, I re-upped with GQ, thinking it would be interesting to read it again after all these years. I lasted three issues. Every issue was filled with anti-Republican bile, even in articles that had nothing to do with politics. Big surprise, right? The last straw came when I was reading an article that mentioned Karl Rove, followed by a vulgarity directed at him. A vulgarity that came out of nowhere and was stated as if it were a fact rather than an ignorant opinion.

    That day, that very moment, I contacted GQ and cancelled my subscription. I’ve decided that I would no longer give my money or attention to any entertainment source that went out of its way to take a dump on Republicans, religious people, gun owners or any other target du jour of today’s Left.

    I recommend that we all do the same. Life’s too short to pay money, or attention, to those who hate us.

    Charlie Eklund (03c2f8)

  14. Why would Michael Hastings give a fig about whether he can ever work as a (cough, cough) “objective” reporter for Newsweek any longer? Anyone paying attention knows that the old-fashioned MSM is on the way out anyway — their product is too expensive and lacks credibility with over half of the public. Hastings is probably positioning himself for a gig at HuffPo, or Slate, or some other left-wing blog site, where he can use his regular postings as a vehicle to launch a book or become a TV talking head.

    And as for his talk of “taking out” Rudy Giuliani, I had a flashback to the old Saturday Night Live when Joe Piscopo would play Frank Sinatra. I could see Rudy giving Hastings the line that “Frank” gave the actor playing Steve Lawrence: “I’ve got chunks of guys like you in my stool.”

    JVW (45bdfe)

  15. Charlie Eklund (#13, 5:28 pm), I felt the same way about Esquire. I used to enjoy reading it, but gradually its left-wing stance on everything began to permeate (and this was during the Clinton Administration!), so I got eventually rid of it. At a certain point in a man’s life, he also decides that he no longer needs some magazine to tell him how to dress, drink, date, and act cool. Least of all Esquire or GQ.

    JVW (45bdfe)

  16. Sacrifice is seen as a fetish by someone who has probably never even had to drink warm water.

    Or “dude… like this pizza is barely even warm and the beer is barely cold… this country sucks!”

    SteveG (71dc6f)

  17. Great post as always, Karl…

    I’m certain that this putz believes that honor is a fetish also…

    I’m not surprised though, ever since Time’s editor, a Mr. Stengel, admitted that he believed in activist journalism, as opposed to the traditional ethos of objectivity…

    More and more the mask is slipping amongst the MSM types; and the public is starting to get it. Note that the big 3 have been experiencing ever decreasing ratings through this cycle.

    While most of the elite media believes that it is their job to instruct us non-Ivy-League Rubes! in this country, in reality we all are just like Jack Webb; just the fact’s, ma’am-and we can all develop our opinions.

    This is the role that led our forebears to value a free press. They believed that ones ideas and informed opinion was among the most valuable personal property that a person could posess. The biased elements of the MSM are anathema to all that our predecessors envisioned. And, those citizens that either don’t have access to, or haven’t developed a skill to use, the internet, are being denied access to all of the information they need to make informed decisions and truly make our representative democracy function as it was envisioned…

    Bob (99fc1b)

  18. It’s no longer enough for most of the media to be for Obama. They want to out themselves.

    The motive though is is still unclear… I don’t see it as a troubled conscience looking for absolution at the public confessional but perhaps more like a declarative sneer. I may be cynical but that is the unintended consequence of media players morbidly in love with themselves.

    Or perhaps he realizes he really isn’t that good of a writer,

    Newsweek Baghdad correspondent Michael Hastings’ book proposal sold last Tuesday for $500,000 to Scribner, a publishing source told FishbowlNY Thursday. The book, about Hastings’ experiences working as a young journalist in Iraq, focuses on the author’s relationship with 28-year-old Andrea “Andi” Parhamovich, a civilian consulting with NGO National Democratic Institute in Baghdad who was killed January 2717, 2007 in an ambush there.

    We’re told Hastings’ book proposal landed at the Wylie Agency — where Hastings is represented by Andrew Wylie’s No. 2 agent, Sarah Chalfant — three weeks after Parhamovich was killed in Baghdad. Containing “intimate emails and text message transcripts” that “really creep you out,” according to our source, the proposal apparently contained photos to illustrate Hastings’ and Parhamovich’s romance — including one of Parhamovich posing with a teddy bear.

    The proposal’s not of the caliber one would expect of a nationally-published journalist, nor a top-tier literary agency, as our source describes: “I couldn’t stand it,” she says. “I wondered if he’s a stringer, as the writing was not good. Also, it seems like it wasn’t even proofread, either, which is unusual for Wylie. Their stuff is usually very clean, so I wonder if this wasn’t a rush on their end, too.”

    Dana (658c17)

  19. The motive though is is still unclear

    I think it is just because they now feel comfortable enough to admit in public what most of us have known for some time. They feel comfortable enough in this environment that they do not have to tell those hollow lies about objectivity, bias, etc …

    JD (6248dc)

  20. I’d like to ask Mr Hastings where he was when the communists were turning Mrs Tran into soap…er fertilizer.

    Larry D. Barnes (cd7e0c)

  21. I gave up reading Newsweek and Time a decade ago when their bias became too much to stomach.

    MSNBC announced today it is in league with La Raza, ACORN, the ACLU and other “non-partisan” groups to run a Voter Protection effort election day.

    I just mentioned to a friend that the liberal news organizations and their reporters are getting bolder and bolder in abandoning any pretext of being fair or unbiased. It is a giant coming out party where they shrug off any semblence of professionalism and flout the fact that they are in the bag for Obama and his group. They are definantly looking conservatives in the eye and laughing.

    Good Lord, the gleeful abandonment of institutional integrity has been swift and nearly universal. It does not bode well for the Republic that the media is now openly and completely – joyously in the bag for the liberals.

    in_awe (bc82df)

  22. I think it is just because they now feel comfortable enough to admit in public what most of us have known for some time. They feel comfortable enough in this environment that they do not have to tell those hollow lies about objectivity, bias, etc …

    JD, wouldn’t it seem prudent to wait until after their guy is in the WH before admitting this? After all, if McCain does get in, and more journos spell it out beforehand, it could be a bit problematic.

    Plus these people do not strike me as being the least bit bothered by telling lies, hollow or otherwise.

    Dana (658c17)

  23. If anyone wants to have their spirits lifted a little bit, go search for the NRA ad, Imagine, about Baracky’s 2nd Amendment positions.

    JD (6248dc)

  24. Dana – Yes, it would seem prudent, but apparently they see no significant potential for fallout in just coming right out with it. It is not like they are going to be fair to any Republican in office, so why bother going through the motions of hiding in the closet?

    JD (6248dc)

  25. That is a good ad, JD. ABC News posted a link and partial transcript for anyone that’s interested.

    DRJ (c953ab)

  26. DRJ – The comments there are pretty amusing. Think of that ongoing 800+ comment thread here, but about the 2nd Amendment.

    JD (6248dc)

  27. The press in this country has never been truly unbiased. What is new and novel is the absolute one sidedness of the situation.

    In the early days of the country and on through the to the WWII era, practically all cities of any size, say 100,000+ people, had at least two daily papers with two distinct voices. Typically one would be Democrat and the other Republican.

    In fact, I recall seeing an advertizing textbook from the late ’50s early ’60s era that told the novice that the “morning paper is usually more liberal, feminine and community oriented” while the evening edition was “more conservative, masculine and oriented toward sports and political news” and that ad campaigns should be planned accordingly.

    What changed? Three things sounded the death knell of a diverse press.

    The first was the advent of national television news. The evening paper had a very tough time competing for eyeballs with moving pictures and fresh stories.

    Second was the advent of J school. Until journalism became a “profession”, anybody who could string words together on a deadline, spell and get the names right was a potential reporter. After a degree became the union card to get your foot in the door, the job was restricted to those who self selected and had the money to go to school for four years leaning how to bury a lead.

    The third was Watergate. After the press was the key to hounding Nixon from office, every two bit liberal with a desire for “change” who didn’t have the radicalism or stones to throw real bombs decided a journalism degree and rhetorical bombs were the way to go. You could influence people’s perception of the world and get paid for doing it.

    kaz (cad490)

  28. My long, late, father had Newsweek, Time and USN&WP mailed to our house since before 1960. His den was like a doctors waiting room without the ladies magazines. I remember that I used an issue of NW to write a social studies report in jr. high school. Newsweek has always been propaganda for the Democrat Party. It was evident to me at 13 years old. My “report”, on political bias in the press, did not please my admittedly Democrat teacher, Mrs. Davis. “The more things change….”

    C. Norris (bcab93)

  29. As a teen, I read, and subscribed, to USN&WR, my folks got Newsweek, my sis TNR, my best friend NR.
    TNR & NW are still the crap they were then.
    NR is, if anything, even better for there are so many more voices there than fifty-years ago.
    USN&WR was a gem. “Washington Whispers” was the best DC gossip column of substance. David Lawrence’s words on anything were as “Sermons From the Mount”. With his death/retirement, and the sale of the mag to the current owners: Just another DC rag.

    Another Drew (b4e6e5)

  30. Hmmmmm.

    OK. So why bother having these creeps along on a campaign? Particularly when the campaign has to -pay- to bring them along?

    Is it some masochistic thing? Tradition?

    If you’re going to be constantly stabbed in the back by the reporter from MSNBC then why include the bastard in the first place?

    memomachine (6ab657)

  31. Glad to have found your new hangout, Karl.

    The Sanity Inspector (ef5d4d)

  32. Comment by memomachine — 10/23/2008 @ 10:45 am

    Actually IIRC the MSM has to pay the campaign an amount comparable to commercial air-fare for their transportation on the campaign plane (I would hope they’re charging them first-class, walk-up rates, but I doubt it).

    Another Drew (b4e6e5)


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