The State of Journalism: Past, Present, and Future

by Marc Hochstein

This essay appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era

by Donald A. Barclay

Rowman & Littlefield, 281 pp., $30

The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

by Ashley Rindsberg

Midnight Oil Publishers, 284 pp., $14.99

HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY! A Memoir

by Peter Hochstein

Telemachus Press, 195 pp., $3.99

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Editors and English teachers at their wits’ end, rejoice! Ashley Rindsberg has unearthed the perfect illustration for your writers and students of why they should use active verbs whenever possible.

The textbook how-not-to-write sentence appeared September 1, 1939, in The New York Times:

“The Gleiwitz incident is alleged here to have been the signal ‘for a general attack by Polish frantireurs [guerillas] on German territory.’” (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps the author of that page three article couldn’t have known that the men who attacked a radio station in the town of Gleiwitz the day before were German operatives in Polish uniforms. This was, to be fair, 17 years before the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, when a former SS officer testified that the incident was a false flag operation to give Hitler a pretext to invade Poland.

But the uncredited writer (possibly Otto D. Tolischus, a Times Berlin correspondent, whose summary of Hitler’s speech declaring war led page one that day) could have at least informed readers who had alleged that the Gleiwitz incident showed Poland was preparing to attack Germany. That’s the problem with passive verbs, kids: Not only do they make for bumpy reading—the literary equivalent of biking over cobblestones—they obscure important information. Who is doing the thing?

Had the Times identified the source, its readers, and possibly the newspapers around the U.S. that regularly picked up its international coverage, might have known to take the claim with a pinch of salt. The only hint was a reference, several paragraphs above, to a “semi-official news agency.” It turns out that the source for the allegation was more than “semi-official”: Völkischer Beobachter.

“[T]his was the newspaper Hitler himself read while relaxing in his Bavarian retreat and which billed itself as the ‘fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany,’” Rindsberg writes in The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. “Yet, the Times article failed to mention that its single source was the official newspaper of the NSDAP—the Nazi party in Germany.”

As his book’s subtitle suggests, Rindsberg doesn’t believe this was some one-off goof. He describes a longstanding pattern of at best mistaken but often willfully deceptive reporting at the nation’s leading and most respected newspaper, from the 1920s up through the present day.

By itself, The Gray Lady Winked is a damning, if occasionally uncharitable, portrait of a renowned institution. Read alongside two other works, the book casts new light on the current debate about misinformation, the internet’s role in propagating it, and the decline of a media profession that, according to lore, once counteracted it.

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For the official line about our epistemic crisis we may turn to Donald A. Barclay.

“When it comes to the reporting of news by journalistic (and pseudo-journalistic) sources, we may be experiencing a return to an unapologetically nonobjective news media following a fairly short-lived period in which objective journalism has been the expectation,” the university librarian laments in the preface to Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era.

In Barclay’s account, that brief golden age started in the 1920s and is rapidly coming to a close as the public—nudged by algorithms, bots and cognitive biases—increasingly get their information from “giant cable news networks or lone YouTube commentators’’ instead of dispassionate Walter Cronkite figures.

Much of Barclay’s critique of what he calls the “post-truth culture” shaped by digital technology rings true. Punctuated with gray-shaded sidebars and bullet point summaries, Disinformation reads like a textbook for a college media studies class, which appears to be its intended purpose. It’s a serviceable primer for sorting the signal from the noise in an information-saturated environment, in a similar vein as Normand Baillargeon’s A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense. Students who can slog through Barclay’s dry prose—leavened with pop-culture references and jokes that sometimes land—will learn important rudimentary tools for detecting propaganda (always ask, “cui bono?”) and unhinged conspiracy theories (“nothing happens by accident” is a classic tell).

One of Barclay’s strongest points is that instantaneous delivery of information creates unrealistic expectations and fuels conspiratorial interpretations:

If something momentous or noteworthy happens anywhere in the world, news and (very often) video of what happened shows up on smartphones in real time (or very close to it). This has created not only an expectation of immediacy on the part of information consumers, but also [an] instant gratification mentality that causes people to become suspicious of duplicity when there is any delay between an event and reportage of it: “What do you mean they don’t know who won today’s election? What are they trying to hide?”

Although Barclay never mentions Jeffrey Epstein, social media chatter about media coverage of the late sex offender’s associates supports his point. The oft-repeated claims that the press “covered up” Epstein’s crimes or still “refuses” to identify all his sex-trafficking clients elides the reality that investigative journalism takes time. Lawsuit threats are likely, and even the most thoroughly researched piece will and should go through several rewrites, rounds of editing, and legal review before publication. For all you or I know, journalists at numerous outlets have been struggling for valid reasons to get Epstein-pal exposés across the finish line.

Should the media as a whole have pursued the Epstein story more aggressively? Probably. Should ABC News have aired the interview with an Epstein accuser that the reporter later offhandedly complained the network had “quashed” under pressure from the British royal family? Maybe; we don’t know the whole story behind that story, and the reporter later said the never-aired report lacked sufficient corroborating evidence.

The point is that when the stakes are so high, the truth is not going to come out overnight. It can’t. First it has to be carefully pieced together, and rigorously verified. For a sample of what happens when journalists rush a contentious story, look at Rolling Stone’s notorious retracted article alleging rape at the University of Virginia (more on that later).

Yet to Barclay’s point, it’s hard to blame news consumers for being impatient when their devices and apps train them to ingest information for dopamine hits. This impatience, in turn, exacerbates pressure on journalists to cut corners (which was tempting enough in the analog era when reporters raced to meet daily newspaper deadlines).

“The demand for instantaneous access to information has the unfortunate side effect of making fact-checking of breaking news difficult if not impossible (at least for those media outlets that actually care about the factuality of what they report),” writes Barclay. “Even more than in the past, getting the information out quickly has become more important than getting the information right.”

Unfortunately, early chapters of Disinformation come off a bit condescending. In a passage about COVID-19, Barclay professes bafflement that “a submicroscopic infectious agent” (he repeats the italicized phrase to stress his incredulity) became a political issue, perhaps forgetting the lockdowns’ toll on small businesses and schoolchildren. At times, he appears to fault social media platforms for refusing to shut down the accounts of conspiracy theorists, chalking up the companies’ free-speech rhetoric to purely bottom-line concerns. Did he miss the deplatforming of Alex Jones or Donald Trump, moves that, whatever you think about them, were surely driven by something other than maximizing engagement-driven profits? What about “misinformation” that turns out to be true, like the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story that Twitter suppressed on the eve of the 2020 election (mentioned nowhere in the book, which Barclay finished late enough to reference the Jan. 6, 2021 riots)?

To his credit, Barclay later acknowledges the “paternalistic” nature of calls for social media censorship and toward the end of Disinformation he urges readers not to dehumanize those who fall for nonsense like QAnon. “If anything, the struggle to rein in the spread of conspiracy theories requires more all-around patience and empathy from all concerned.” Amen.

Yet Disinformation’s biggest blind spot lies not in Barclay’s description of the present but his implicit romanticizing of a past in which “objective journalism has been the expectation.” Or rather, his apparent assumption that this expectation was religiously met.

***

The Gleiwitz episode wasn’t the only time a Times correspondent parroted Nazi propaganda, according to Rindsberg. Or Communist propaganda.

In The Gray Lady Winked, we learn of Guido Enderis, the Times’ Berlin bureau chief who assigned and wrote “articles that were sympathetic, if not outright supportive, of the Nazi regime.” Unlike other American journalists in Germany, Enderis was not detained in 1941 after the Reich declared war on the U.S. A memorandum from the Nazi in charge of detaining the other reporters cited Enderis’s “proven friendliness to Germany” as the reason for letting him be. (Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent who apparently bungled the Gleiwitz story, was tossed out of the country the year before.)

We learn of Walter Duranty, the Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, who in his dispatches denied the Soviet-engineered Holodomor famine in Ukraine that killed millions; told a U.S. State Department bureaucrat that the Times and the Soviet authorities had agreed his coverage would reflect the latter’s party line; and admitted to fellow journalists he knew the scale of deaths caused by starvation.

We learn of the Times’ muted contemporaneous coverage of the Holocaust, regularly buried on the inside pages; of a decision by the paper’s then-publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger—who wanted to preempt anti-Semitic accusations that his family business was a “Jewish-controlled” paper—to keep the word “Jew” out of its pages whenever possible; and his abbreviating the bylines of journalists with Jewish-sounding names (which is how Abraham Rosenthal became A. M. Rosenthal).

We learn of William L. Laurence, a brilliant science correspondent who got a little too close to his sources. He flew on a plane accompanying the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and was on the payroll of the U.S. Department of War (as it was then candidly called), writing press releases and statements for President Truman, while still reporting for the Times.

Access journalism has its perks, but it tainted Laurence’s coverage: Relying on a single military source, he wrote an article that claimed there was no radioactivity in Hiroshima following the bombing there—contradicting what another Times correspondent (uncannily named William H. Lawrence) had accurately reported a week earlier.

And on and on and on. Much of this comes from secondary sources, including Laurel Leff’s 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. By putting it all in one place, Rindsberg makes reminiscing about a bygone golden age of journalism look like, as the kids say, cope.

Most readers probably remember recent Times debacles such as the 1619 Project, the paper’s extremely woke reframing of American history that was widely debunked by scholars across the political spectrum, or the shameful decision, during the summer 2020 unrest, to fire an opinion editor who published an op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator because his words supposedly “endangered” Times staffers.

I am old enough to also remember Judith Miller, the reporter who pushed the later-discredited narrative about Saddam Hussein amassing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and her contemporary Jayson Blair, whose combination of fabrications, plagiarism and frequent misspellings made incompetence a performance art. Prior to reading Rindsberg, I’d heard of Duranty but didn’t realize the extent of his malpractice, and I’d never heard of Enderis or Laurence.

Any one of these stories, by itself, could be written off as an anomaly (or a “significant breakdown in our editing processes,” as current publisher A. G. Sulzberger, Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s great-grandson, appallingly described the decision to run the Senator’s op-ed, throwing the fired editor under the bus). Taken together, they shatter the unspoken assumption among educated Americans that if it’s in the Times, it must be true. “[O]ur most seemingly infallible institutions are often prone to error,” Rindsberg writes in his conclusion.

Why, then, did the Times retain its prestige over the decades? It’s a question I’d have liked The Gray Lady Winked to explore more. One possible answer is that the paper has still done a lot of good. For every groaner like Duranty’s “RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING,” there’s probably at least one impactful and salubrious piece of reporting like the 1971 Pentagon Papers exposé.

A less reassuring (though not mutually exclusive) explanation is what the novelist Michael Crichton called Gell-Mann Amnesia: People automatically believe articles about topics outside their expertise even if they’ve read botched coverage of things they know intimately from the same source. A third, also unsettling possibility, is that prestige begets prestige. Tolischus, Duranty and Laurence all won Pulitzer prizes for their reporting, Rindsberg notes, whereas reporters at other outlets who were truer to the stories of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Hiroshima did not.

I wondered at times if Rindsberg was being unfair to certain reporters and editors working on deadlines, in the figurative fog of war, without the benefit of hindsight. Whenever he decried the omission of a particular event from the front page, or from an edition of the paper, I wanted to know how late in the day the Times staff caught wind of the news in question, if they caught wind of it that day at all (most of the events in the book take place before the widespread use of email, much less Twitter), and whether there was time to change the layout before the issue went to press. While Rindsberg deserves credit for taking on a powerful corporation—in the preface he claims no major publisher would touch the manuscript for fear of making enemies—even New York Times journalists are only human.

***

So were the grumpy night-desk editors who mentored—well, berated and bullied—my late father, Peter Hochstein, when he cut his teeth as a junior reporter at the New York Post in the early 1960s.

In HEIRESS STRANGLED IN MOLTEN CHOCOLATE AT NAZI SEX ORGY!, the memoir of a short-lived tabloid journalism career which he self-published on Amazon in 2012, nine years before his death, my father credits those gruff central-casting characters for helping him learn to write tight, clean copy, fast. Even though he didn’t last long in the newspaper racket, this skill helped him ace his final English exam in college and go on to a long career writing ad copy.

Despite his mostly fond recollections of the experience, he recounts two incidents where Post editors falsified his crime reporting, in service of a sexy headline the first time and for mysterious reasons the other.

In the first incident, my dad went to East Harlem to chase a tip about a gang shooting. One person was shot dead, two were injured. Peter learned the shooting wasn’t a gang incident, but rather tied to a family feud. He went to a phone booth and read his notes to a “rewrite man” named Al Aronowitz, who wrote the story. This was standard practice long before laptops and smartphones.

The next morning my dad returned to the Post city room and saw his story on the front page of the morning edition with the words GANG WAR in the headline.

"Where the hell did this come from?” I asked Aronowitz. . . . “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aronowitz said. “I’m talking about the front page headline. It wasn’t a gang war. I told you it wasn’t a gang war.” Aronowitz picked up the newspaper and pretended to study the headline. After a moment, he said, “What do you mean it wasn’t a gang war? It says right here in the paper it was a gang war.” I felt violated. There were lots of things I’d do grudgingly that didn’t leave me feeling comfortable, like ringing doorbells in the middle of the night to tell people their sons were dead, just so I could get a fresh quote. But telling lies wasn’t one of those things.

Later, my father interviewed a woman in a hospital bed who had been arrested by two cops, one of whom, she said, beat her up. He then interviewed the cop, who acknowledged using force, and didn’t mention his partner. Dad wrote the story, naming only the cop who’d administered the beating. The editor rewrote the piece—under Peter Hochstein’s byline—extending the charge to include the partner, and refused to explain when my dad asked why. A “naïve jerk,” barely 21 years old at the time, my dad writes ruefully that he didn’t think to complain to their boss.

***

It’s probably an overstatement to say “journalists lied all the time in the so-called good old days.” But they probably lied more often than people like Barclay and I grew up believing.

Here’s where the internet, even social media, with its turbo-charged feedback loops, may play a constructive role.

One of the first readers to question Rolling Stone’s 2014 UVA story, the editor-in-chief of the financial publication Worth, did so not in his magazine but on his blog, and could easily have done it in a Twitter thread. For expressing doubts, he was excoriated by other journalists determined to push the campus rape narrative—and eventually vindicated when Rolling Stone retracted the story and settled three defamation lawsuits.

I doubt “citizen journalists” can replace professional journalists. (As one of the latter, I would say that, wouldn’t I?) It’s a full-time job. But our fellow citizens can now keep us honest by flagging our errors in real time. Maybe the anybody-can-allege-anything free-for-all of social media is a fair price to pay for this added layer of accountability.

Rather than a “post-truth era,” maybe we are enter- ing a “post-credulity era” in which misinformation is revealed for what it is much faster than it used to be and consumers are slowly learning not to blindly trust anything they read, see or hear—regardless of the source’s prestige.