Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them
Senator John McCain
The medium of The Gray Lady’s OP/ED stunner I am a Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration is in itself a quiet but powerful backlight to the folly of Propaganda. This was a blockbuster leak, possibly involving multiple participants at the highest levels of the Trump White House and the GOP. Why on Earth did it go to the New York Times?
Fox News is politically embedded in this White House like no other media/client relationship in American political history. They should have multiple networked source-reporter relationships that ensure instant and exclusive access to this material and their reporters should enjoy the unwavering trust of their inside contacts. If they allowed their spokesmodels to do actual journalism they would have easily gotten this story. If they are, as they hourly complain, the only national experts at doing “Real News” they should have uncovered this letter’s creation and been sought out initially by the Republican source who penned it. Fox News should have broken this story. What does it mean that they didn’t?
Even in a hot season of unprecedented bombshells this story is thermonuclear. It highlights, among so many other things, that the average Republican senior staffer in the White House would rather commit treason to save their job than commit legal truth-telling to save their country. Ok, not much of surprise there, still, if people are deliberately hiding documents to keep the POTUS from acting then those people are treasonous criminals. The Constitution by way of the 25th Amendment is apparently hard so; treason and an ongoing coup de manipulation…
In addition to those little issues, however, this missive originates in the absolute center of the specific media realm Fox News uniquely commands. One might boldly suggest they helped create this administration out of whole (and dumb) cloth. Obviously, the idea that any White House shotcaller would trust Fox News enough to leak this to them, particularly at a moment of such national gravitas, is laughable. But why exactly is that? Is it because the most accomplished and senior leaders of the GOP White House understand that Fox is a propaganda machine that would never actually publish their dissenting story no matter how important it might be to national security? Is it because they fear their own media lynch mob would turn on them, ignore every tenet of honorable ethical journalism and destroy their confidentiality and careers? Or is it, perhaps most daring of all, simply that they don’t see Fox as a competent enough news agency to confidentially gather and accurately manage such a high level, dangerous story even when the entire story is a simple pre-written letter?
I any case let’s be clear about one overriding fact: Fox News continues to be absent from this or any other meaningful story that is not directly narrated by the Trump/GOP Government. There exists an oceanic gap between the rest of the media world’s normal rough and tumble multi-sided reporting of scandals and innuendo and wonk coming out of the Trump/ GOP government and the trickle produced by Fox News. The journalism gap across which this letter sailed screams that the leaders of the Republican White House take Fox News no more seriously as an actual news organization than they take Donald Trump as an actual President. This is not a surprise but it seems worth noting for the record.
The author(s) of this phenomenally historic communique - seemingly voiced as a shared and nearly unanimous private dissent piece from within the highest echelons of the White House - never pretended that the GOP’s exclusive media wing had any relevance or legitimate role in reporting it. The fact is that this letter seems very likely to have been written by a communications staffer who owes some of his or her political ascendancy to the Fox News syndicate and associated right wing publications. Not leaking or delivering this via a Fox News contact was an open acknowledgement by this same person that trust, loyalty, professionalism and competence are in greater supply at the enemy NYT than at Fox.
The fact that Fox was not offered this and no one asked why they weren't highlights the assumption, especially with the White House, that Fox News is not a real news organization. A senior communications operative for the Trump White House did not think that Fox News was worthy of the story of the Year. Generally no one in the White House leaks anything meaningful to Fox News (or Fox never publishes them). This in itself is such an obvious definition of how Fox News is a discordant political operation that no one in the media bothers to explore it.
In the end the right and some on the left will respond to this kind of subtle analysis by claiming that Fox's abdication of morally accountable journalism is just the normal bias of mainstream media. They will say that The New York Times would never break a seriously damaging negative story against their party’s leader. And there is no way in hell the Washington Post would first break a scandal involving their liberal POTUS and then follow the leaks so houndingly that they may have single handedly forced the impeachment of a Democratic President.
Oops
Either no one in the leakiest Administration in American history has ever leaked even a single dissenting footnote to Fox News or Fox News refuses to publish or pursue a single one. (Trick premise - it’s actually both). The only reality-based explanation for this journalism gap is because Fox is both de-facto and de-jure a propaganda ministry. That is to say, they only publish favorable, biased and party approved stories AND they are treated by senior party leadership as a propaganda machine which is untrustworthy, unreliable and won’t place country above party.
The implication that Fox News (or perhaps the recently much less visible Wall Street Journal) could have, should have and would have broken this story if they were anything but an openly biased and cravenly unethical propaganda directorate of the Republican party will be glossed over or ignored by the GOP's electioneering leadership. They will all spin it away as just another minor straw of circumstantial evidence of subversive conspiracy fallen unjustly on their partisan camel's back. A back which Fox News will continue to report is unbent and unbreakable, right up until the last minute.
Ultimately, aside from the actual and savage contents of The Letter, the inability of the GOP's Pravda to break this or any other meaningful inside story exposes their democracy-mocking Trump era command philosophy: That Fox's service to Uncle Joe is an acceptable price to pay for the GOP’s subversion of Uncle Sam.