This week, Anderson Cooper performed a flagrant act of journalism during a town hall with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. He asked her tough, but fair, questions on a variety of issues. The fact Kamala Harris could not answer them is not Cooper's fault.
Cooper did his job. What makes that noteworthy is the fact it doesn't happen often. Cooper, like the majority of journalists, op-ed writers, and other media personalities is a dyed in the wool Leftist and Democrat. So he doesn't always act as impartial or fair as he should when executing the primary duty of his job: to report objective fact and dig deep by asking the hard questions, regardless of the political affiliation of the person being questioned.
In an ideal world, I would have no idea what Cooper's political leanings were. We would have no idea what the political leanings of any newsroom or outlet were because those journalists would put the importance of their position above partisan politics.
My college journalism professor and advisor to the student newspaper was a rare breed. She not only didn't tell us her political leanings, she said she didn't vote in partisan elections; she also believed no journalist should. Quite the unicorn, huh?
It was so radical a position that -- as I approach the 20th anniversary of my college graduation -- I remember it and respect her for it.
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So when I watch the staff at The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have absolute temper tantrums over the fact their respective publications have declined to endorse any presidential candidate this year, it's with amazement and a healthy side of schadenfreude.
The media wouldn't be in the mess they're in, with trust in them at historic lows, if they had adopted a non-endorsement approach to presidential races from the outset.
But they didn't, so here we are.
A few staff at The Los Angeles Times have resigned in protest. Great. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Before The Washington Post pulled the rug on endorsement hopes, one of their journalists who praised the LA Times resignations was Jennifer Rubin.
Brava. That is courage. And shame on her boss for not joining her. https://t.co/6c4s93MBsa
— Jen "We aren't going back " Rubin 🥥🌴 (@JRubinBlogger) October 23, 2024
So this begs the question: when do you submit your resignation Jen, because this doesn't look like a resignation letter to me:
"The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
— Jen "We aren't going back " Rubin 🥥🌴 (@JRubinBlogger) October 26, 2024
In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
The newspaper…
What it does look like is the attempt of a spineless coward who is trying to weasel her way out of putting her money where her mouth is and telling the WaPo to go pound sand.
I am focusing on Jen here specifically because she is uniquely vile among the Never Trump crowd of so-called conservatives.
There isn't a policy position she once held that she hasn't done a complete about-face on since Donald Trump irreparably broke her brain eight years ago. And it's not so much that she's completely flip-flopped on what she once said she believed, it's that she does it with the smug arrogance of someone who forgets the general population don't have the collective memory of a goldfish and a condescension that says she's morally superior to us in her rank hypocrisy.
But let's engage in a logic exercise here.
First, we'll start by looking at what Jen posted, which I'll quote here for ease of reading:
The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men
By reacting the way they have, Jen, and her colleagues, have given away the game. A non-endorsement should be taken as just that: a non-endorsement. No candidate got the nod. A completely neutral, journalistically sound position that they should have accepted at face value before moving on with their lives.
Instead, they threw temper tantrums that tell people like me they see these non-endorsements as tacit endorsements of Donald Trump. And like vampires and garlic, they recoil in pain and horror at the thought.
Why is that duty, in Jen's thinking, to endorse Kamala Harris? How does refusing to endorse any political candidate make it an 'ally of special interest'?
How is endorsing Kamala Harris a 'fair and free and wholesome' outlook on public affairs?
It's not. The only way a paper can do it's duty to the public is to report objective fact, unvarnished and unfettered by partisan bias and let the public decide for themselves.
Jen finds that intolerable, however, because the public might not think in the way she demands they think. And she, being their moral and intellectual superior, cannot abide by that.
The argument the Left put forth in condemning the LA Times and Wapo is that -- failing to endorse Kamala Harris explicitly -- makes those outlets complicit in the 'fascism' of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is many things, but he is not a fascist, and the casual use of the word to describe him as such undermines actual fascism.
But I digress.
The reason the LA Times editor left is she didn't want to be 'silent' in the face of this.
Not only did Jen praise her fellow AWFL for it, she encouraged others to do the same. They're brave, she cheered, and sending a message to their publications and the public that they are on the 'right side of history' when it comes to Donald Trump.
That rah-rahing lasting precisely twelve seconds, and up until the moment WaPo joined the LA Times and declined to endorse a candidate.
Being forced to put her money where her mouth is, Jen did what she does best: flip-flopped on principles she once held in high regard. It seems to be a pattern for her.
In the last eight years, Jen has revealed herself to be a very unserious, shallow thinker. I doubt, amid all her bloviating, she realized how hypocritical it would look for her not to put a letter of resignation on her editor's desk by now.
Because she hasn't realized how hypocritical she's looked since she got infected with a terminal case of TDS.
But Jen won't resign, because this belief -- like every conservative position and belief she held a decade ago -- was only hers when it paid the bills.
Continuing to be WaPo's ostensible in-house conservative columnist makes her money. She won't be following the LA Times staffers to the unemployment line.
Yet only honorable thing for Jen Rubin to do is resign. To tell the WaPo she will not stand idly by while they engage in neutral journalism in the face of the rising fascism of Donald Trump. She should not put her own private interests before the pursuit of truth and the public good.
If she does not do so, WaPo has a duty to fire her for being failing to live up to the standard she expects of them.
By Jen's own logic, they'd be obligated to do so, lest they be an ally of her special interest in seeing Kamala Harris get elected.
And I call dibs on her job.
