Goodbye to the Grand Pooh-bahs?

A.A. Milne, who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, also wrote a poem relevant to the Grand Pooh-bahs of Big Media in 2017. “Bad Sir Brian Botany” describes a bully who “had a pair of boots with great big spurs on, / A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond. / On Tuesday and on Friday, just to make the street look tidy, / He’d collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.”

That’s what networks like CNN and newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post do. The Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, hardly a conservative organization, recently reported that CNN and NBC were 93 percent negative on President Donald Trump during his first three months in office, while the two powerful newspapers were 85 percent negative.

You may remember godfather Michael Corleone explaining, “It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.” On June 27 Project Veritas released a video of CNN supervising producer John Bonifield dismissing “all the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school. … This is a business.”

Now-standard Big Media business practice: overuse of any anonymous source willing to shoot gossip into the societal bloodstream. A 24/7 news cycle that pushes reporters to rush to judgment. Grand Pooh-bahs styling themselves like the original one in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado: “Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral ... Lord High Everything Else.”

Other big problems include evaluating performance by ratings or clicks: Bonifield bragged, “Our ratings are incredible right now.” Journalists of course want to be read, heard, and watched, but if we forget our other bottom line—accuracy and truth—we don’t deserve First Amendment protection. Plus, Big Media credibility is so low now that President Trump’s unpresidential tweets don’t lose him evangelical support: Sadly, what else do we expect in the cage fight our politics have become?

Bonifield spoke of Big Media’s abdication during the Obama years: If CNN had “scrutinized everything that he was doing with as much scrutiny as we applied to Donald Trump, I think our viewers would have been turned off.” Real journalists are willing to turn off viewers and readers at times, but Sharyl Attkisson, who spent 21 years with CBS until she resigned in 2014, speaks of how “political operatives” have pushed out some real reporters.

Many young reporters have seen two movies—All the President’s Men (1976) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)—celebrating press efforts that removed Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974 and Joseph McCarthy from his dominance in the Senate 20 years earlier. They are desperately seeking facts that could lead to the impeachment of President Trump, but on June 26 CNN, trying to preserve the little that’s left of its journalistic reputation, accepted the resignations of three employees who pushed a Trump-Russia conspiracy story that had no factual basis.

History does not necessarily repeat itself, though—and when it does, we learn that from dogged investigation, not a quick-splash story. Spotlight, which rightly won the Oscar for best picture last year, shows the slow process that led to exposure of a big pederasty scandal and cover-up. Reporting on the 1960s civil rights movement also took time. Freedom Riders who helped to integrate the South were brave, but they needed press allies: One Mississippi lawman told a demonstrator being dragged away when no cameras were present, “Ain’t no newspapermen out here, what you actin’ like that for?”

So far among Big Media we’re seeing, at least publicly, more sloganeering than thoughtful reflection. The New York Times this year ran a big ad campaign proclaiming, “The truth is more important now than ever,” but the newspaper that once was pro-life refuses to admit the scientific truth that the creature in the womb is a baby. An honest slogan would be, “We print less truth than ever.”

That suggestion, though, misses a deeper question: Do most mainstream reporters even believe that truth exists—or is everything just a power struggle? As Bonifield said, “I love the news business, but I’m very cynical about it and at the same time so are most of my colleagues.” Chapter 8 of the Gospel of John offers an alternative to cynicism: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Few Big Media folks realize their desperate need—yet.

In Milne’s poem the villagers Sir Brian had pushed into the pond finally rebel:

Sir Brian went a journey and he found a lot of duckweed; / They pulled him out and dried him and they blipped him on the head. / They took him by the breeches and they hurled him into ditches, / And they pushed him under waterfalls and this is what they said: / “You are Sir Brian—don’t laugh, / You are Sir Brian—don’t cry; / You are Sir Brian, as bold as a lion— / Sir Brian, the Lion, goodbye!”