A culture of innocence

Writing for New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column, Charlotte Klein has lately reported that “The Media Is Now Part of Trump’s War Against the Deep State.” She decries what she sees as “Trump’s apparent willingness to weaponize vast troves of government data” by making it public in furtherance of a right-wing conspiracy theory alleged to hold that “the media has been doing the bidding of the deep state.”

As I suggested in this space last month (see “Melting the ideological permafrost” in The New Criterion of March, 2025), it is far more likely that the deep state is doing the bidding of the media than the other way around. But the media as we have known them for the last half century or so could never be supposed to be guilty of interfering in the operations of the government, since they depend absolutely on a culture of unquestioned innocence and therefore enjoy the moral unassailability of the victim, or the champion of the certifiably victimized.

In the case of the deep state, this posture of innocence is especially necessary to disguise, to themselves if not to the rest of us, the symbiotic relationship between the media and the deep state which has accomplished something like a real weaponization of “government data” — by keeping as much of it as possible secret from all but the media themselves and the strategically placed deep-staters who selectively leak it in aid of the media’s progressive agenda.

This cooperation with the deep state works so well for the media’s scandal-culture because any bit of information which is not intrinsically scandalous can be made to appear so simply by being leaked. The classic example is the Pentagon Papers, whose most scandalous revelation, as I suggest in my book Honor, A History, was that the men who got America into the Vietnam War were motivated primarily not, as they claimed, by a moral crusade against communist aggression but by their concern for America’s “reputation” as a guarantor of the security of smaller nations in the shadow of Communist China.

I would argue that all wars are fought, at least in part, for reputation — or honor, as it used to be called. But the Nixon administration chose to regard the allegation as a deep, dark government secret worth fighting in the courts to keep and so made a present to the media of a major scandal, not only against its predecessor in office but against itself. And so was created the media scandal-machine, which went into overdrive with the Watergate affair a year or two later.

The legend of Watergate and its accompanying media triumphalism has kept the scandal culture alive ever since, to the advantage of the progressive media and the detriment of our country’s civic and political life. Since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower nearly ten years ago, Mr Trump has hampered the operation of the media’s scandal detector by his radical openness about his thoughts and opinions, many of which, if they had been voiced in private and then leaked to the media would have damaged him much worse than they did by his making no secret of them.

If I am right about this, precisely such openness, now that Mr Trump is president again, has got the media spitting mad about the “war on the deep state” postulated by Ms Klein. For example, “DOGE Is Hacking America,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer for Foreign Policy. “In the span of just weeks, the U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history — not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role.”

If, as they claim, “the implications for national security are profound,” the implications for the profitability of the media, not to mention their success in pushing their political agenda, are even more profound. A government without secrets — or with many fewer secrets — is so far proof against the endless scandal narratives with which the media attempt to put an end to the careers of those whom they dislike, or to advance those they like. Without such secrets, the deep staters can only lose their jobs, but the media can lose a whole industry — an industry dependent on its control over the flow of information, which is already threatened by the proliferation of alternative media on-line.

The owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at least, must have seen the writing on the wall, foretelling the doom of scandal-focused journalism as it has been practiced since the Nixon administration. The staff of both papers were shocked and outraged by their declining to endorse a candidate in the presidential election last November, and both have gone on to shake up their editorial staffs in order to treat political candidates of both parties more even-handedly and not, reading between the lines, as avatars of either good or evil, as scandal-journalism demands.

Jeff Bezos of the Post seems, at first glance anyway, to want to get out of the scandal-business altogether. “We are going to be writing every day,” he wrote to the paper’s opinion writers and editors, “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Of course it will still be theoretically possible for the Post to call Mr Trump — or anybody else it chooses — a villain, or a Nazi, on the grounds that he threatens personal liberties and/or free markets, but if that was any consolation to the paper’s opinion editor, David Shipley, it wasn’t enough to prevent him from resigning rather than carry out such a distasteful instruction from the boss.

Pace Ms Klein, the “weaponizing” of information is the media’s business, not Mr Trump’s, except insofar as he seeks to neutralize a weapon which has so often been used against himself. And as with “weaponizing” so with “politicizing.” Both involve visiting upon the presumptively non-partisan institutions of government and the law the politically self-interested motives of those who control those institutions. As I write, President Trump and his agents are said by numerous media outlets to be politicizing the civil service (a.k.a. “the deep state”) and the armed forces by firing people put in place by previous administrations with — or so the Trump people allege — their own political motivations.

It must be tempting for those who have lost their jobs, or who may be about to lose them, to accuse Mr Trump of hypocrisy for acting from political motives himself, but it’s hard to see how anyone could hope to purge partisan politics from the supposedly non-partisan areas of government without being to some degree partisan himself. One nail drives out another. The test will come when we see if there is a return to legal and administrative non-partisanship where it used to be customary, or if instead there is only partisanship of an opposite kind.

Unsurprisingly, the media are screaming bloody murder against the Trump reforms on behalf of the Obama-Biden politicized status quo, since the media have the most to lose from the return to something resembling non-partisanship in the many areas of government where it used to be, if not entirely absent, not threatening to tear the country apart. But we might hope to see a less hysterical response from the more thoughtful people among the Democratic opposition, some of whom surely don’t relish the prospect of having to defend the sort of government waste, fraud and abuse that has been found on the books of the USAID, or appearing to be trying to keep any such knowledge secret from the country.

Whisper it softly but, according to some observers anyway, there really are such sane and moderate Democrats. Byron York writes for The Washington Examiner:

Recently, a group of former Obama aides who appeared on the podcast Pod Save America discussed how hard change can be. “We all know that government is slow,” said former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau. “We all know government can be inefficient. We all know that the bureaucracy can be bloated. We all worked in the White House. We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do.” Another former Obama speechwriter, Jon Lovett, addressed what Trump and Musk are doing and said, “Honestly, some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should have done. We didn’t know you could do some of this.”

Such people may have been made aware of the poll which found that 45 per cent of Democrats in the country wanted to see a more moderate party, or the one which revealed that 58 per cent believed government spending to be “filled with waste, fraud and inefficiency.” Yet they must also know that any effort at moderation or compromise will be opposed by the media, who continue to cry out in protest against those they see as their supine Democratic clients — as does, for example, Ed Kilgore, also of New York, when he asks, “Are Democrats Already Surrendering on Government Spending?” Or Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker, who asks “Why Aren’t We in the Streets?”

The die-hard media must believe that anything less than resistance à outrance to the Trump reforms constitutes an existential threat to themselves, as indeed it does — through their own fault in casting so much of their reporting for the last decade in terms of an ultimatum: it’s either Trump or us. Well, it turned out to be — not them. Who’d have thought it?

Such adamantine anti-Trumpery in the media is one indication of where the real power lies on the left, even if those who enforce it are beginning to have trouble keeping some of their Democratic dependents in line. It also explains why, as J.T. Young writes for The Hill, “Democrats lack a message and a messenger” to set against the Trump political offensive.

Governors from states like Pennsylvania (Josh Shapiro), North Carolina (Roy Cooper), and Kentucky (Andy Beshear) — places Democrats desperately need to win to rebound nationally — are all too moderate to win a Democratic nomination contest for president. This is probably why all were passed over as Harris’s running mate in 2024. Leaders in Congress look even worse. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had his Michael Dukakis tank moment when he stood holding an avocado and a Corona at a press conference against Trump’s tariffs. House Minority Leader Hakeem “Street Fightin’ Man” Jeffries let slip a call to “fight it in the streets.” The nation’s scold, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? No way. . . .Democrats’ messages turn off the voters they need to win, and none of [the] Democrats’ messengers speak to these groups they do need to win. Rather, Democrats’ messages and messengers speak to groups they already have and, candidly, could use some distance from.

And why is this? Because Democrats have put the partisan media in charge of delivering their message, as well as vetting it for any signs of heterodoxy with respect to the media narrative. So long as the media and the activist groups they also sponsor (and the non-profits who increasingly sponsor them) continue to maintain message (and party) discipline for Democrats, the occasional local office-holder can go around, if not against, that message, though no one on the national stage can do so.

The now much-mentioned “vibe shift” in the country suggests that the only way for the Democratic opposition to step out of line and so return to electoral viability is by the dawning awareness that their media masters have lost, or at least are beginning to lose, the power to punish them if they do. There is some reason to believe that this is happening. That must be why Barton Swaim can write for The Wall Street Journal that “Trump Somehow Lowers the Temperature in Washington.”

The invective of the typical host and commentator on MSNBC, it’s true, is nearly as acidic as it was in 2017 and 2020. For a few columnists on the left, Mr. Trump is perpetrating a putsch, destroying the country and doing violence to the innocent, the same as ever. But the language of ordinary Democratic politicos has become — I wouldn’t say fair or responsible, but less manic. . . We are back, more or less, to the accusations Democrats preferred for decades — that Republicans want to gut Social Security and Medicare, and that the GOP president is doing the bidding of his wealthy friends. This is comity and concord.

There may be something to this, but it remains an open question as to whether or to what extent the Democrats can abandon their apocalypticism about Mr Trump, even if they want to, since their past and (still sometimes) present rhetorical extremism means that they can neither come out openly and say that they have been wrong all along about his being an evil dictator — we love Big Brother now! — nor just let it quietly be forgotten. In making the stakes of the election so high, they created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because they could admit of no error, fault or corruption in need of the reform to the status quo promised by Mr Trump, they made him the indispensable man to bring such reform about. And they made themselves the anti-democratic force that they always accused him of being, standing in reform’s way.

As I suggested above, the media and the Democrats who still depend upon them have become the prisoners of their own culture of innocence, which demands that they be seen as always in the right, always incapable of any but the most trivial faults, and therefore morally irreproachable in their exposure of the wrong done by others. This it is which makes their loss of the public’s trust, pointed out to them by, among others, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, in his overhaul of that paper’s editorial staff, so seemingly incomprehensible to them.

We can see a rather comical example of this moral blindness and failure of self-awareness in Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor whose election Mr Soon-Shiong’s paper, much to his subsequent regret, endorsed in 2022.

In February, Mayor Bass announced that she was launching an investigation into her own trip to Africa during the January wild-fires that devastated so much of the city she ostensibly leads. The aim of the investigation appears to be to find some unnamed guilty party who failed to make her aware, before she jetted off to Ghana for the inauguration of that country’s president, that the trip might have been ill-advised. Pretty obviously, I think, such a person has lived her whole life with the bedrock assumption that any misfortune which befalls her must be somebody else’s fault. Indeed, her principal qualification for the office she holds can hardly be anything but her membership in good standing of various approved groups of victims. Therefore, whoever else may have been a victim of the fires, she must be one too, and certainly not the least among them.

As she told Fox News, “I felt absolutely terrible about not being here for my city and not being here for my family who was impacted by the fires as well . . . So when I say it was a mistake, absolutely, the idea that I was not present was very painful.” How dare those who have only lost their homes or businesses criticize someone who has suffered as she has! Where could she have learned such moral imbecility if not from the media? And yet I’m afraid that there is more hope of Karen Bass’s some day experiencing a glimmer of shame or self-awareness than of the media’s ever doing so. Écrasez l’infâme!