A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How Peter Baker's Feelings Become 'News'

Or, how our paper of record substitutes reporters' opinions for
historic breakthroughs

Biden "can 'hardly break through' nonstop attention to Trump.
According to an article directing its attention toward Trump
."

The above quote is from a post on James Fallows's Substack blog. I
recommend reading it despite the fact that it also includes the
following sentence: "There is no point in naming the writer."

I beg to differ. The writer in question is Peter Baker, chief White
House correspondent for The New York Times, who, according to his bio,
"has covered the last five presidents for the Times and the Washington
Post. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Divider: Trump
in the White House, 2017-2021, with Susan Glasser." (I have corrected
its punctuation.) The important point about the fact that Baker is the
writer is that he is, by virtue of his position(s), likely the most
influential of all reporters who cover either the current or
ex-president. Less important, but worth noting, is the fact that he and
his wife, Glasser, wrote the book that held onto the news about Trump
demanding that U.S. generals act more like (Trump incorrectly thought)
Hitler's generals did until they could profit by its publication (with
Baker giving that story to his employer's competition, The New Yorker,
where Glasser works).

Baker's story, headlined "Even on Biden's Big Day, He's Still in
Trump's Long Shadow
,"
is a master class in how to bend reality to one's prejudices:
prejudices that dominate the Times coverage of American politics
and-the Times being what it is-set the tone for the rest of the
respectable mainstream media.

Let's just glance at its opening-likely the part that Baker and his
editors spent the most time on, as few readers can be depended upon to
read much past that point. The piece's first paragraph contains an
anonymous quote:

"One of his congressional allies lamented that the president's
accomplishments are 'often away from public view' while another
contrasted him with a former president who 'relished creating
chaos.'" Here's my question: Why was anonymity given for this?
Updated barely a month ago, the Times explained its use of anonymous
sources

as follows: "Under our guidelines, these sources should be used only
for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we
are not able to report any other way." How in the world do those
criteria apply to that namby-pamby quote?

In the very next paragraph, Baker offers us his thesis: "No one
mentioned Donald J. Trump's name during the ceremony in the State
Dining Room of the White House, but his presence was felt nonetheless as
Mr. Biden enacted major climate, health care and corporate tax policies
.
One major reason Mr. Biden's achievements often seem eclipsed in
public view is because Mr. Trump is still creating chaos from his
post-presidential exile."

[link removed]

Two points about this egregious abuse of journalistic authority. When a
sentence contains an alleged fact stated in the passive voice, followed
by one in which the major verb is the time-honored journalistic weasel
word "seem," you can bet the whole thing is likely bullshit. In
fact, Baker was describing his own "feelings." We can be grateful to
learn that this is what the New York Times chief White House
correspondent thinks is the most important aspect to report on with
regard to legislation that will affect the lives of millions of people
and represents the most significant legislative accomplishment by a
president since Obamacare, and before that-well it's hard to
remember anything. But no matter: Not only is Baker interested
exclusively in show-business-oriented horse-race-driven coverage, but he
also bases this judgment entirely on his own imagination.

And yet, that's the way it is these days. Politico Playbook reprinted
these alleged insights as if that were the real story:

"And NYT's Peter Baker takes on the backdrop that Biden found this
week: 'No other sitting president has ever lived with the shadow of
his defeated predecessor in quite the way that Mr. Biden has over the
last year and a half. Regardless of what the current president does, he
often finds himself struggling to break through the all-consuming circus
that keeps Mr. Trump in the public eye. Even the bully pulpit of the
White House has proved no match for the Trump reality show.'"

This quote-and the piece that follows-also demonstrates what might
fairly be termed the lust that reporters feel for the good old days of
the Trump presidency, when CNN's and MSNBC's ratings were sky-high,
and the world was focused on what these insiders-mostly Beltway
gasbags and late-to-the-party "Never Trumpers"-had to say about
the next 15 minutes. Biden, amid all that talk about this or that
policy, rather than complaints about cancer-causing windmills and
paid-off porn stars, cannot compete. That Trump's winning the war for
the journalistic mind by committing potentially treasonous crimes could
not be more beside the point in this narrative. He's winning because
we're talking about him-and as Fallows pointed out, that's because
we're talking about him.

P.S.: I searched for Baker's name in the long section on Trump's
presidency in my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-And Why
Trump Is Worse and found
this: "In another front-page analysis, Times White House correspondent
Peter Baker described the drama of impeachment as playing out against
'conspiracy theories,' which he said were 'everywhere,' adding
that 'conspiracy theorists are in the White House and Congress
,'
though he neglected to point to a single 'conspiracy theory' that
did not emanate from the Republican side of the aisle."

It would be inaccurate to say that the members of the mainstream media
do not cover one another. They do so, often to an obsessive degree. (I
see in Thursday's Politico Playbook, there is even some heavy
breathing about ... wait for it ... who will be the media spokesperson
for, um, Jill Biden. Credit Max Tani and Alex Thompson

for this earth-shattering scoop.) What these same journalists do an
absolutely terrible job of, however, is covering the manner in which the
media matters in politics. We learn also from Baker

that "The challenge for Mr. Biden is acute. Only 41 percent of
Americans said they were even familiar with the legislation signed on
Tuesday, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll
."
Turns out that "its major elements enjoy strong support among voters
when informed, with 62 percent to 71 percent in favor of provisions like
allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and expanding
incentives for clean energy." If only there were some mechanism for
people to find out what was in this legislation, rather than who or what
is "haunting" the White House in the overactive imagination of its
top reporters.

[link removed]

I became a big fan of Pink Floyd late in life. In high school, liking
The Dark Side of the Moon too much ID'd you as a hopeless stoner. In
college, I deeply objected to hearing the words "We don't need no
education" over and over, particularly as it identified it with
"thought control." (The terrible grammar of that sentence indicates
its falsity, by virtue of its misplaced use of the double negative.) In
my dotage, however, I have come to love the band. I've gone to a few
concerts by both Roger Waters and David Gilmour and was even seated at a
luncheon (actually for Waters) next to Nick Mason. (I am also a great
fan of Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll
, which
is sort of about Syd Barrett, the band's founder, who destroyed his
mind with LSD, and who is also the subject of one of the band's
greatest songs, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond
.")

It's no secret that the genius behind the band was Waters. This is
sort of a problem because his politics are really terrible. I don't
mind if an artist has politics that contradict my own-it's the art,
not the artist, that matters-but Waters's intense hostility toward
Israel has tended to veer into antisemitic symbolism. In the visuals for
one of his anti-war songs during his concerts, the screen is first
filled with Jewish stars that are then turned into dollar signs and then
falling bombs. Yet I remain a little reluctant to outright condemn the
man, for three reasons. One is my love for his music. "Comfortably
Numb
"
and "Wish You Were Here
"
are two of the most beautiful and powerful songs in the entire canon of
rock music. Second, I've had a few social interactions with the guy,
and he seemed really decent. (We were once shut out of a screening
together and he did not throw a typical rock star fit. He gave up and
left at the same time I did.) And third, at the December 2015 all-day
conference on Israel and Palestine sponsored by Haaretz and the New
Israel Fund in Manhattan, Roger spent the entire day there, listening
and learning. That's pretty unusual behavior for any genuine
antisemite. That brings us to his more recent crazy comments about the
Ukraine, China, Taiwan, and the Uyghurs
,
as well as terming Joe Biden a "war criminal." The transparent
silliness of these comments actually helps absolve him of the
antisemitic accusations. Politically speaking, Roger is an all-purpose
fanatic, albeit one who has earned hundreds of millions from his
brilliant music. You know what that makes him? "Comfortably Dumb."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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