The Legacy Media Are Not The Heroes They Think They Are

The legacy media are certainly delighted with themselves by their ability to have Ronna McDaniel fired. And she is certainly a deserving target ­– if an incredibly easy one. However, I’m not so sure the hiring by NBC would have been such a mistake.

As they like to warn us during organized crime investigations, none of the witnesses are going to be choir boys. And the same sort of caveat is always going to be needed concerning Donald Trump. So I’m a little skeptical of the validity of the criticism being presented of the McDaniel hiring. It seems to me the American public are smart enough to untangle her biases and place her statements in context. Also, it doesn’t take a lot of courage to go after a target that has been as clearly teed up as McDaniel was.

More to the point, I really wish those same reporters would have had the kind of courage required to debunk one of their own, who showed his own lack of integrity. I’m referring to Bob Woodward, and his recorded interviews with then President Trump during the initial stages of the Covid pandemic back in 2020.

You may recall, that as part of his efforts to write a book about the Trump presidency, Woodward had several one-on-one interviews with Trump which he recorded. And in at least one of those sessions the subject of Covid came up. And the resultant recordings showed that Trump had told Woodward what a dangerous disease he thought Covid was, and that it was not “just some flu.”

What is so remarkable about these statements and the fact that Woodward had them on tape, was that in the weeks and months that followed, Trump made repeated claims about the lack of severity of the virus and resultant danger of the coming pandemic – all in an effort to keep it from damaging his presidency in an election year.

Those statements and their attendant policies are believed to have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans, most of which came in the early months of the pandemic at a time when there was neither vaccine nor treatment. Yet throughout that disastrous period, Woodward remained silent. Not a word came from him about what he knew of Trump’s real views of Covid, and his actual concerns.

And as someone who has long admired Bob Woodward as one of the reporters who courageously broke the Watergate story, I was deeply disappointed to learn of his silence. That was especially true given that it was done purely out of a desire to keep what he knew from the public until the release of his book months later, when it was too late to have much of an effect on the pandemic.

As intended, that news created a lot of publicity for the book. But that publicity coup might not have been so successful had the same journalists who are now jumping all over McDaniel and NBC had spoken out more forcefully at the time, about Woodward’s lack of integrity – not to mention morality. After all, the man had placed his own profit and popularity above his duty to public safety and the country writ large.

If journalists had been as concerned with that lack of integrity as they now are with McDaniel and NBC, he might not have reaped the rewards that such a lack of moral judgment then brought him in interview requests and resultant book sales. And that might have done much to prevent other journalists from doing the same in the future. It might have even made NBC think twice about hiring McDaniel.

This NBC “disaster” is nowhere near the level of importance of what Woodward’s actions did in the pandemic. And it seems to me the American public is perfectly capable of parsing the views of someone like McDaniel and putting them in context. The real danger comes from those who are not so public about their real standing and intentions.

So is it better to have McDaniel appear as an unedited, untouchable star on FOX News, where she can be a tool to rile up Trump’s base, or to have her on NBC, where she would have been regularly and loudly confronted about her past dealings and current thoughts?