Among the more bizarre contortions in which the progressive establishment has engaged to promote the campaign and eventual presidency of Hillary Clinton nothing beats the newly discovered ethical quandary about using the “stolen” information presented by the WikiLeaks email dumps.
As the evidence mounts of the multimillion dollar pay-to-play schemes concocted by Clinton to use her family foundation to monetize her tenure as Secretary of State and the completely unethical and illegal relationship between the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and supposedly independent Political Action Committees, so-called journalists have suddenly started to balk at reporting the information revealed in the leaks and in James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas undercover videos.
Exemplary of this newly discovered “problem” is this from NPR Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen:
Essentially, then, the debate boils down to whether transparency — the disclosure by NPR that it cannot confirm the authenticity of the emails, and that some have raised questions about whether the emails have been faked — is enough to tip the balance in favor of reporting about them, instead of taking a far more cautious approach or even deciding not to report on them altogether.
Jensen goes on to quote a listener, David Diggs, of Victorville, Calif., who wrote:
Should WikiLeaks pilfering be legitimize[d] (offered a venue) by NPR? I have real problems with the casualness of reporting information that was the result of theft… If a story, regardless of how it was obtained, was of genuine public interest ... that most likely would pass muster (e.g., people have the right to know if their elected officials are crooks)," but he wrote that he did not feel the stories that were published rose to that level.
In the 1970s “journalists” had no such angst about reporting the stolen Pentagon Papers – a top secret study of the military and political implications of American involvement in Vietnam that was stolen by Daniel Ellsberg and leaked to the New York Times and other media outlets.
Among the many revelations in the stolen documents was proof that President Lyndon B. Johnson and many of his top advisors, such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress."
Likewise, the “journalists” had no angst about reporting on the intelligence material leaked by Edward Snowden and Private Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks – some of it beyond top secret – that caused the death of at least one US intelligence source in Iran.
But now there’s a big journalistic quandary about publishing “stolen” material and whether evidence of a quid pro quo theft of public service is “in the public interest?”
Apparently so, because there appears to be a question in the minds of NPR’s editors as to whether Hillary Clinton’s pay-to-play with foreign governments and the corruption of American “journalists” revealed by WikiLeaks is “in the public interest.”
NPR’s Jensen, however, tries to make the specious differentiation between “leaked” and “stolen” to justify publishing Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return claiming that the information is “in the public interest.”
This newly revealed angst about “pilfering” as the source of a story seems to have emerged only during the Obama years as the progressive media establishment accepted the veil of Obama – Clinton secrecy and stonewalling, and in many cases engaged in an active conspiracy of silence to reinforce it.
The reality is that, unlike the crusading journalists of old, today’s “journalists” don’t crusade for the truth and against the corruption of politicians like Hillary Clinton, they cover for them.
In the angst of NPR and the blatant bias of the rest of the national media elite, journalists of today appear to have modeled themselves on Bertram Scudder, one of the more depressing characters in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Scudder’s job was to destroy anyone, like Donald Trump, who opposed the progressive consensus that was wrecking the country.
My first paid writing job was for a small-town newspaper, and when my Mother retired as an editor of that newspaper it was the first time in almost 150-years no one in our family was in the newspaper business. During that time “journalists” would do anything to get a story – and the truth – but those days are apparently long gone and in their passing it appears the Obama – Clinton years have made the dystopian future of Atlas Shrugged look all the more likely.
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