Dear Editor,
Only state exactly what happened, without embellishment or exaggeration. That phrase - “Just the facts, Ma’am” - has been attributed to the character Sergeant Joe Friday from the 1950s TV show “Dragnet.” That notion, if applied to journalism, is somewhat comparable to the expression “All the news that’s fit to print,” which first appeared on the upper left corner of the New York Times’ masthead in February 1897. It was meant to denote the newspaper’s reportorial objectives of fairness, restraint and impartiality.
For me, these concepts are of utmost importance when trying to glean the truth embedded in news reports of world events that shape our lives.
By definition, journalism is the collecting, preparation, and distribution of news and information through printed and electronic communication that deals with current affairs, yet so much of what is being presented as news today takes the form of politicized disinformation.
After four years of reviewing the actions of the FBI in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Special Counsel John Durham released a final report on May 15.
Durham indicated the FBI should not have launched a full counterintelligence investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the election. Durham concluded that by acting on uncorroborated information, the Justice Department and FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.
These report findings have further fueled partisan tensions over the reliability of the FBI and Justice Dept.
The suggestion of the FBI has taken actions based on political motivation reappears in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
In February 2020, The New York Post published a story alleging that emails from Hunter’s laptop, abandoned at a Delaware computer shop in 2019, suggested corruption by then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Even as the FBI obtained the hard drive data, Facebook and Twitter restricted public access to this story prior to the election. Since then, Democrats and media allies have represented the laptop contents as Russian disinformation, yet today’s House Oversight Committee can find no evidence of such activity.
These are just two examples that indicate trust in our institutions is down.
Americans deserve the FBI, our principal federal law enforcement agency, to operate with rigor, objectivity, and professionalism. Our media needs to be held accountable for not chasing stories and for not asking more questions.
Fifty years ago, The Washington Post was best known for investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and executive editor Ben Bradlee’s honest, provoking, and thorough reporting of the Watergate scandal. Five years ago, that newspaper was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on fabricated and uncorroborated intelligence.
Like me, some of you may share fond memories of “the most trusted man in America”, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, and remember his nightly broadcast sign-off phrase, “And that’s the way it is.” These days, I find myself wishing for more of the way it was.
Peter Wibell, Rutledge