Maybe now they’ll listen.
For roughly the past twenty-five years, I’ve been warning conservatives to not get careless when practicing journalism. Yes, it was fine to discover charismatic stars like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, but if the right wanted to build a competitor to the corrupt mainstream media there had to be ethical guardrails. If we were sloppy our work would not be considered credible. We might even wind up looking like fools.
I was ignored, so now comes the hangover. The controversy about Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes and about Candace Owens pushing conspiracy theories is essentially a problem of journalistic ethics. The right, like the left, too often has none.
With Tucker, many people seem to get this. A lot of posts online pointed out that the problem wasn’t that the problem is not that Carlson interviewed Fuentes — we conservatives believe in free speech — but that Tucker did not perform as a competent journalist. He didn’t question Fuentes on the ghastly, ignorant, and racist things that Fuentes has said over the years. It was a tongue bath.
When I was coming up as a journalist in the 1980s, there was something informally referred to as “the feeder system.” Places like NBC News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times would pull their talent from smaller outlets – urban free weeklies that produced good writers, smaller newspapers, and TV affiliates in small towns. Now, the system was rigged towards liberals, and conservatives didn’t get hired, but it did establish a baseline of competence. When a liar like Stephen Glass appeared and was found out, it became a huge scandal.
Now, of course, all bets are off. The leftist media lies frequently and often, and when another Stephen Glass is exposed, it gets ignored. This has left the job of producing journalism with honor and ethics to the right. In many ways we have failed.
Earlier this year, I confronted a New York Times reporter who had written articles about me that were untrue. In 2018, he was covering the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, and as Hot Air readers know, I was high-school friends with Kavanaugh and got drawn into the controversy. Times reporter David Enrich replied to a question I asked him about his abysmal coverage this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.” Then he added, “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”
This was a much more honest mea culpa than I’ve ever gotten from the right, whose “coverage” of my role in the Kavanaugh circus has sometimes approached Glassian levels of badness. Also, I never would have gotten the apology from Enrich had I taken the advice of many conservative commentators telling me to drop the Kavanaugh stuff already. They did seem to grasp the basic idea of long-term investigative journalism. It’s like they don’t want me to fully expose what was done to me and Brett. They want the quick dopamine hit of “owning the libs” on social media. Real journalism requires much more.
In October 2024, Ben Shapiro posted a new video about Kamala Harris’s Senate career. Shapiro’s lecture includes several errors. In it, Shapiro attempts to take down Harris by describing her role in the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh. Shapiro describes how a woman named “Christina” Blasey Ford came forward in 2018 to accuse SCOTUS nominee Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party in 1982. Shapiro then says that Blasey Ford “couldn’t name anyone else at the party.” He says Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh’s “drunk friends tried to rape her.” Then Shapiro claims that Ford “wanted to remain anonymous.”
Every one of these statements is an error. The irony is that the truth reveals a much more sinister side of Kamala Harris than Shapiro’s account. The plot against Kavanaugh was exactly what Kavanaugh said it was: “a calculated and orchestrated political hit.” The FBI also discovered this truth, which is why their background check ended so quickly. Kavanaugh set up. Kamala Harris was a main culprit.
First, Ford’s first name is Christine, not Christina, as anyone familiar with the story knows.
Second, despite what Shapiro says, Ford did name people she claims were at the party. She did not claim that a bunch of “drunk friends” tried to rape her—she claimed Brett tried to take her clothes off while another boy was in the room. That other boy, Blasey Ford said, was me. By saying “a bunch of drunk friends tried to rape her,” Shapiro is conflating Ford’s story with the madness of another woman who, at the same time, claimed that I and Kavanaugh were involved in drugging girls and gang rape.
Third: Shapiro also says that Blasey Ford was reluctant to come forward and “wanted to stay private.” Ford was never a reluctant witness. In his book We’ve Got People, Ryan Grim—the guy who broke and helped spread the news about Ford in the first place and no conservative—notes that Blasey Ford took repeated steps to come forward. She’d already told friends she planned to come out publicly. She was only asking for confidentiality until she could arrange to speak with Senator Dianne Feinstein. Grim writes, accurately:
[Ford’s] letter included a request: “As a constituent, I expect that you will maintain this confidential until we have further opportunity to speak.” That line would end up being used repeatedly by Feinstein as she claimed that, in fact, Blasey Ford never wanted to come forward, and was only forced out by the media. But that argument ignored that Blasey Ford had already taken repeated steps to come forward, had already told friends she planned to do so, had already come forward to two congressional offices and reached out to the press, and was only asking for confidentiality until she and Feinstein spoke.
The Kavanaugh nightmare was an oppo research political hit that had been set up weeks earlier. Ben Shapiro might think he is wrecking Ford’s argument by saying she “couldn’t name any of the people at the party.” However, it is a far worse thing to name people you are using and threatening to promote a fake story. That’s a plot. That’s extortion. And that’s witness tampering. Harris was involved in all of this with Ford, and Ben Shapiro ought to have said so. Leftist journalism is wretched, we all know that. Conservative journalism needs to do better. Shapiro should have consulted me for his story. Indeed, he had every opportunity to do so.
It’s painful to say because I loathe the mainstream media so much, but journalistic malpractice is also killing conservative journalism. Despite my being near the center of the Kavanaugh blast, several conservative outlets did not review my book about the experience or show any interest in an interview. Even conservative journalists who were writing books about Kavanaugh did not bother to contact me. One of the few conservative outlets that did review my book The Devil’s Triangle managed to, as one of my childhood friends put it, “get you and us exactly, 100% wrong.” How can we scold the liberal media when our side is doing such a poor job?
In the last thirty years, it has been rewarding watching the rise of conservative media and how it challenges the narratives of fake news. Yet to truly replace them, we need to do better. Otherwise, the Tucker debacle is just the beginning.
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