Harper’s magazine, the left-wing monthly, has a cover story asking, Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media? The November “forum” features three journalists attempting to answer this question: Jack Shafer, Jelani Cobb, and Taylor Lorenz.
You read that correctly. To ask why Americans don’t trust the media, Harper’s interviewed three of the most untrustworthy, hackish, godawful journalists in America.
First, of course, is Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz is a bad person. Her trail of sleazy journalism is Long and detailed. As Christine Rosen pointed out in 2021, “Lorenz gained some notoriety last year when it emerged that she was almost single-handedly responsible for making the anti-Trump TikTok videos created by 15-year-old Claudia Conway (whose mother, Kellyanne Conway, was at the time a Trump White House aide) go viral by retweeting them to her 200,000-plus followers. ‘Claudia Conway is not holding back,’ Lorenz wrote, in one encouraging tweet.”
In 2024, Lorenz left the Washington Post after a “riff” with the editors. Lorenz had labeled President Biden a “war criminal” in a picture from a White House event in which Biden was visible in the background. “Three people at the Post with knowledge of events tell NPR that Lorenz lost the trust of the newsroom’s leadership both by posting that selfie with the caption about Biden and then by willfully misleading editors in claiming that she had not done so,” reported David Folkenflick of NPR.
Lorenz issued corrections for factual inaccuracies in her articles, such as a misattributed quote in a 2022 piece about YouTube content creators covering the Depp-Heard trial. She retracted a public claim of harassment against a Drudge Report editor. In August 2025, while working as a “Reporter in Residence” for the Omidyar Network, Lorenz promoted the “Bark Phone” on social media. The phone was being sold as a safe smartphone for children as young as 6.
I wonder why people don’t trust her?
Another pontificator in Harper’s forum is Jack Shafer, formerly of Politico and Slate. Shafer will be remembered in history for the “monkeyfishing” hoax. In 2001, a man named Jay Forman wrote a piece for the liberal website Slate called “Monkeyfishing.” It described a trip Forman said he took to Florida’s Lois Key with a “monkeyfisherman.” The monkeyfisherman, wrote Foreman, casts a fruit-baited fish line onto the island where research monkeys were kept. A monkey perched takes the bait and is then pulled into the water.
“Monkeyfishing” was almost instantly revealed to be total nonsense. It took Slate several years, and an investigation by some journalism students at Columbia University, for them to admit as much. The editor of “Monkeyfishing,” Jack Shafer, went on to become the media critic for Politico. These people always, always fail upwards. Again: it literally took years for Shafer to admit “monkeyfishing” was bogus.
Then there is the third sage interviewed in Harper’s. Jelani Cobb is the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He’s also an unethical journalist. I took Cobb apart recently in Chronicles magazine:
In his new book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025, Jelani Cobb, the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has high praise for David Carr. Cobb met Carr in 1996, when Carr was the editor of the Washington City Paper. Carr, who went on to become a well-known writer at the New York Times, was a deep influence on Cobb.
Carr was also a monster who by his own admission did crack and beat and tortured women. In his appreciation for Carr, Cobb ignores these awful facts. Furthermore, Cobb, a New Yorker writer, is the same man who expressed moral outrage because Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh defended themselves. Cobb compared these two men to Jeffrey Epstein.
In short, Jelani Cobb celebrates men who maul and torture women while condemning innocent men who defend themselves. He’s kind of a perfect exemplar of modern American journalism. For $124,000 a year you can sit at his feet and absorb his wisdom
Who was the editor of the Washington City Paper before David Carr? Jack Shafer, Mr. Monkeyfishing himself. I have often used the analogy of addiction to describe mainstream media journalists. In the 1970s, they got their first hit of crack with Watergate, and ever since then, they have been on the hunt to replicate the high. They will destroy any person, place, or thing to attain it. Eventually, like all addicts, they are left isolated, alone, in a boarded-up shack on edge of town. They have no influence anymore, and no one cares about them. Asking them about ethics, as Harper’s has done, is like asking Hunter Biden about monogamy.
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