The Press vs. the Truth, Cold War Edition

“Thomas Crooks, the shooter who almost killed Donald Trump in Pennsylvania in July, 2024, left an extensive and lurid history of online threats against politicians, we now find out only from Tucker Carlson and the New York Post.

 

Mr. Trump's own intelligence appointees in his first term tried to shield the authors of a doctored assessment that falsely painted him as a Kremlin catspaw, we learn not from the New York Times but from RealClear's Paul Sperry.

 

The improprieties and gaucheries of Mr. Trump's attempts to prosecute his political enemies? A big story.

 

Those of the Biden administration? Not a story.

 

OK, we get it. News stories that are disadvantageous to Mr. Trump are emphasized and followed up in the mainstream press, those that aren't are buried. But if, like me, you think today's media is somehow unprecedentedly conformist, consider 2022's "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington" by Kathryn J. McGarr.

 

It's a "misconception," she writes, "that the press used to be trustworthy, and today it is not." Witness the private letters and memos of big time, Cold War-era reporters like the Times's Scotty Reston, CBS's Eric Sevareid and Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post. The record shows they routinely believed one thing and told readers something else.

 

These press lions of a bygone liberal age were actually a blob connected at the hip to each other and to their frequently lying, spinning government contacts. Yet they were anything but shills and dupes. They frequently decided among themselves which truths to report and which to bury in support of U.S. global leadership in the "battle of ideas."

 

Though not without pushback from editors at home, who were more sympathetic to the quasi-isolationist, less interventionist views of their readership. "Washington is not America," complained Chicago Daily News editor Basil "Stuffy" Walters to correspondent Wallace Deuel in 1947. "I don't like trying to spoon feed people with only the news that we think is good for them."

 

Stuffy's remonstrances had little effect, apparently. Deuel would eventually leave journalism to join the CIA.

 

Ms. McGarr, who teaches at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is often acerbic about her subjects but notes that they were "awash in patriotic fervor at the same time that they were distrustful and cynical." A wonder is the episode she leaves out. The Times's Reston led the national media in changing the subject from Lee Harvey Oswald's communist connections to "right-wing hate" in Dallas.

 

Her book pulls me up short in one way. Should we apply a similar frame to the actions of Obama administration figures like James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan and their press allies in championing lies about Mr. Trump?

 

We at least don't have to guess about the efficacy of their manipulations. Mr. Trump is president. But has he been the disaster for U.S. global leadership our news manipulators feared?

 

It's a hard case to make. The Ukraine conflict, today's most dangerous flashpoint, has it antecedents in events under Presidents Obama and Biden, not Mr. Trump. Most now agree Mr. Obama's "red line" fiasco in Syria incited our enemies.

 

Mr. Trump struggles after the 2024 election to deliver, but he was the one who put ending the war squarely on his presidential agenda. He ran at first, let's remember, against a nameless cabal fronting for an increasingly senile figurehead. Was this really a better option for the U.S. and the world?

 

Ms. McGarr's crack-up only came in the late Eisenhower and early JFK era, thanks to lies about a West German spy chief's defection, thanks to lies about the Bay of Pigs. Her press giants of yore end up sounding like today's conservatives, warning each other and their readers about an unaccountable "administrative" state.

 

Indeed, her book is replete with their habit of self-examination, an unflattering comparison with today's legacy press. Then most newspapers were local monopolies; their Washington reporters really could believe they were molding the views of editors and readers back home, and feel a duty to do so toward some higher end.

 

Today, dissenting and nonconformist outlets have the same planetary reach that conforming ones do, which rendered it impossible to conceal the truth about the Steele dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop. It was foolish to try. The legacy press only discredited itself. You won't find in Ms. McGarr's book anything like the 2019 incident in which a Times editor wrung his hands at a staff meeting over his paper's failure to deliver the collusion story its readers demanded.

 

In the Cold War, the press at least could tell itself it was shaping public consciousness, rather than being shaped by it in a miserable bid for clicks by telling audiences what they wanted to hear.” [1]

 

1. The Press vs. the Truth, Cold War Edition. Jenkins, Holman W; Jr.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Nov 2025: A13.