Putrescence

When a story really, really stinks

This piece first appeared in the Idaho State Journal on October 30, 2020. I’m reprinting it here, 18 months later, because it’s now, perhaps, more relevant than ever.

Let me toss a name at you: Miles Taylor. I’ll daresay that the vast majority of you have never heard of Mr. Taylor. Those of you who have probably just learned about him in the past few days.

Mr. Taylor turns out to be the author of the “Anonymous” op-ed that ran in the New York Times a couple of years ago. In this extraordinary op-ed, “Anonymous,” who was widely touted as a “senior Trump administration official,” laid out a case that resistance to President Donald Trump was widespread within his own administration, and that many senior-level officials (as he explicitly stated — such as himself) were doing their best to thwart the plans of a president they considered dangerous — to the point of considering the powers of the 25th Amendment.

This op-ed was followed by a book, “A Warning — Anonymous” that became a best-seller late last year. I happen to own a copy.

As it turns out, Mr. Taylor was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a senior-level official. He was a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security at the time that he wrote the Times op-ed. Implicit in his claim of invoking the 25th Amendment is the power to actually do so. I can find no language anywhere in the 25th Amendment, Section 4 or anywhere else, that bestows this authority on a deputy chief of staff.

Right on the front cover of Mr. Taylor’s book, clearly visible in red ink below the title, is the claim that the author is a senior-level Trump administration official. This is relevant because Mr. Taylor’s book is a series of opinions, not a series of indisputable facts, so sourcing is vitally important in placing his various claims in the proper context.

Perhaps the bulk of what Mr. Taylor had to say was completely true, perhaps not. But the claim that Anonymous was a “senior-level official” was obviously made by Mr. Taylor and the Times specifically to burnish his claims with an unmerited patina of respectability.

My guess is that if Mr. Taylor had not been given anonymity, dubiously in the eyes of many, his op-ed would have been a one news-cycle story and his book would have gone nowhere. But the “senior-level” claim was enough to sell a lot of newspapers and a lot of books.

Even as I read the book, I suspected that it was not actually written by a cabinet level official. “A Warning — Anonymous” reads like a screed penned by a disillusioned staffer who’s trying to justify his spot in a lifeboat on the Titanic. I had the feeling of being duped.

It gets better. This putrescent mess has actually managed to ripen. Mr. Taylor left the government after the Times op-ed and subsequently accepted a position as a political analyst with CNN. When recently asked there, on air and point blank, if he was Anonymous, he denied it.

It’s one thing to find someone in the media sympathetic enough to a cause to grant an extraordinary platform under the guise of anonymity. That’s not even really that difficult to arrange anymore since media standards and ratings are moving rapidly in opposite directions.

But no one bent Mr. Taylor’s arm up behind his back to become a CNN pundit. And if he was going to out himself anyway, he should have done so when asked. It’s a pretty damning indictment of his trustworthiness — at least as far as I’m concerned.

The abandonment of long-held professional standards by segments of the media is the lasting damage of the Trump administration. In their zeal to either praise or condemn President Trump, depending on who they are pimping for ratings, the media have openly declared that the ends justify the means.

I suspect that Trump will no longer be president in a few days. We’ll be stuck, however, for a whole lot longer with a fourth estate that has largely abandoned any pretense of objectivity because pandering has become so much more lucrative.

This story is but a part of a long line of ethically dubious pieces in the MSM that have persisted not on the basis of merit, but because they are ratings gold. As bad as President Trump is, and that’s pretty bad, the media, at least in my opinion, has become worse. Trump condemns himself without any help almost every time he talks or tweets. All the media has done by pushing ethical boundaries into new and unknown territory — mostly to go after Trump — is to create sympathy for him and distrust in themselves from anyone who’s not eating the candy.

Worse, there’s a trickle-down effect here that’s not overly difficult to discern. Blatant lying is now a part of any “ends justifies the means” strategy — at all levels of politics.

To the benefit of almost no one.

Associated Press and Idaho Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His writing on Substack, “Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I” may be found at martinhackworth.substack.com