The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

News Media: Our Moral Superiors

Posted on | March 20, 2019 | Comments Off on News Media: Our Moral Superiors

 

David Sirota is a “journalist” in the same sense that George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are “journalists,” i.e., Democrat political operatives employed by the liberal media. Like all members of the media elite, journalists think of themselves as Our Moral Superiors. They’re better than us, and expect us to be grateful for their tutelage, as they condescend to share their enlightenment with us.

In his role as a columnist for The Guardian, Sirota played the grassroots populist, taking aim at “corporate-friendly Democrats” who “protect the status quo and serve corporate donors,” naming two potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidates — Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — among these villains. In December, Sirota twice wrote Guardian columns attacking Beto O’Rourke, first for having “frequently voted for Republican legislation” in Congress and then for being the favored candidate of “Washington elites.”

Remember, David Sirota is morally superior to you and me. He cares about the Little People. He’s got journalistic ethics:

Shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters, urging them to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents — talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.”
What he didn’t include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online.
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Sirota’s hiring as a senior adviser and speechwriter was announced by the Sanders campaign on Tuesday morning after The Atlantic contacted the campaign and inquired about the undisclosed role Sirota held while attacking other Democrats.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that Sirota had been in an advisory role prior to his hiring on March 11. “He was advising beforehand,” Shakir said, explaining that Sirota’s informal work for Sanders goes back months.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) In other words, Sirota has “informally” been a member of the Sanders campaign team since last fall and, while this doesn’t necessarily mean that Sanders was paying Sirota’s bills, it does mean that Sirota’s attacks on O’Rourke and other 2020 Democrat hopefuls were disingenuous and unethical, as his conflict of interest was undisclosed. Notice also that as soon as The Atlantic started asking questions, Sirota was “announced” as a campaign staffer. What this tells you is that Sirota’s services were considered sufficiently valuable to the Sanders campaign that they couldn’t afford to dump him, so they were forced to be honest about his role as a hired attack dog.

They are Our Moral Superiors.



 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election

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