The Other McCain

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

Journalism, Credibility and ‘Experts’

Posted on | December 23, 2025 | No Comments

Brittany Bernstein at National Review notes:

NPR’s standards chief, Tony Calvin, had to issue an unusual bit of guidance to staff this week: stop quoting Carl Tobias. The instruction came after Calvin found NPR reporters had quoted the University of Richmond law professor 77 times on a variety of topics. “If Tobias’s name sounds familiar, it’s because Professor Tobias’s hobby seems to be getting himself quoted about anything and everything in news stories,” Calvin told staff, according to Semafor. “Professor Tobias often emails reporters offering his expert opinion on stories of the day and while I don’t presume to judge his expertise in legal matters, the professor is certainly an expert at getting himself quoted.”

The full text of the National Public Radio staff email reveals that, in addition to his frequent citation by NPR, the professor’s “expert” quotes have also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Fresno Bee. Not since “Kilroy Was Here” has anyone been so ubiquitous as Professor Tobias.

At risk of going off on a tangent, permit me to note a relevant fact: University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds has opinions on all kinds of subjects, but you never see him quoted as an “expert” by NPR, the New York Times, Associated Press, etc. Why do you think that is?

Professor Reynolds is not a partisan Democrat, that’s why. These journalists quoting Professor Tobias are partisan Democrats, and his dial-a-quote service flourished because so-called “mainstream” journalism has become nothing but Democratic Party propaganda.

For many years, conservatives criticized “liberal bias” in the news media, but the bias is not ideological so much as it is partisan. Most journalists seem to wake up in the morning, pour themselves a cup of coffee, and then go looking for ways to help the Democratic Party or, conversely, to hurt Republicans. Every aspect of major media coverage is shaped by this crude partisan calculus, and none of the allegedly objective journalists acting as “Democratic operatives with bylines” seem to have the slightest shame about their completely one-sided coverage.

Most journalists never get to the existential questions about their profession: What are we doing and why are we doing it? My admiration for Hunter S. Thompson was that he pondered those questions very deeply, although his thoughtfulness was concealed by dark humor. It would behoove all media critics to carefully read Hell’s Angels, the book that was Thompson’s first big breakthrough. He had paid his dues as a roving correspondent in Latin America in 1962-63, and was living in San Francisco in 1964 when the Hell’s Angels were accused of gang raping two girl, ages 14 and 15, at a Labor Day beach bonfire in Monterrey. The charges were dismissed, but that incident sparked nationwide media attention from outlets including Life magazine, depicting these outlaw bikers as a nationwide menace who might suddenly appear anywhere in the country and rape every girl in town — the Visigoth horde reincarnated in 20th-century America. Thompson set out to get the real truth.

Hunter S. Thompson on his motorcycle in 1965

Thompson met the Hell’s Angels, drank beer with them in their Oakland clubhouse, purchased a Triumph motorcycle and rode along with them on their road trips — “embedded” with them, so to speak. This began with a freelance assignment for The Nation, “The Motorcycle Gangs,” which included this indictment of how the Labor Day incident was covered in newspapers: “The difference between the Hell’s Angels in the paper and the Hell’s Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for.” For Thompson, this was the real story — the distance between reality and the media-generated perception of events.

Thompson was keenly aware of how reporters and editors create perceptions that shape public opinion, and the whole purpose of his “Gonzo” approach was to break through the reality/perception gap by abandoning the posture of journalistic objectivity.

What conservatives despise about NPR and other “mainstream” media is their pretense of objectivity, the bogus claim that they are simply doing factual “reporting” when, it can easily demonstrated, they are engaged in one-sided partisan propaganda with a bias that affects their coverage of everything from national security to the weather. What’s interesting about the media’s reliance on the all-purpose “expert” Professor Tobias is that this went on for years before anyone noticed it. How is it that all these reporters kept quoting this one law professor at a not-very-prestigious university, citing his supposed expertise on all kinds of subjects, and none of their editors seemed to notice? Professor Tobias could be counted on to provide quotes advancing the Democratic Party line, and therefore his universal expertise was never called into question.

Too many journalists see themselves as heroic truth-tellers, crusaders for justice, when all they are is partisan hacks, part of a herd of bleating sheep, indistinguishable from each other in their blind loyalty to the Democratic Party. They have lost their credibility, and this loss is permanent, because they refuse to admit their own errors.



 

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Category: Media Bias

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