Tag / Journalism

by Edward Champion

The Alt-Journalist Sociopath

A new species of “journalist” has emerged in recent months, one that is incredibly baleful to news and public discourse.

Now that the “fake news” braying from the frayed Trump cabal has faded into the obscurity of a horrifying age feeling improbably older than its actual position on the Gregorian calendar, the time has come to reckon with the alt-journalist sociopath, who may represent one of the greatest threats to empathy and thoughtful reflection in 2021. I speak, of course, of the Tim Pools, the Glenn Greenwalds, the Andy Ngôs, and, most recently, the Michael Traceys of the universe. These scenery-chewing and humorless offshoots of the so-called “intellectual dark web” live for ruining people even as they pretend to espouse some greater “truth-telling” ideal. They have picked up the slack left by Trump’s ban from all social media, catering to the ravenous hordes who wish to believe that the earth is flat and that the illusory Democratic conspiracy against them is very real.

If you are fortunate enough to have never encountered the alt-journalist sociopath, then let me fill you in on his common qualities. For the alt-journalist sociopath is almost invariably a “he” and really makes you aware of this fact by callously disregarding how other people use pronouns. (Ngô has gone to the trouble of deadnaming one of his victims. The YouTube commentator Vaush has limned Pool’s transphobic positions in an epic 85 minute video. Greenwald stumps for transphobic authors. Tulsi Gabbard tag-teamed with Tracey to ridicule the nonbinary.)

The alt-journalist sociopath is usually a white male, ousted from traditional platforms because of seasoned incompetence, outright hubris, or routine dereliction of basic journalistic practice. Facts, or even a cogent argument, do not matter to the alt-journalist sociopath. What does matter is the “truth,” which is often nebulous and subject to constant revision, but almost always tendered as something outside the purview of mainstream media and thus somehow nobler. This gives the alt-journalist sociopath a certain cachet shared by trendy serial killers or domestic terrorists who appeal to the fawning interest of incel shut-ins. This alt-right leaning crowd tends to represent the vast majority of the alt-journalist sociopath’s audience.

By so placing himself as an outlier upholder of dodgy “principles,” the alt-journalist sociopath anoints himself as a kind of deity, usually amassing several hundred thousand followers on his Twitter account. Yes, social media is the wild kingdom for this bilious animal. And because there are no zookeepers to administer to the alt-journalist sociopath’s unhinged rage and false sense of entitlement, the uncaged alt-journalist sociopath paws at his outsize megaphone rather than rattling the bars of his holding cell. These environmental conditions allow the alt-journalist sociopath to stir his legions of febrile acolytes into vengeful id-driven troglodytes.

Despite having the wide reach of a cult leader, the alt-journalist sociopath’s raison is to portray himself as a frail outlier even as he possesses no compassion or remorse for anyone beyond himself. In 2017, Michael Tracey ludicrously attempted to frame a modest brush from then 79-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters as a “shove” in a pathetic attempt to depict himself as victim.

Two years later, Andy Ngô went further than Tracey and secured fame and admiration from mainstream outlets after experiencing alleged violence during the Portland Black Lives Matter protests. The greatest problem with Ngô, aside from the relentless fabrication of his reporting (of which more anon), is that the details didn’t quite add up. Ngô claimed that he had been diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage after being hit with a milkshake mixed with quick-drying cement, but the cement angle was later debunked. Ngô told BuzzFeed reporter Joseph Bernstein, “I don’t feel obliged to share my personal medical records publicly to satisfy internet trolls.” (Bernstein reports that he reviewed a copy of hospital discharge paperwork confirming that he had suffered from a “subarachnoid hemorrhage.”) While no journalist, even dubious ones like Ngô, should experience any form of violence, it’s rather remarkable how Ngô mustered such sympathy for being “attacked” by antifa protesters. He secured a $195,000 GoFundMe nest egg from his ultraconservative enablers.

Being a victim is the alt-journalist sociopath’s bread and butter. It’s the winning lottery ticket that secures him some questionable legitimacy in the media food chain. Yet the alt-journalist sociopath is so self-absorbed that he will never consider the misfortunes, much less the victimhood, of anyone beyond himself. If anything, he goes out of his way to denigrate or disparage anyone whom he perceives as a threat. After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bravely revealed that she was a victim of sexual assault on Instagram Live, Tracey claimed this to be “a masterclass in emotional manipulation.”

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald inspired a campaign that resulted in New York Times contributor Lauren Wolfe being fired from her job. Why? Because she had the audacity to express that she had “chills” after seeing Biden’s plane land before his inauguration. Wolfe’s tweet was a relatively innocuous statement. Reporters are, after all, human just like the rest of us. But Greenwald’s 1.6 million followers took the catnip and responded with the fierce force of unhinged vigilantes, claiming Wolfe to be a demonic transgressor against journalistic objectivity. Greenwald neither took his original tweet down nor called for the Times to reverse its decision. Because the alt-journalist sociopath is usually a narcissist, Greenwald instead made it about himself, whinging that he bore no responsibility for the results of his reckless tweets and disingenuously cleaving to the great “speak truth to power” lie that all alt-journalist sociopaths champion.

The remarkably indefatigable Twitter account, @TimPoolClips, has tackled Pool and Ngô at length, exquisitely filleting these charlatans down to their oleaginous essence. These two have been highly selective and ideologically convenient about how they frame the “news” they purport to report on. As documented by Jacobin‘s Arun Gupta, in an article for the Wall Street Journal, Ngô omitted key evidence of a driver striking a protester, claiming his falsely edited clip to be the work of “angry, agitated ingrates and criminals.” As Gupta has outlined, Ngô’s journalistic liberties have resulted in other conservative outlets becoming emboldened to commit similarly egregious omissions. In a September 2, 2020 YouTube video, Vaush detailed the “Tim Pool Grift” as follows: Tim Pool has weaved a narrative in which has painted himself as “a liberal who is merely criticizing the Democrat Party” throughout his YouTube existence. But Vaush pointed out that the clickbait titles of Pool’s videos, often factually inaccurate, were more indicative of a Republican.

In any other world, these agitprop quacks would be laughed off the public stage for their risible anti-intellectualism and tendentious cartoonishness. But it is a regrettable truth that these sociopaths are largely impervious to castigation — in large part because they are regularly in the habit of doxxing and shaming their critics or anyone perceived to be “against” their mission. As The New York Times has increasingly shifted to glossy profiles of insurrectionists (the “Nazis! They’re just like us!” school of journalism) and Marjorie Taylor Greene faces no repercussions for expressing the desire to execute prominent Democrats, it’s not much of a surprise to see the alt-journalist sociopath thriving quite well. And since the nadir of what now constitutes “journalism” continues to slip lower than any other time in American history (even the notorious James Callender faced consequences!), the question we must ask is this: What will it take for the public to uproot these toxic demagogues from their perches?

2/2/2021 7:30 PM UPDATE:

Mere hours after I published this essay, Glenn Greenwald further cemented himself as an alt-journalist sociopath, aligning himself with Michael Tracy’s misogyny by belittling AOC’s story. He also offered the false and hyperbolic claim, “All she wants to do is attack Republicans and fortify the Democratic Party.” This, of course, is a Pool/Ngô style airbrushing of actual history. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted just six days ago, “I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed.”

by Edward Champion

Bob Woodward Demands an Apology

Do not question Bob Woodward! He demands that you apologize. He will send you a free book.

On any given day, Bob Woodward demands a minimum of thirty-two apologies from various people he encounters. Most of the people whom Bob Woodward demands apologies from are women who ask him legitimate questions. But he has already answered these questions. And asking Bob Woodward a question is disrespectful. Do you not recognize the Genius of Bob Woodward? At least Bob Woodward is not grabbing the legs of his enemies like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, looking down on their bodies from open windows with imperious vengeance and unhinged narcissism. Bob Woodward is too old for such shenanigans. But in his younger days, he may have done this.

This is the way that Bob Woodward rolls. He is a 77-year-old man of the old school. Show Bob Woodward some respect! Just yesterday, Bob Woodward demanded an apology from the barista who got his order wrong. He had ordered a skim milk latte, but the barista had accidentally given him a whole milk latte. Bob Woodward was not pleased. You don’t mess up Bob Woodward’s order. He’s a Journalistic Treasure! Don’t you remember Watergate and Bob Woodward’s invaluable journalistic contributions? Bob Woodward is a hero! Don’t you recognize this? Goddammit, he deserves the correct latte he ordered.

So when the barista politely asks Bob Woodward if he can accept a correctly constructed skim milk latte as recompense for the screwup, Bob Woodward says no. Because the barista should have made the latte right the first time. “Contact my people,” says Bob Woodward, “They’ll send you a free book.”

Bob Woodward sends a free book to anyone he demands an apology from. It seems only fair. He is sitting on a very large pile of his books. On days when Bob Woodward is depressed, he will walk into his study and stare at the vertiginous towers of his volumes stacked neatly in his den and smile and say, “Why yes! This is why I am Bob Woodward!”

It was Saturday morning. The paper boy, who is working two other jobs, hurled a copy of The Washington Post onto Bob Woodward’s porch. But the paper did not land on the pressure-treated redwood slats at the right angle. The paper did not land right next to the tall lantana plant that had spent the summer soaking up the sun. Bob Woodward was very upset by this. We might all be upset with such calumnies, even when there are very small stakes involved. It’s a difficult time to be alive. So Bob Woodward called around to people he knew at the paper and demanded an apology. “Mr. Woodward,” said the kid on the phone. “With all due respect, this is an easily cleared up misunderstanding.” “No,” said Bob Woodward. “This is a matter of pride. I’m Bob Woodward! Don’t you understand this?” And so Bob Woodward reamed into the kid on the phone and made sure that both the paper boy and the kid on the phone were fired. Never mind that these were rough economic times. But that was the regrettable price of crossing Bob Woodward. You don’t question Bob Woodward. Bob Woodward is always right. Bob Woodward has created a life that demands supplication and genuflection and obedience. Bob Woodward doesn’t understand why these kids never got the “Respect your elders!” memo.

Bob Woodward wasn’t feeling very well when Shira Stein and Karen Ho pressed him on a thorny ethical issue — namely, why he held onto the Trump tapes for so long, tapes in which Trump revealed that he knew the true threat of the coronavirus as early as February. If the tapes had been released sooner, was it possible that more American lives would be saved? Would it also be possible that lives in other countries might have been saved if Bob Woodward had not stayed quiet? Bob Woodward insisted to the two uppity women (were they really journalists or did they play journalists on TV?) that he needed to figure out whether Trump was referring to the United States when he said these things multiple times. He needed until at least May. Why the delay in corroboration? Well, Bob Woodward was still catching up on Schitt’s Creek. It was one of the few television series known to penetrate Bob Woodward’s serious hickory mien, a look modeled after Andrew Jackson that he regularly evinced to his wife and to his professional peers and that caused all people in Bob Woodward’s immediate circle to revere him and to fawn over him without criticism. Besides, like anyone, Bob Woodward needed to unwind sometimes. As Bob Woodward caught up on Schitt’s Creek between February and May, you could sometimes see Bob Woodward cracking a smile if you caught him on a good day.

And so Bob Woodward did what he always did. He demanded that Stein and Ho serve up apologies — ideally with a suggestive dance over Zoom. He didn’t really answer their questions.

But this time, much to Bob Woodward’s surprise, the two journalists did not back down. Much to Bob Woodward’s surprise, those who followed the dispute on social media took the side of the two younger journalists.

When Bob Woodward learned that his privilege didn’t inure him to criticism and that people thought he was being a dick, he began calling around for people who would offer apologies to him for invented offenses. For all perceived transgressors, he offered them a free copy of his book. Because a free copy of Rage was apparently the price you paid for abandoning your ethical core and backing down from justifiable criticism of Bob Woodward’s shaky journalistic methods.

It’s possible that Bob Woodward is a confidence man, much in the way that Janet Malcolm had famously described. After the Zoom meeting, Bob Woodward waited all day for the apologies to roll in. The apologies never arrived. Bob Woodward had reached an end point. He was too old to learn. He was too old to change. He was too caught up in the hot fire of his hubris to play it cool.

Bob Woodward had only one option left. He is now demanding an apology from himself. But he can’t seem to summon it. And he still doesn’t know why.

by Edward Champion

Bob Woodward’s Rage: Not a Barnbuster, But Still Vital

Bob Woodward’s latest volume on Trump isn’t quite the Trump TKO we were all hoping for. But it is a thoughtful and vital volume that nimbly exposes the baleful Trump strain that has altered American politics — perhaps permanently.

RAGE
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 480 pages

It goes without saying that, contrary to Trump’s maddeningly megalomaniacal claim that his signature is now worth $10,000 on eBay, most of the universe would sleep easier if this walking disaster would swiftly disappear. And because this state of affairs is the norm, backed up by polls showing that the current President can barely squeak past 40% in the polls against Biden, it does make reading the latest Trump tell-all an act of masochism.

Most of us know that Trump has mangled the pandemic and permanently uprooted millions of Americans now facing grief, eviction, and unemployment. Most of us intuitively understand that nearly 200,000 Americans are dead because of Trump’s arrogance, cruelty, and ineptitude. Why then would one want to read another book exposing this pernicious sociopath?

Well, when it’s Bob Woodward, you do. Rage, Woodward’s followup to Fury, is different from his previous Trump volume because, this time around, he actually talked with Agent Orange, landing eighteen interviews with the monster between December 2019 and July 21, 2020 — the last on the very day his manuscript was due. It is different because we’ve been in the prepublication position of listening to the tapes. Trump clearly knew how deadly the virus was and he lied to the American public about it. Just as he lied about calling McCain and military veterans “losers” and “suckers” — as recently as last night in a town hall appearance on ABC. This disparity between the private and the public represents the very reason why we need journalists to dig up the details.

The book arrived last night. I stayed up until 5 AM reading it. The volume is by no means a barnbuster and will probably not change too many minds, but it does offer an even-handed narrative that serves as a necessary reminder of just what we’ve come to accept from the executive branch and why this simply cannot be the norm of American politics.

The book’s first half is largely a summary of the political hellscape that we’ve come to accept, with some new context. We see former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former secretary of defense Jim Mattis enter into a Faustaian bargain with Trump under what now seems to be a dowdy ideal of patriotism and loyalty, no matter how bungling and dangerous the Commander-in-Chief may be. “How can you work for that man?” asks Mattis’s mother. “Ma, last time I checked, I work for the Constitution,” replied Mattis. Tillerson asks for numerous reassurances (being able to pick his own staff, asking Trump to refrain from a public dispute) before uneasily accepting the job. Tillerson, like many former Trump staffers, would be swiftly betrayed and have his conditions vitiated.

Mattis would find himself in a madhouse, contending with an easily distracted maniac who refused to countenance the facts. Here’s a stunning Mattis quote from the Woodward book:

It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it would go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him. So you had to deal with it. He’d been voted in. And our job was not to take a political or partisan position. It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?

We see Senator Lindsey Graham — a man who, only five years ago, denounced Trump as “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” on CNN — cozy up to Trump on the golf course, even willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when evidence of Russian collusion was stacked against him. “Listen,” said Graham to Trump, “if you actually did this, even though it was before you were president, you cannot serve.” Trump responded, “I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t do this.”

In other words, the new loyalty among those who worked with Trump meant accepting blanket statements at face value, never corroborating these against the facts and, above all, never fighting a pernicious leader who was committed to magical thinking when he wasn’t abdicating his duties altogether. This is one of the key takeaways from Woodward’s book, one that eluded Alexander Nazaryan at the Los Angeles Times.1

What Trump has effectively accomplished over the last four years is to create a political environment in which believing in tangible and objective facts is now partisan. Much as empathy and taking care of a suffering population has become partisan. For there is no other way to explain why so many of the people who endured Trump over the long haul altered their command of the facts.

One of the book’s more shocking revelations involves Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the CDC. Here is the man who ostensibly exists to protect the national health. When he first learned of the virus, Redfield nimbly cracked the whip and gathered his team — on New Year’s Eve, no less — and produced a three-page memo, the first of many detailed daily reports. But as we see in the book, even Redfield could be corrupted.

In late February, Redfield had information that there was “a big problem in New York.” There were cases of people from Italy who had been infected with the virus. At this point, Redfield was well aware just how fast the virus could spread. But he fell in with the Trump line, telling the commonweal, “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives. Okay?”

If Woodward doesn’t quite answer the question of how ostensible scientists like Redfield could abdicate the very scientific method in favor of Trump loyalty and propaganda, Woodward’s conversations with Trump, which constitute the book’s second half, are of considerable importance in understanding how we have permitted such a beast to get away with anything. The episodes involving Kim Jung-un reveal not only how Trump could be easily manipulated with targeted flattery (Kim always referred to Trump as “Your Excellency” in “love letters” obtained by Woodward), but of how flexible Trump could be in humanizing clear human rights abusers. When Woodward asks how he could have cozy relationships with monstrous men, Trump replies, “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

Moreover, there is a creepy womanizing approach that Trump applies to diplomacy, one that makes the victims of Trump’s abuse and harassment even more necessary to not brush under the carpet. Here is Trump describing meeting Kim:

“You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s all going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes, and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second.

Woodward also offers definitive evidence of just what a blundering credit taker Trump has been, particularly in relation to the virus. Five people – Dr. Anthony Fauci, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the aforementioned Redfield, and security advisers Robert C. O’Brien and Matthew Pottinger — urged Trump to initiate travel restrictions on China. On deep background, Woodward paints a picture of a man merely telling the room, “Are you guys okay with this?” rather than, contrary to his own myth-making, being the sole voice to demand a flight ban. (Moreover, it is Fauci himself who suggests that stranded Americans be given the opportunity to return home.)

Jared Kushner tells Woodward that one of Trump’s great skills is “figuring out how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.” This quality may also explain why guys like Redfield and Mattis eventually gave up the ghost and allowed Trump to beat them down into tacit acceptance of the counterfactual.

And maybe that’s the rage of the title that we’re meant to feel here. Righteous indignation that was once so easily summoned and used to take out the politically corrupt, but that has been deadened over the last four years — save perhaps for the valiant efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement, which may very well be our only remaining hope. Because Trump is the new normal. And we’re all so busy trying to survive a pandemic, climate change on the West Coast, and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

by Edward Champion

Zack Budryk: Is There a More Deplorable, Thieving, and Mooncalfed Pillock “Reporting” on Politics Today?

Zack Budryk is an arrogant bastard who could not be called a “journalist” by any stretch of the imagination. Yet he fits into the smug content farm template that erodes journalism as we know it.

[9/11/2020 UPDATE: It wasn’t enough for Zack Budryk to send his peers after me on Twitter to try and get my account suspended. Yesterday, I received more than two dozen death threats by email and by comments because of this piece — with IP addresses that traced back in many cases to New York. I’ve never received so many death threats in my life on anything I’ve written — and I’ve written some wild and crazy stuff over the years. It’s pretty apparent that Budryk incited members of the New York media to preserve his position. One journalist who left a comment here before on an article sent me a death threat under a false name and it tracked to the same IP address. These continued threats and efforts to defame my character have been collected and, should the death threats continue, I will report this to the police and the employers of these journalists. I’m not going to be silenced or intimidated by Budryk and his thugs.]

In Which I Encounter a Wildly Arrogant, Remarkably Stupid, Instantly Punchable, and Otiose Bastard in the Wild

On the morning of September 9, 2020, I had no idea who in the fuck Zack Budryk was. Less than three hours after my regrettable discovery of this talentless hack, I would despise the man with every fiber of my being.

It all started when I ran into an irresponsibly “reported” article (archive) at The Hill — written by the diseased dunderhead in question — claiming salmon to be a a danger to America because, in Budryk’s own words, “the novel coronavirus may linger on chilled salmon for more than a week.” Having read up on this very issue months earlier (by a strange twist of fate, this was a subject matter dear to my heart — I happen to love baking salmon — there are six pounds of fish in my freezer as I write this), I knew that Budryk was spreading false information or, to put it another way a few paragraphs before I lay down the real old school invective, his hopelessly blockaded intestinal tract was packed tighter with the larder’s dregs than the infinitely nobler stretch of the late great Maxwell Roach’s snare drum. In other words, this free-wheeling doofus couldn’t bebop even if you bopped him over the head every five minutes with a formidable chinook.

As reported in The Los Angeles Times, you could kill off SARS (a viral cousin of COVID) at 56 to 85 degrees Celsius. Which basically means that, if you bake salmon at 450 for about twenty minutes, any viral threat is removed. Because a well-done salmon is comfortably beneath any deadly threshold. (Just to be clear on this fact — because I do like to practice what I preach — I called the New York State Department of Health on Wednesday afternoon and, not long after I got a live human and sang an improvised version of Dire Straits’s “Industrial Disease” (I couldn’t remember all the lyrics) to make sure she had a fun and memorable day, I was able to confirm with a doctor that, yes, indeed, you aren’t going to catch COVID from salmon. This, folks, is actual journalism — albeit eccentrically practiced. I try to be a fun guy on the phone. We need all the joy we can get in these parlous times.) You can check your salmon with a meat thermometer if you want to get in touch with your inner Howard Hughes. Moreover, COVID is a respiratory virus, not a virus delivered through the stomach. This, incidentally, is why we wear masks in public rather than rubbing our bellies on the streets with hyperbolic Buddha performance art. As Dr. Stephen Berger told the Los Angeles Times, not only have there been no cases of COVID-19 associated with eating food, but the likelihood of COVID spreading through dinner was “rarely, if ever” — and that’s including the extremely slim possibility that you somehow breathed in food through the larynx. (Hope someone adjacent knows the Heimlich!)

I was, in short, deeply outraged that any alleged journalist would wallow in easily debunked malarkey, particularly one who made the choice (the choice!) to be as otiose and as stupid as Budryk to promulgate such deliberate misinformation — especially during a pandemic. The article in question was shared more than 4,500 times by the time I found it. That meant that Budryk was largely responsible for spreading lies and panic and — well, let’s take the gloves off — a steaming heap of bullshit to a reading public that needed facts and reliable information. In an age of wanton lies by our government and biased and lazy garbage promulgated by hucksters like Budryk — all of which have contributed in their own way to the needless deaths of nearly 200,000 Americans — I truly do not have any more energy to devote to this bullshit Faustian bargain whereby we have to accept lies and outright misinformation as the truth and we have to accept lazy and mediocre white guys like Budryk as our “reporters.” No. Fuck these amoral and unpardonable marsupials. They deserve our most stinging vitriol. “No mercy,” to quote Cobra Kai. Languorous lemurs like Budryk are evil fuckwits who tarnish the trade with their cavalier indolence. In a just world, they would be shamed out of practice.

Naturally, I called the dude out on Twitter.

Budryk has since deleted his tweets back to me. This is because Budryk is a cowardly and cocky bastard — the kind of entitled and diseased and dishonorable cuck who would run away from a fight easily resolved through discourse — a dipstick who is more weak-kneed and indecent than Mike McQueary, if you can believe it. And I very much can. There isn’t an ounce of decency in this awful man, He is smug about his fraudulent approach to the facts. (In an attempt to be somewhat objective in a piece that is otherwise designed to mercilessly torch an arrogant and disrespectful asshole well beneath his dermis, I should point out that Budryk did, to his credit, commend a simile I used.) As I proceeded to point out further errors in his “journalism,” it took less than an hour for Budryk to whip up his journalistic peers — including dishonorable Vox contributor Constance Grady (I made numerous phone calls with old contacts on Wednesday afternoon in an effort to get a feel for the current media landscape — I am, after all, quite fucking busy editing a goofball audio drama with a small but deeply appreciative cult audience (one fan was even nice enough to bake me a cake! isn’t that amazing?) — many of Grady’s colleagues, who knew damn well just what I was up to, informed me off the record that they don’t know a single New York media person who hadn’t been stabbed in the back by her at some point — so much for honor among content thieves — and this at an even higher clip than the wonted rate of duplicity and betrayal you come to expect among solipsistic New York media types who would sell your children out if it meant landing a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story — the upshot of my findings is this: you cannot trust Grady; don’t ever confess your blood type to her — she’ll sell it at bargain basement prices to the vampires) — to smear my reputation rather than respond to my claims. Soon, Budryk was telling the New York media world that I was “a genuinely scary maniac” rather than responding to my findings. Later, in an abuse of his reportorial power, Budryk whipped up his followers to falsely report my makeshift Twitter account so that it would be thrown in Twitter jail (even though I never broke the rules) and silenced.

I don’t take such rampant acts of hubris and stupidity and unfounded assaults on my character lying down.

Not only is Zack Budryk one of the most wildly arrogant little fuckfaces I’ve had the misfortune to encounter over the years — the kind of rabid dog that Fess Parker used to shoot in the head at the end of a wholesome Disney film — but as seen by the image accompanying this story, this malingering noodlehead can’t even pull off the leather jacket look. Which is astonishing. Because 90% of the population knows how to wear a leather jacket. And even if they can’t wear a leather jacket, they’re usually decent enough to capitulate on this front. But arrogant fuckwits like Zack Budryk cannot. They are too busy wallowing in their own hubris to consider the greater good. Honestly, the slicked back hair — the botched greaser look — did have me howling. I have long suspected that full-bore moral probity was beyond my reach and my uncontrolled guffaws concerning the jacket and the hair only confirmed my thesis. This fashion-challenged fool — who cannot comprehend that the combo of studded leather and a plaid shirt is a no-no — is my nemesis? Jesus Christ. I’m not sure what infuriates me more. Budryk’s offense on the leather jacket front. (It’s clear to me that Budryk may just be tolerable-looking in a long wool coat. Why isn’t his wife giving this hapless bungler tips on how to dress? Or maybe she has and Pigheaded Budryk lacks the perspicacity to accept the truth? Or is this a metaphor? A sign that Budryk is fated to permanently have his chirrupy noggin up his own obdurate orifice?) Or his arrogance when called out on his journalistic malpractice. But let’s dwell on the latter. Because that’s clearly more important.

My research into Budryk’s work reveals that he may be one of the worst hack journalists operating today. He bangs out endless content for The Hill — anywhere from eight to twelve articles a day — and regularly commits factual errors, exudes a smarmy bias, never performs journalistic rigor, steals from other sources, and commits wholesale plagiarism — all for an algorithm carefully tailored for Google.

This investigation isn’t just me settling a score with some pompous pencilneck — although, let me be honest, it is in part that. Opprobrious oafs like Budryk represent the kind of entitled fuckwits I used to get into brawls with in junior high school and who I would fight in the streets to this very day. There are, after all, standards of decency and human inclusiveness to maintain. Still, there are larger stakes. Because this is also an exposé of The Hill — presently under the editorial leadership of Bob Cusack, a scumbag who openly shirks his duties and runs an operation driven by lassitude. This piece reveals just what a content farm this awful rag has turned into and why you should trust outlets like Politico and The Washington Post over The Hill. Real news outlets do the kind of invaluable long-form reporting that grifters like Budryk pluck from and attempt to pass off as their own. As seen through Budruk’s halitotic efforts, and as sanctioned by his fellow “journalists” on Twitter, The Hill is doing real journalism a disservice. And anybody who holds this content-pilfering mouthpiece up as the real deal should be considered highly suspect or ideally run out of town.

What follows is a detailed collection — just from the last four days or so — outlining why Zack Budryk is one of the slimiest and most unreliable hack journalists working today and why he and The Hill cannot be trusted. Twenty-seven disgracreful and unpardonable affronts upon journalism. In my younger days, I would have tallied more. But, honestly, I value my emotional wellbeing more than I did ten years ago. So I hope you can pardon me.

I have archived every single one of his stories in the event that The Hill pulls or modifies his ineluctable missteps.

I want to be clear that, should Budryk change his ways, I will be the first to welcome him back into the proper graces of journalism. But I don’t see that happening soon. The man is an amoral content thief — the kind of casual criminal who walks into your house, steals the billfold out of your wallet, and then claims it as his. He is a hopeless bungler and a pox upon journalism, a menace to anybody who values the consideration of facts or the careful cultivation of sources. The hell of it is that I never would have gone to all this trouble had Budryk not gone out of his pusillanimous way to tar and feather and silence me. But then deplorable dickwads like Budryk only know how to play dirty. Budryk’s gaffes proved to be so disgraceful and intolerable that I was forced to holler like a starved dog out my window, to which my neighbor replied, “Another hack journalist?” “Yeah,” I said. “Why don’t you write it out?” “Okay.” And so I did.

Factual Errors

1. in a September 9, 2020 article (archive), Budryk claimed that New York Rep. Max Rose “defeat[ed] Rep. Dan Donovan (R-N.Y.) by just under 4 points.” This is incorrect. According to the certified election results, Rose beat Donovan on November 6, 2018 by 101,823 votes to Donovan’s 89,441 — or 53% to Rose’s 46.6%. That’s seven points. (More details on Rose at Ballotpedia.)

2. In a September 8, 2020 article (archive), Budryk cannot get the facts or the timeline right for a story on Michel Cohen and Jerry Falwell, Jr. Falwell resigned from Liberty University on the evening of August 24, 2020. Cohen offered quotes to CNN on August 27, 2020. A year before this, the Wall Street Journal reported on Cohen’s recording on April 2019. Here is how Budryk “reported” it and mangled the factual details:

Earlier this year after the recording was released, Cohen said “there is absolutely no connection between the photos and my personal request to the Falwells to assist the Trump campaign.”

Falwell resigned his presidency at Liberty University in August after a business associate, Giancarlo Granda, claimed he had an affair with Falwell’s wife Becki Falwell with her husband’s knowledge and consent.

This is incorrect. The recording was released in 2019, not “earlier this year.” Budryk falsely offers the impression that Falwell resigned after Coehn’s statement. But it was clear that he did so before.

3. In this September 6, 2020 article, Budryk reveals that he’s an inept and inaccurate transcriber. He quotes Symone Sanders as saying, ““I just think we have to think about the pain that the working families across this country are experiencing right now,” But upon reviewing the actual video, Sanders says, “I just really think we have to think about the pain of the working families across this country are experiencing right now.” This is a pedantic point — and I’m sure that Budryk would probably claim that he was “synthesizing” or “aggregating” the quote in question. But he also smears Sanders in his piece by claiming, “Sanders responded but did not definitively say whether the former vice president would get vaccinated.” What Budryk completely omitted in his piece was Sanders stating twice, “We all want a vaccine.” He also failed to note that Sanders expressed worries about the distribution of a hypothetical vaccine: “Will working families across this country — I just talked about the folks who work at cashier, who are working check cashing counters and working grocery stores, and folks who are truck drivers — will they have the ability to get this vaccine? We know that African-American and Latino folks in this country are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Will those neighborhoods and communities across the country have the opportunity to receive the vaccine? That is the question.”

It is worth noting that, when Sanders mentioned this, even the right-leaning FOX News cut to B roll of blue-collar workers toiling. That FOX News would show more journalistic responsibility than Budryk truly reveals his bias and his ineptitude.

Journalistic Bias/Willful Exclusion of Key Facts

1. Budryk refers to “so-called straw donor schemes” (archive) in this aloof article on Louis Dejoy, almost as if a straw donor scheme were a colloquial term of art rather than something expressly illegal under 52 U.S.C. § 3012. This is a convenient way for Budryk to fail to refer to such straw donor convicts as Dinesh D’Souza in 2014 (pardoned by Trump) and Jeffrey E. Thompson in 2016. It’s clear that this hopeless kid has no real understanding of political corruption and creates a biased article that significantly underplays Dejoy’s criminal behavior.

2. In a September 7, 2020 article (archive), Budryk’s unpardonable failure to include vital reporting by The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg and Reuters make it appear that Joe Biden is merely calling Trump names over the issue of whether the President called soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” This unpardonable elision fails to buttress the facts. The article contains the sentence:

“Trump has strenuously denied making the remarks.”

But a more careful and objectively reported article would have contained this sentence:

“Trump has strenuously denied making the remarks, which were reported by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and the Associated Press.”

3. In a September 7, 2020 article (archive) that appears to have been banged out in seven minutes, Budryk completely bungled a story concerning Amazon purchasing a 16% stake in Deliveroo and running against the regulatory exigencies of the CMA, an authority in the UK. Budryk suggests that Amazon “missed a deadline to provide documents” and was fined the equivalent of $72,000, suggesting this to be a case of oppressive government. What Budryk omits here is that, according to Reuters, Amazon failed to file 189 documents in a timely manner, causing the CMA to have delays to properly investigate the purchase. Why is this important? Because what Budryk has done is softened the necessary investigation a monopolistic giant expanding its territory into UK delivery. By failing to report this detail — which is in every other news story about this — Budryk paints the CM as a pesky bureaucratic authority rather than a governmental mechanism designed to safeguard businesses. Who knows? Maybe Budryk sided with Amazon because he is, fundamentally, a content thief who lives to exploit the words and findings of other journalists.

4. Much as Budryk did with his Joe Biden story, Budryk’s September 5, 2020 piece (Archive) paints Nancy Pelosi as someone who “politicizes a deal,” even as Budryk fails to note that the Senator who suggested this also called Pelosi “Cruella de Vil” in the same interview. Note how Budryk pins the blame on (a) a Democrat and (b) a woman. The omission is so despicable here that it’s almost as if Budryk has some misogynistic issues that he needs to work out.

5. (I have done my best to organize Budryk’s failings, which are considerable. But I urge you to revisit Factual Errors, Entry 5, concerning Symone Sanders. It’s truly a disgraceful and tendentious elision.)

6. In a September 6, 2020 article, Budryk once again paints Nancy Pelosi as the figure holding up coverage. A review of the actual Steven Mnuchin interview reveals a slightly nuanced quote. I have bolded what Budryk has deliberately left out:

Well, I think you know in my discussions with the Speaker, where we’re really stuck is both on certain policy issues, but more importantly on the top line. The Spaker has refused to sit down and negotiate unless we agree to something like a $2.5 trillion-dollar deal in advance.”

The point here is that even Mnuchin started out his answer with a more realistic assessment of the stalled stimulus talks. But Budryk, more interested in painting Pelosi as some Democratic harpie, deliberately overlooked this.

7. It is an undisputed fact that 93% of Black Lives Matters protests have been peaceful. (And, by all means, please dispute the data. But the fact of the matter is that you can’t.) But dispute the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the protests, this didn’t stop the vulpine Budryk from seizing upon a report (archive) suggesting that protesters were in the habit of regularly throwing firebombs. In his “objective” story, Budryk quote-tweets the Portland Police. But he never even considers tweeting a Portland protester or a journalist who was actually there on the scene. He continues to paint the Portland protesters as baleful, ranging from citing an “unlawful assembly” to a fatal shooting. In short, Budryk is a pusillanimous chickenhead on the side of the right. He is no more objective than a Jehovah’s Witness.

8. As was pointed out in Point 2, why would Budryk cheapen Reuters or The Atlantic in their reporting of Trump’s disparagement of the military? But, you see, Budryk is a closeted right-winger who summons FOX News as an authority (archive) before any other outlet:

Fox News and The Washington Post have since matched parts of The Atlantic’s reporting.

9. Budryk is an anti-science asshole (Archive). Here is Budryk, claiming that objective science is merely an opinion:

The scientific adviser for the Trump administration similarly said “I’m out” if a scenario arises in which an Emergency Use Authorization he disagreed with was issued for an inoculation.

I cannot even begin to register my disgust for the loathsome anti-intellectual “take” that fuckwads like Budryk have gone to the mat for here. To understand why Budryk’s framing is so vile, let me put forth a proposition. Let’s say the FDA approved mercury, which is poisonous to humans, as a remedy for COVID. If you proffered science, demonstrating why this is bad, would it be an “opinion”? Or would it be a scientific fact? Honestly, if Budryk is to be punched in the face for anything, it is with this venal legerdemain. He clearly isn’t a journalist. He’s a partisan anti-science asshole. Opportunists like Constance Grady may very well stare lovingly at Budryk’s hound dog face and say, “This sloppy hack is the Romeo for me!” But unlike Grady, I know that I can sleep easy, knowing that I am on the side of science.

Lack of Journalistic Rigor

1. In this September 8, 2020 article on the DC Metro (archive), Budryk lacks the reading comprehension skills (or maybe the time) to read a PDF properly. He writes, “[The audit] also found incidents of managers threatening controllers who questioned orders that violated existing rules.” But it fails to note the more important details from the report, which was managers threatening controllers with arrest and termination if they didn’t do their job. If Budryk were an actual journalist, he might have reached out to the ROCC for a statement on this. He might have persuaded transit operators to speak to him anonymously. This is what any decent journalist does. She pushes forward the story. But Budryk is incapable of doing so. He doesn’t actually do any work here. The Hill‘s strategy is to hijack the algorithm — whereby an incompetent hack like Budryk gets into the top search results and a reported story falls by the wayside.

2. While he was banging together a September 7, 2020 “article” (archive) on disgraced Minnesota priest Michel Mulloy that was largely cut and pasted from two articles from the Associated Press, it never occurred to Budryk that the very subject of his article (or, rather, the “article” that he was assembling from various other bits like Dr. Frankenstein on a bender) had a history of abusing minors in the 1980s.

3. It’s clear that Budryk will never pick up the phone for these stories. Even so, let’s compare Budryk’s appallingly simplistic story from September 6, 2020 concerning OMB crackdowns on free speech against a story in Politico. Note how Politico writer Michael Stratford is committed to historical context while Budryk flails around in the dark like some frat boy trying to find the light switch.

Budryk: “It is unclear to what extent, if at all, such programs are in place at the agencies, with the OMB citing ‘press reports.'”

Stratford: “It is not clear how the Trump administration could make good on such a threat since longstanding federal law prohibits the Education Department from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” of the nation’s schools.”

As we continue to see here, Budryk is clearly stretched too thin and too willing to cut corners to provide such essential context.

4. To get a real sense of how dopey Budryk is, look no further than this September 6, 2020 article, which relied heavily on a paragraph uttered by North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell on Meet the Press. You can compare it against the transcript — specifically the paragraph I have highlighted below, which serves as the basis for the article. Budryk doesn’t have any real news. So, being the good hack that he is, he stretches out sentences from this paragraph to pad out his piece. I have observed high-schoolers with more inventive ways of turning in their homework at the last minute.

Failing to Attribute Sources

1. On September 5, 2019, Smithsonian reported on the Met’s developments to hire a full-time curator of Native American Art. Because Smithsonian‘s Brigit Katz is an honorable journalist, she dutifully linked to a statement issued by the Art of Native America as well as a Shannon O’Loughlin interview with Art Newspaper so that anybody following the story could follow the leads. Unfortunately, since Budryk is a dishonorable thief who does not credit, he simply plucked this information from Katz without credit and pasted them into his September 9, 2020 story (archive) without attribution.

Plagiarism

When I pressed Budryk on his tendency to plagiarize entire articles from other news sites for The Hill, he claimed (in a now deleted tweet) that he was “aggregating” his content. But his “aggregation” is often far too close to the original sources, as the numerous examples below will attest. (I switched over to Desklib from Copyleaks. I truly did not expect to blow through my free uses so fast. But then Budryk surprised me with his nimble and prolific thievery!)

1. (Source) (Budryk) (Budryk Archive):

2. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

3. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

4. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

5. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

6. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

7. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

8. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

9. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

10. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

11. (Source) (Budryk) (Archive)

by Edward Champion

A Special Message from James Bennet

We reached out to New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet to ask him to explain why he continues to publish dangerous opinion pieces. And we were stunned when he sent us an opinion column that he insisted we publish!

Hello there! James Bennet here. You may know me as that fun-loving xenophobic paycheck man who, despite never taking a meaningful moral position in my entire life, fell upward thanks to my vanilla background to oversee the op-ed pages of the New York Times! I’m living proof that, if you’re a sycophantic 54-year-old Yalie who bobs his mouth up and down on the throbbing member of the Establishment on a daily basis, you too will never be fired or rebuked by top brass! Because here at the Times, we’re not just about celebrating the Stuff White People Like or ensuring that David Brooks can fulminate right-wing drivel under the false cover of inclusive intellectualism. We’re not just about refusing to modulate or adjust our voice from our hopelessly dowdy upper middle class roots. We’re also firmly committed to being inexorably puzzled by strange cultural figures like Lizzo, Childish Gambino, Big Sean, Boots Riley, Rungano Nyoni, and Mariama Diallo! And we will continue to deny column-inches to anyone who enjoys these strange dark-skinned people!

Thanks to my cowardly sensibilities, I ensure that the New York Times continues to publish all the affluent Cacuasian opinions fit to print! Aside from a few token individuals who are trending heavily on social media (we do, after all, need your subscription dollars to keep the lights on!), you won’t find many brown people or black people among our guest columnists here! Nor will you find any of those sketchy pinko socialists. No, sir! Not on my watch. I’m so committed to reinforcing fascism and putting our African-American staffers at risk that I’m even willing to publish a racist and authoritarian article by a Senator named Tom Cotton! (Get it? Cotton! Ha ha! Yeah, I chuckled over that little joke too.)

They say that opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one and most of them stink. Well, if you’re the overlord of opinions, as I am, then you can only imagine the kind of asshole you’d have to be to swim in a sea of fuming anuses and earn a living at it! Instead of being a writer’s writer or a journalist’s journalist, I’m an asshole’s asshole! My spineless timidity and willful capitulation of my soul have been the secrets to my success!

Here at the Times, we publish the kind of family-friendly white supremacy that gives the Amy Coopers and the Svitlana Floms of our world all the inspiration they need to use their privilege to sic the police on innocent black people with false accusations! I’m very proud of my work. I wake up every day, smile in the mirror, and, just before I splash a few drops of Clive Christian No. 1 upon my neck and prepare to scarf down $60 strips of Norwegian salmon for breakfast, I say to myself, “Goddammit, James! Look at you, you magnificent white bastard!” Not a streak of melanin in my skin, my friends. I take pride in my work. I take pride in my skin color. Not white power, but white pride. There’s a distinction! Still, I have to say. Ain’t being white grand?

However, I do want to explain why we published the piece today by convicted murderer Harold Bailey, former grand wizard of the KKK and, for many years, a prominent dot on the hate map published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yes, it’s true that he filed his column from a maximum facility cell at the Red Onion State Prison, where he is serving time for raping forty-five black people. Nevertheless, Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments. And it remains my firm belief that a dangerous criminal screaming obscenities and making deranged sculptures from his own fecal matter in a padded cell is capable of thinking along the same lines as a policy expert. After all, that’s democracy!

When Mr. Bailey wrote at length about why he wanted to shove a pineapple into my wife Sarah Jessup’s mouth and tie her down with rope in a chair so that she could watch helplessly as he sodomized my two children, I didn’t flinch one bit! Obviously, most people in our society are opposed to this assault and trauma. And that is fine. But we are in the business of recklessly publishing any diseased opinion we can find. It fits right in with the tacit acceptance of white values that we hold dear to our hearts. And sometimes it’s vital to understand the careful nuances of why someone would be driven to such a violent act of abuse. “But what nuances exist in publishing such an explicit essay?” you may ask? Well, it’s not my job to suss these out. Use your noodle! Think about it!

We understand that many readers find Harold Bailey’s argument painful and even dangerous. We believe that this is one reason why it requires public scrutiny and debate. However, if you look deep enough into anything, such as an unblemished wall that has been freshly painted white or a graphic description of my two children being violated, you will find great shining beauty that you can turn into exciting cocktail party banter!

What’s most important about publishing opinions is to realize that they are just that: merely opinions. It’s my job to deaden your soul and to rob you of your moral compass so that you can look upon the world with a clinically detached eye, remaining flip and casual about the unfolding horrors and staying on the sidelines as these uppity revolutionary bastards lose hope and are pecked off one by one by an authoritarian police force. I mean, if I don’t bat an eye when Mr. Bailey writes in adoring detail about the fantasy of committing vicious crimes against my family, then there’s no reason why you should either! If you don’t raise a stink about Tom Cotton’s column, then his views will become more normalized. And when that happens, it creates a stable world in which you too can worship at the altar of unwavering normalcy. And isn’t that a lofty goal for our society? To walk out into the world, knowing that nobody feels anything, and proudly slam down two dollars and fifty cents for the morning edition, only to read opinions that you once considered horrifying and that are now absolutely the norm. That’s why the Times keeps me, James Bennet, here at the top!

I’ll admit. We did push the envelope a bit with the Cotton and Bailey essays. But the only way to unite this nation is by inoculating the population from horrors and systemic abuse, ensuring that they never feel outrage, and creating a population in which nobody has hope. And with protests and a pandemic happening now, and a Second Great Depression just on the horizon, we’re nearly there! All of these exciting developments make me prouder than ever to be white, status quo, and dead inside.