No Penalty for Bad Punditry

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, a massive boondoggle that was built on a lie, furthered by more lies, and propped up by columnists all-too-willing to give George W. Bush and his administration the benefit of the doubt.

Over on her Substack, Parker Molloy chronicled just some of the pundits that were all too happy to play credulous twits to the necessity of going to war with Iraq. I encourage you to read the full article:

I was only slightly older than Molloy when the Iraq War started, but even then, it was clear things were kind of amiss. Even if you account for a shell-shocked nation reeling from 9/11 looking to lash out and assert its global dominance (which, it should be noted, is a dumb reason for going to war because I’m pretty sure Al-Qaeda was aware of our global arsenal and attacked us anyway), the evidence that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction was flimsy at best. When it turned out that—gasp—the administration lied, none of these pundits took a step back to reconsider their biases or do any real soul searching.

The truth is, if you’re a pundit who’s bad at their job, it doesn’t really matter. Some may argue that since they operate in the realm of opinion, they can’t be “wrong,” but by the same token, they can’t be “right” either at which point what are they offering? These columnists are hired and handsomely compensated by prestigious outlets because they’re supposed to be so knowledgable that they deserve to shape the public discourse. When Thomas Friedman says, “You think this [terrorism] fantasy [you have]—we're just gonna let it grow? Well, suck. on. this. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia….We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could,” it’s not supposed to be the venting of an unhinged warmonger but a A Very Serious Person who has a weekly column at The New York Times.

But I love the case study of Friedman because he’s so clearly wrong, and his reasons for striking Iraq were so morally bankrupt, and yet he was fine! At no point did the Times publicly reconsider their relationship with Friedman, and he’s happily churning out articles today. He, and many of his cohorts in the professional political punditry world, are immovable objects. They are prestige fixtures that are never reevaluated, never reconsidered, and never replaced.

So why bring all this up? The Iraq War was a fiasco that resulted in countless lost lives (4,431 U.S. soldiers killed, but we can only estimate the lives lost of non-combatants, not to mention the PTSD suffered from those involved in the conflict), but it’s effectively “over” now (although the fallout from this failed experiment in nation-building continues). I bring it up because when there’s no penalty for repeating misinformation, then the cycle continues anew and bad actors can exploit empty-headed pundits who want to pass themselves off as voices of sage wisdom.

We’re seeing it now over the “debate” about the trans community. Jonathan Chait, who assumed that any opposition to the war was simply liberals “blinded by Bush-hatred,” is now at work laundering the right-wing misinformation that clinics are transitioning children too quickly and without supervision. Chait credulously swallowed a dubious affidavit about children swiftly having their genders surgically reassigned without any supervision. When real reporters looked into the claims, they found the affidavit to be bunk, and hey, it turns out that the person who filed it actively wanted the clinic shut down despite the claimant not being involved in treatment or management. (For more on this story, click over to Ryan Cooper’s article at The American Prospect, which I know is left-wing, but also, seems to value reporting, which is more than I can say for Chait).

If Chait truly believes that any gender transitioning care for young people should be off the table, he should simply say so. Instead, he’s hedging behind phony information, and for those who truly want to eradicate all trans people, this is great because they need people like Chait in their corner. If their goals bounce around the right-wing echo chamber, then they don’t go anywhere. If only neo-conservatives had wanted to go to war in 2002/2003, then they wouldn’t have amassed enough support. It took a combination of both cowardly politicians as well as a media apparatus hungry for not only war, but to overlook the glaring flaws in the administration’s case.

As Jonathan M. Katz (whose book The Big Truck That Went By is excellent and you should buy it) points out on his Substack, Chait in particular is repeating his own actions twenty years later:

This is one of the reasons I keep getting up in arms about the right-wing push against trans people. The same people who have never had any accountability about being wrong are now once again laundering right-wing talking points under the guise of reasonable centrism. If there was a nationwide crisis of children going to doctors and quickly having their genders irreversibly changed, that would be something! But there’s no evidence that’s happening. It’s not like the U.S. medical system is notoriously speedy with non-emergency surgeries. I had jaw surgery done about ten years ago and it was still a long process to not only convince my insurance company that it was necessary, but then to get my jaw ready for such surgery. The notion that little Timmy hops on down to the gender clinic to become little Susie because his friends are all saying being trans is cool doesn’t hold a lot of water.

I don’t think every pundit has to be 100% right 100% of the time. But I think in the realm of political punditry where your words have the power to shape lives in a real way, there needs to be some kind of accountability beyond, “Well, this person has readers, the respect of their peers, and wins awards,” because none of those actually investigate the work being done. I could say of numerous athletes that they have fans, respect of their peers, and won awards, but if they can’t do the job anymore, no team is going to pay them just to stick around and be lousy based on past performance.

Words matter. When you’re reckless with them on a consistent basis in a public way that shapes opinions of both the public and the upper echelons of power, there needs to be some form of accountability beyond people dunking on you on Twitter. I know I don’t always get it right, but if I’m wrong about a movie, that doesn't really change anything about movies. But even then, I endeavor to do better and admit when I’m wrong1 (side-note: I know the writing of these articles are quite poor, I hope I’m better now than I was in my 20s.) It’s a lot easier for right-wing governments to martial legislation against the trans community when supposed centrists are “just asking questions.”

To end on a lighter note, here’s a clip from Barry of NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) calling Thomas Friedman (Sam Ingraffia) a dum-dum: