So they were early participants in internet journalism; they have done great work for, you know, what are we talking now, decades. And suddenly they’re under attack because they dared disagree with the narrative, or some of the official narrative in the reporting about the Ukraine and Russia and so forth. One would think that democracy and a free press thrived on that kind of constructive, informed disagreement.
But I must say, as an old-time journalist, I have never experienced this kind of attack on critical thinking in the media and the political discourse, even under Joe McCarthy. Yes, I was alive then, and even doing some scribbling as a teenager. It’s worse than it was during the Vietnam War; you can take my word for that.
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Joe Lauria:
I—unlike you, although I’m not very young either—was born just after the McCarthy period. But I always imagined what it might be like to have lived through that, and I really have to stop imagining, because I think we’re in that.
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Robert Scheer:
I, Robert Scheer, actually looking at the record, being in, I think, in objective journalism, would say that this whole situation in Ukraine was very much engineered and abetted by the U.S. deciding that it knew who the best people were to run the Ukraine, and mobilizing people in an election in a surreptitious way, and meddling in their politics—yes. I think the record would show that.
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McCarthyism was child’s play compared to this. They’ve got—because at least in McCarthyism you had the New York Times, you had establishment voices declaiming against this guy. That’s not the case now. It’s coming from the Democrats.
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This is not McCarthyism. McCarthy was a drunken senator, and not all that photogenic, who was running into very stiff opposition because he was taking on people in the Eisenhower administration. You now have this whirlwind of establishment news organizations, politicians and so forth, calling for the head of anyone who dares challenge their narrative. Free press be damned. And that is a really scary moment.
