Let me toss a name at you: Miles Taylor. I’ll daresay that the vast majority of you have never heard of Mr. Taylor. Those of you who have probably just learned about him in the past few days.
Mr. Taylor turns out to be the author of the “Anonymous” op-ed that ran in the New York Times a couple of years ago. In this extraordinary op-ed, “Anonymous,” who was widely touted as a “senior Trump administration official,” laid out a case that resistance to President Donald Trump was widespread within his own administration, and that many senior-level officials (as he explicitly stated — such as himself) were doing their best to thwart the plans of a president they considered dangerous — to the point of considering the powers of the 25th Amendment.
This op-ed was followed by a book, “A Warning — Anonymous” that became a best-seller late last year. I happen to own a copy.
Mr. Taylor was not by any stretch of the imagination a senior-level official. He was a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security at the time that he wrote the Times op-ed. Implicit in his claim of invoking the 25th Amendment is the power to actually do so. I can find no language anywhere in the 25th Amendment, Section 4 or anywhere else, that bestows this authority on a deputy chief of staff.
Right on the front cover of Mr. Taylor’s book, clearly visible in red ink below the title, is the claim that the author is a senior-level Trump administration official. This is relevant because Mr. Taylor’s book is a series of opinions, not a series of indisputable facts, so sourcing is important vital in placing his various claims in the proper context.
Perhaps what Mr. Taylor had to say was completely true, perhaps not. The claim that Anonymous was a “senior-level official” was obviously made by Mr. Taylor and the Times specifically to burnish his claims with an unmerited patina of respectability.
My guess is that if Mr. Taylor had not been given anonymity, dubiously in the eyes of many, his op-ed would have been a one news-cycle story and his book would have gone nowhere. But the “senior-level” claim was enough to sell a lot of newspapers and a lot of books.
As I read the book, I suspected that it was not actually written by a cabinet level official. It reads like a screed penned by a very disillusioned staffer who’s trying to justify his spot in a lifeboat on the Titanic. I had the feeling of being duped.
This putrescent mess has managed to ripen. Mr. Taylor left the government after the Times op-ed and subsequently accepted a position as a political analyst with CNN. When recently asked there, point blank, if he was Anonymous, he denied it.
It’s one thing to find someone in the media sympathetic enough to one’s cause to grant an extraordinary platform under the guise of anonymity. That’s not even really that difficult to arrange anymore since media standards and ratings are moving rapidly in opposite directions. But no one bent Mr. Taylor’s arm up behind his back to become a CNN pundit. And if he was going to out himself anyway, he should have done so when asked. It’s a pretty damning indictment of his trustworthiness — at least as far as I’m concerned.
The abandonment of long-held professional standards by segments of the media is the lasting damage of the Trump administration. In their zeal to either praise or condemn President Trump, depending on who they are pimping for ratings, the media have openly declared that the ends justify the means.
I suspect that Trump will no longer be president in a few days. We’ll be stuck, however, for a whole lot longer with a fourth estate that has largely abandoned any pretense of objectivity because pandering has become so much more lucrative.
This story is but a part of a long line of ethically dubious pieces in the MSM that have persisted not on the basis of merit, but because they are ratings gold. As bad as President Trump is, and that’s pretty bad, the media, at least in my opinion, has become worse. Trump condemns himself without any help almost every time he talks or tweets. All the media has done by pushing ethical boundaries into new and unknown territory — mostly to go after Trump — is to create sympathy for him and distrust in themselves from anyone who’s not eating the candy.
Worse, there’s a trickle-down effect here that’s not overly difficult to discern. Blatant lying is now a part of any “ends justifies the means” strategy — at all levels of politics.
Here locally we have an issue — the mascot controversy at Pocatello High — where this strategy is on full display. School and District 25 officials have blatantly and repeatedly misled the public about the amount of support for the mascot change from “Indians” to something else.
I don’t know whether this mascot change is a good idea or not. But I strongly suspect that the claim by D-25 and school official that the community overwhelmingly supports this change isn’t true, and furthermore they likely know it isn’t true. If one really does enjoy overwhelming support on something like this you’d think they’d want to take a parade lap, not ram it through in a week with minimal public input. It smacks of disingenuousness.
Even if I can be convinced that the mascot change is a good idea, which might be easy since I currently don’t care one way or the other, I’m all for every official who’s misled the public about this being recalled. I can’t vote the New York Times out of existence for their BS, but I can sure send some D-25 officials packing if I have the chance to do so.
On that, at least, you may count.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, consultant and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising children, llama farming, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His video blog, “Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I,” may be found at facebook.com/HowlinattheMoonin251 and on YouTube at bit.ly/2SN745k.