There Is a Club, Ep. # 56,772

You remember Jeffrey Goldberg, right?

Smearmonger?

Neocon war pimp?

Ring any bells?

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First consider this short, ugly recap of the history of Jeffrey Goldberg (from Glenn Greenwald/Salon in 2010):

The Jeffrey Goldberg Media 

BY GLENN GREENWALD

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Numerous commentators immediately noted the supreme and obvious irony that Goldberg, of all people, would anoint himself condescending arbiter of journalistic standards, given that, as one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, he compiled a record of humiliating falsehood-dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller’s both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact.

Except unlike Miller, who was forced to leave the New York Times over what she did, and the NYT itself, which at least acknowledged some of the shoddy pro-war propaganda it churned out, Goldberg has never acknowledged his journalistic errors, expressed remorse for them, or paid any price at all.  To the contrary, as is true for most Iraq war propagandists, he thrived despite as a result of his sorry record in service of the war.  In 2007, David Bradley — the owner of The Atlantic and (in his own words) formerly “a neocon guy” who was “dead certain about the rightness” of invading Iraq  — lavished Goldberg with money and gifts, including ponies for Goldberg’s children, in order to lure him away fromThe New Yorker, where he had churned out most of his pre-war trash.  

One of his most obscenely false and damaging articles — this 2002 museum of deceitful, hideous journalism, “reporting” on Saddam’s “possible ties to Al Qaeda” — actually won an Oversea’s Press Award for — get this — “best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights.”  Goldberg, whose devotion to Israel is so extreme that he served in the IDF as a prison guard over Palestinians and was described last year as “Netanyahu’s faithful stenographer” by The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, wrote an even more falsehood-filled 2002 New Yorker article, warning that Hezbollah was planning a master, Legion-of-Doom alliance with Saddam Hussein for a “larger war,” and that “[b]oth Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel — perhaps with chemical or biological payloads — in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response,” though — Goldberg sternly warned — “Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam’s work itself” and “its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs.”  That fantastical, war-fueling screed — aimed at scaring Americans into targeting the full panoply of Israel’s enemies — actually won a National Magazine Award in 2003.  Given how completely discredited those articles are, those are awards which any person with an iota of shame would renounce and apologize for, but Goldberg continues to proudly tout them on his bio page at The Atlantic.

Despite all of those war-cheerleading deceits — or, again, because of them — Goldberg continues to be held out by America’s most establishment outlets as a preeminent expert in the region.  As Jonathan Schwarz documents, Goldberg is indeed very well-”trained” in the sense that establishment journalists mean that term:  i.e., as an obedient dog who spouts establishment-serving falsehoods.  That’s why Goldberg is worth examining:  he’s so representative of the American media because the more discredited his journalism becomes, the more blatant propaganda he spews, the more he thrives in our media culture.  That’s why it’s not hyperbole to observe that we are plagued by a Jeffrey Goldberg Media; he’s not an aberration but one of its most typical and illustrative members.

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So...whatever else Mr. Goldberg might be, he is also a smearmonger and war pimp. 

Got it?

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when, during the course of my research on David Brooks' latest embarrassment to the journalistic profession (Topic: Wisconsin.  Mr. Brooks' conclusion: "A vote to keep Walker won’t be an antiunion vote." and a recall of Scott Walker "...will remove any hope this country might have of avoiding a fiscal catastrophe.".   No kidding. He really says that.) --   I open my "New York" magazine today to find this waiting for me (emphasis added):

 “I’m just writing stuff down that I think and report” is how [Jeffrey Goldeberg] describes himself to me when we meet one recent afternoon at an outdoor plaza near the Watergate, where The Atlantic has its offices. Goldberg is, in fact, as much of an operator as Beinart may hope to be (Goldberg’s Torah study group in Washington includes David Brooks, David ­Gregory, and former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk).

When you wonder for the 1,000th time why these awful, awful asshole occupy positions of such outsized and destructive influence in our media, remember always that there is a Club.

And that you are not in it.