A Custom More Honored in the Breach...

...than the observance.

In the Washington Post today, the last person to hold the title of New York Times public editor has some very sensible Rules for Redemption.

Redemption sounds nice, but disgraced pundit Mark Halperin doesn’t deserve it

By Margaret Sullivan

...
Mark Halperin, an author and media commentator who stepped down from his various lofty perches in 2017, seems to have missed that step along the path to would-be redemption.

He has a high-profile book deal — but what he doesn’t seem to have is a sense of why he shouldn’t have one.

And most of his comeback enablers don’t seem to get it either...

Should there be such a thing — as [Judith Regan, Halpein's publisher] puts it — as forgiveness, second chances and redemption?

Of course. People mess up, sometimes badly. Some do deserve a second chance, and not all situations are of equal weight. There is no one-size-fits-all.
...

But forgiveness, second chances and redemption should be inconceivable without dealing honestly and publicly — and, in some cases, personally — with misconduct.

And even if that happens, it doesn’t mean that the perpetrators should blithely get to return to what they were doing before the fall.

In some cases, a return to previous roles is simply wrong.

If this all sounds a very familiar, it should. For a couple of reasons.

First, because although (as one wag put it) "Mark Halperin has been an unforgivable shart-in-white-Dockers stain on the profession of journalism since forever" who "sucks at everything, except sucking up to Conservatives" I knew it was inevitable that the Beltway Media Self-Protection Syndicate would sooner-or-later find a way to "redeem" another irredeemable lodge brother.

And second because since the start of the Never Trump Elite Republican Rebranding Scam, I have been very deliberately calling the language of faith off the bench and onto the field to make this very point about a much larger gang of grifters and goofs all of whom enjoy a Halperin-or-higher level of completely unearned deference and privilege and the authority to invoke some secret clause of some private compact which causes the Beltway media to rally to their defense whenever they have done something indefensible ("The Madness of Mercy"):

But, there has truly never been a time when events have more completely vindicated the Left than the moment we are living through now, so I simply do not understand why so many Liberals who should damn well know better by now fling themselves like drunk prom dates at the tiniest wisp of validation from the Never Trumpers.

If the Never Trumpers are offering actual, useful intel -- plans to the GOP Death Star -- then great.  Welcome aboard.  If they are coming to us in the spirit of genuine confession, repentance and atonement, terrific.  We're a forgiving bunch.  But if they cannot form the words "The Left was right about the Right all along" and will not lock their loyalty to our cause down with anything more than nods and winks, then we have no reason in the world to lend them our hard-won credibility or give them our trust or show them an ounce of our mercy.

Inside the Beltway media ecosystem, you can't swing a dead meme without hitting an entire menagerie of moochers and monsters -- Bush regime dead-enders, torture apologists, bibbling hacks who have been wrong about everything since Christ was a corporal, newly woke Republicans who swear they only discovered that the GOP was full of Republicans 20 minutes ago -- all reaping the benefits of wholly undeserved privilege and gold-plated job security.

But that's not what killed journalism for me, because I have worked at many places where thoroughly unqualified people enjoyed undeserved privilege and gold-plated job security.  And in every case it came down to that invisible currency of loyalty and reciprocal advantage that we men and women of Chicago know as clout.

Clout is what builds mighty careers out of thin air for the third-rate nephews and sons-in-law of the powerful.  Clout makes it possible for nitwits to garner impressive titles and salaries because they fucked the right people (literally and figuratively) at the right time.  Clout is what permits incompetent dopes to advanced steadily through the ranks based on their skills as after-hours party organizer, on-call procurer, drinking-buddy and doer of various unsavory favors for persons of importance.

This is the way much of the world works.

No, what killed journalism for me is that it's supposed to be the one civic enterprise specifically charted to be the enemy of clout.  To expose the grimy inner working of corrupt institutions that are screwing the public.   From the American Press Institute:

The purpose of journalism is thus to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.

What killed journalism's credibility with me is not that many powerful people are obviously invested in resuscitating or maintaining the careers of so many wildly overrated stool samples like Mark Halperin.

What killed journalism's credibility with me is how deeply committed almost everyone else in the field is to ignoring it.

75 powerful Democratic operatives were not interviewed for this post.