In a couple of weeks, Tom Rosenstiel will release his new book, The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy. Rosenstiel is the head of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. His resume from the school website is quite impressive:
Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism; Professor of the Practice
Tom Rosenstiel, former executive director of the American Press Institute, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021. He was appointed to the rank of Professor of the Practice in August 2023. Rosenstiel, who left API after leading the organization since 2013, is one of the world’s most recognized thought leaders about journalism, media, technology, and the intersection of media and politics. He teaches courses on the role of journalism in a democracy, news-delivery models, media innovation, and the intersection of media and politics.
With those kinds of credentials, I’m sure Rosenstiel won’t mind me, a fellow journalist, asking him a question. First, a couple of relevant facts. The Philip Merrill College of Journalism is named after Philip Merrill, who was the owner of Washingtonian magazine since 1979. Philip Merrill passed away in 2006 and was succeeded by his daughter Cathy Merrill, who took over Washingtonian. Cathy Merrill is the CEO and president of Washingtonian Media.
Here’s the question I’d like to ask Tom Rosenstiel and his students: Why did Washingtonian magazine recently spike a planned profile of me? A profile that writer Cathy Alter had begged me to do for six years?
I’ll tell you my theory. They killed it because I exposed a lot of nasty stuff about the left and their plot against Brett Kavanaugh, stuff the journalists at Washingtonian (and elsewhere) do not want coming to light. I also suspect that despite all of his books, degrees, experience and credentials, Tom Rosenstiel will not have the guts to answer that question. He won’t even reply to this post.
Still, I’d like to ask Rosenstiel, the top dog of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, why Cathy Merrill, panjandrum of Washingtonian Media, why her magazine, Washingtonian, killed a profile of me when it was on the brink of being published. Because whatever that is, it is not journalism. It's censorship.
Hot Air readers know I was one of the targets of the Kavanaugh plot, and that I have written about it a lot, but this is much bigger than me. The Washingtonian story was killed because the editors and their friends did not want to address the bigger picture of what happened and the leads I gave them. They acted like Stasi censors, not as journalists. I’m addressing this post largely to Tom Rosenstiel’s students, because frankly I doubt that Rosenstiel himself has the guts to answer me. At least David Enrich at the New York Times had the stones to apologize to me.
Over a year ago I finally agreed to talk to Cathy Alter, who had been pestering me for six years to submit to an interview for Washingtonian. I knew part of the topic would be about my involvement in the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh nomination circus, when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982 and that I had witnessed it. Still, Alter wanted more and I gave it to her. Alter and I met at Georgetown University, and she asked me non-political questions - what frightened me, what my family was like growing up, what girls I dated in high school at Georgetown Prep, where I was friends with Kavanaugh. We met two more times and I drove here around the places in Maryland where I spent my youth. More than once she said that she has known for decades that while I’m a flawed person, I’m also a kind one.
I also gave Alter the dirt on the Blasey Ford hit. As I explain in my book The Devil’s Triangle, it was an opposition research operation from the start, with Blasey Ford working with researchers, journalists, oppo researchers and politicians like Kamala Harris. The story was broken in September 2018 by Ryan Grim, the same person who would later disgrace himself defending Graham Platner to the teeth. Grim’s story appeared in The Intercept, which is owned and funded byPierre Omydiar, a far-left billionaire and a member of the Deep State High School. Blasey Ford’s best friend who helped set the whole thing up was a woman named Monica McLean, a 20-year FBI veteran who will no longer speak to Ford. McLean cut off ties when it became clear that Ford was involved in extortion, slander, and witness tampering. McLean’s attorney was David Laufman, a Deep State ghoul who is now under investigation by Joe diGenova.
On March 31 of this year, I got a text from Cathy:
Hey there. I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard (in a phone call today with the editor), Washingtonian is killing the story. I’m tied up now with a list of crap to finish but I wanted to let you know. How about I take some of my kill fee and treat you to a fancy meal? I’m really sorry. And really disappointed.
Cathy Alter made the mistake of making me look human. In the pages of the Washingtonian, the friend of Brett Kavanaugh who exposed the media in his book The Devil’s Triangle can’t be made to look human. More importantly, the things he revealed cannot be printed. Best to stick to profiles of transgender politicians and profiles of Debra Katz - the simian lawyer for Christine Blasey Ford.
In The Next Journalism, Rosenstiel lays out a series of new rules, ethical guidelines and practices journalists need to adopt. Here is #1: “Journalists must begin to place the public at the center of their work, not treat them as passive bystanders to it. To do this, journalists must judge their work by a new standard—the value it provides the public, not the attention it generates. Their portrayal of the world must become less random and alarmist and more comprehensive and accurate. And they must begin to consider and track how each piece of content actually helps people, both in the moment and more richly over time.”
I’ll tell Tom some content that could help me more richly over time. Have your students try and find answers to the questions I’ve brought up. Rosenstiel himself asked a smart question in 2018 when he interviewed Ruth Marcus, then of the Washington Post and working on a book about Kavanaugh. Why, Rosenstiel asked, did Senator Diane Feinstein, one of the first people Ford talked to about Kavanaugh, advise Ford not to go forward? Marcus gives a nonsense answer, when the truth is obvious. Feinstein knew the story was crap and that Ford and her handlers are involved in illegal activity. She didn't want to get burned by people claiming me and Kavanaugh were drugging and gang raping girls.
In the fall of 2018 I received a disgusting, obsequious email from Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post. Marcus wanted to interview me for a book she was working on about the Kavanaugh nomination. “I am open-minded about what transpired and want to write as full and fair a book as possible,” she wrote. Yet Marcus was unwilling to answer a very simple question I posed. Christine Blasey Ford had years and years, and the entire summer of 2018, to contact me if she wanted to ask me about Brett Kavanaugh and high school. Why didn’t she? In her Supreme Ambition, Marcus addresses it this way: “One possibility: Ford would call Mark Judge, remind Judge of what had happened, tell him to call Kavanaugh, and advise him to spare his family the ordeal. She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.”
What? “She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.” I’m a journalist who has written for most major publications and many minor ones. I’ve been on Fox several times, CNN and EWTN. I’m on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Ford didn’t know how to contact me? And Marcus believed this? I have since tried to call Marcus several times. She won't pick up her phone.
When Marcus was promoting Supreme Ambition at its launch, Rosenstiel was in the audience. Yet it was not him but an audience member at a book signing who stood up and noted that since 2018 no one has ever come forward to corroborate Ford’s story - this despite the fact that Marcus claims in D.C. “everybody leaks.” “Well there was no investigation,” Marcus said. Her questioner was not impressed: “But you investigated!” She had just published a book about it!
I have one final request for Tom Rosenstiel, King of Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Cathy Alter recorded our interview at Georgetown University, then printed it into a 28,000-word transcript. Does Rosenstiel or one of his students have enough journalistic curiosity to simply ask that the audio and transcript of the interview, full and unedited, be released to the public?
That’s what I thought.
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