Podcast appearances and mentions of Robert M Smith

Bob Smith covered the White House for the New York Times during the Nixon Administration. Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray gave him an early scoop on the Watergate scandal, before Woodward and Bernstein began publishing their revelations in the Washington Post. But inexplicably, the Times failed to publish the story. He also contrasts the NYT coverage of President Nixon and President Trump. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/james-herlihy/message

Survey after survey shows that trust in the news media is at an all time low. And it's not just the left/right divide. A recent study by the American Press Association reveals that not all Americans universally embrace core journalistic values, and that the trust crisis might best be understood through people's moral values even more than their politics. When journalists say they are” just doing their jobs,” the problem is many people harbor doubts about what that job should be. Couple this with an ever changing media landscape driven by economics, the political bifurcation of news via the long tail of the internet, the news/entertainment nexus, celebrity culture, and now cancel culture, and it makes for an environment that has very little to do with getting at the truth. Maybe democracy dies not in darkness, but in the chaos of competing truths. This is the world that long time journalist Robert M. Smith explores in Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent.   My conversation with Robert M Smith:  

Former New York Times reporter Robert M. Smith, author of 'Suppressed: Confessions of a former New York Times Correspondent." The book is a memoir of Smith's long career in journalism. It includes some outspoken criticism of how the New York Times covered former president Donald Trump. Smith's professional life included a stint in the administration of former president Jimmy Carter.

In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with author Robert Smith about his book Suppressed. As a former New York Times Washington correspondent Smith details how some stories get told and why some don't. From hiring reporters of a certain party, holding back negative stories about business, covering the My Lai massacre and even Smith's involvement in Watergate. This book is a useful tool to navigate the partisan climate we are now in and Smith uses his many years as a reporter, lawyer and mediator to guide the way. Required reading!

Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent by Robert M. Smith Four million people in nearly 200 countries read The New York Times. Of these, many are opinion-leaders. Journalists everywhere read the paper to get a supposedly objective view of the news and to learn what The Times thinks is important. But they aren't getting that kind of view – despite the ads The Times runs proclaiming its attachment to rock-solid truth. A Times former White House and investigative correspondent, Robert M. Smith, discloses how some stories make it to print, some do not, how the filters work, and how the paper may have suppressed the most important U.S. political story of the day—Watergate. Smith shows how the paper stepped into the ring and begun slugging it out with President Trump, instead of staying outside the ring and neutrally reporting what it saw. The book argues that the paper would have been far more effective in countering and exposing the President if it had remained true to its nearly two-hundred-year-old tradition and remained neutral -- that is, remained credible (as it so loudly maintains that it is). The book contends that objectivity on the part of the press might have made people believe the unfavorable things reported about Trump instead of dismissing them as the predictable product of leftist partiality. The book explains how to read the press like an insider. It discloses that The Times assigned Smith to hire a reporter of a particular partisan stripe; that the paper's business journalists refused to cover negative stories about business, and that its Pentagon correspondent refused to cover the My Lai massacre committed by American troops in Vietnam. Written with candor and humor, Suppressed traces a young investigative reporter's arc from naïveté to cynicism, from covering the White House to leaving the paper for Yale Law School and ultimately becoming a barrister in London and teaching at Oxford.