Six minutes into the newest episode of PBS’s weekly public affairs show Firing Line, there was a surprising admission from guest Sam Tanenhaus, whose 1,000-page authorized biography of conservative icon William F. Buckley has been published after a long gestation period.
Buckley, who died in 2008, famously founded and hosted Firing Line between 1966 and 1999. The program was relaunched in 2018 featuring President Herbert Hoover's great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover, but seeing as how she's the wife of failed Democratic congressional candidate John Avlon, it has not retained its conservative perspective.
Hoover talked to Tanenhaus on Friday for the second part of a discussion of his somewhat positive biography of Buckley. At this moment below, Hoover was going negative, but Tanenhaus began down a surprising path:
HOOVER: You're not hesitant to criticize his lapses in journalistic integrity or journalistic diligence, I will just say, and ethics. He took the word of Pinochet that he hadn’t murdered thousands of people. He hid information about Watergate from his audience and from Congress. Are there echoes of this attitude towards journalism and facts in media today?
TANENHAUS: I think so. One of the --
HOOVER: Is it specific only to conservative media?
TANENHAUS: -- no, I would say not, actually. I think it's a lesson the left needs to learn as much as the right. I'll give you an example of that.
Tanenhaus brought a welcome helping of reality to the liberal PBS viewership with his recent history lesson: "I think the year 2020 is one that's going to reverberate in our history for a long time. It feels to me a little bit like 1968, one of those watershed years of violence and militarism, militancy. And we know how a lot of liberal publications, including my former publication, The New York Times, treated what were serious uprisings in some of the major cities in this country, rather what they didn't report about them."
Hoover stood up for her friends on the left, wondering "why didn't they report about them."
But Tanenhaus remained undeterred and delivered the punchline by blasting the left's "mostly peaceful" moniker. But check out how it's Hoover -- the alleged Republican -- who comes to the woke mob's defense (and nevermind their rank hypocrisy on mass gatherings amid the pandemic):
TANENHAUS: They didn't report the attacks on shopkeepers, often black shopkeepers, right, black Americans owning shops, seeing their businesses destroyed. There was not a lot of reporting on that. A notorious phrase that conservatives pick up and you'll probably be familiar with was when The Times described some of the events as ‘mostly peaceful,’ right? That phrase has not gone away.
HOOVER: Yeah, there were demonstrations across the country that were mostly peaceful.
TANENHAUS: That's a meaningful phrase. So, yes, it's the left as much as the right…..
Tanenhaus edited the New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013 and was a fierce and misleading critic of conservatism. That dubious history made his unbidden criticism of his former employer all the more surprising: Who would have thought the phrase “peaceful protest” would have even been uttered as part of a media critique by a liberal on PBS?
The Times did favor "mostly peaceful" and the similar euphemism “largely peaceful” as a description of 2020 rioting, while CNN could also claim “mostly peaceful” thanks to a notorious chyron that aired August 26, 2020 under a report about rioting after a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin: “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING".
