I smell a rat, as would anyone who’s spent years in one newsroom or another, where every reporter has a half-finished novel hidden in the bottom drawer.
This feels like fiction, the preposterous notion that an unnamed White House official has spilled the beans on Trump “to thwart the president’s misguided impulses.”
He’s been published “anonymously” and, we are told, is part of a resistance movement within the White House to surreptitiously stop the president from ruining the country.
That’s the gist of the op-ed topping The New York Times Wednesday edition…a story swiftly picked up in bold print everywhere else and taken to be true…true that this tattling columnist is really a White House official.
In fact…amazing… that I’ve heard no one else wonder about another possibility; that this snitch came from outside the White House.
He was someone from inside The New York Times itself, a staffer…which is my guess. Can the Times prove otherwise?
If so. Hello? I’m here.
Unleash, unbind that imposter, and for once tell the truth.
I cannot be the only writer who sees through this stunt. We’re talking about the Times, fake news central.
Even Fox News, while properly ripping the Times, believes the “White House Official” gambit. So does everyone.
Or with so much garbage-for-news being sloshed our way, from everywhere, perhaps it is understandable that we have become entirely cynical, or gullible to a fault.
I know news. I know newsrooms. I’ve written two thrillers on the subject and you are welcome to open your eyes here and here. I know the business.
I know a slow day in the newsroom until someone says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
The only question is – who got the assignment? I can think of 10 columnists over there who would love to use their untested novelistic skills for such a plumb.
Keep the novel in the drawer, but try your hand at fiction passing as fact, Charlie.
We all know the Times, which will say anything to destroy Trump. Anything and everything – and this doozy is being presented as Sui Generis, the final word, the ultimate expose’.
Beat that, says the Times.
Strangely, no byline. I cannot say that this is a first. But I cannot remember any story, anywhere, a story intended to be so damaging, running as Anonymous.
I do not know what we call it today. They used to call it Yellow Journalism.
That’s how smut tabloids still operate, but I doubt that even the National Enquirer would run such a hoax.
I’m calling it a hoax because the tag-team effect is plain obvious, from last week’s anti-Trump “bombshells” being dropped through Bob Woodward’s book on Trump, which delighted CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS, until it got old. You can stretch a story only so far. Even for Liberals there’s a limit to Trump bashing. Got to be.
I take that back.
No, it’s never enough…and when one story gets old…here comes another one…even juicier.
What’s for next week? They’ll think of something. On that you can trust The New York Times.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and most recently the noir novel “Slot Attendant,” plus the two inside journalism thrillers “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “News Anchor Sweetheart, Hollywood Edition.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
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