The link to the C-SPAN video said that it was a hearing on protecting journalists' sources. A noble cause, I thought, so I clicked on it.

Ominous Portent No. 1: It was a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee—Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman, who was also in attendance and free to question witnesses.

Ominous Portent No. 2: The subcommittee was chaired by Rep. Chip Roy, Republican of Texas.

Ominous Portent No. 3: The witnesses.

Okay, so the woman from Columbia J-school was not scary, and neither was the woman from SAG-AFTRA. But the other two, Sharyl Attkisson and Catherine Herridge—well, you could almost hear the spark gap sizzle between the two of them and the Republicans on the subcommittee. Both of them have proclaimed martyrdom at the hands of the Sanhedrin at CBS News. Attkisson has a long track record of vaccine denialism and, before that, Benghazi "blockbusters" that fizzled. Most famously, she claimed that the Obama administration had hacked her laptop (and her phone and her TV and her house alarm). She released a video purported to show the hack in action, deleting material on a Word document. Security experts blamed the deletions on a stuck delete key. Writing in Vox, Timothy B. Lee tried to make sense of it all:

It's not crazy to think a US government agency might hack a journalist's laptop. The agency certainly has the technical ability to hack peoples' computers (though I don't know of any cases of American journalists being targeted). But the larger problem with Attkisson's story is that she doesn't seem able to distinguish evidence of hacking from the kind of routine technical glitches that everyone suffers….
Hacking a computer usually doesn't cause it to emit a "reeeeeeeeeee" sound, as Attkisson says two of her computers did. There's no particular reason why having your home network hacked would cause your digital television to "spontaneously jitter, mute, and freeze-frame," as she said happened to her. And there's not much reason to think the extraneous cable she found attached to her FiOS box was placed there by a US intelligence agency…. It seems more likely that she suffered from garden variety technical glitches that had nothing to do with government surveillance. And strangely, the security expert Attkisson says confirmed her allegations has refused to talk to the Washington Post about it, citing a confidentiality agreement. This doesn't inspire confidence.

As for Herridge, she migrated to CBS News from the intelligence beat at Fox, and once there, things went pretty much the way you would have expected them to go. She pushed dark theories about how “deep state” moles were employed by the Obama administration against the Trump administration once the White House changed hands. She proved to be a reliable mouthpiece for Republicans who were trying to sabotage any investigation into the Russian ratf*cking of that campaign. She was part of a mass layoff at Paramount CBS, and CBS News then made a clumsy mistake by seizing her files. Eventually, they were returned, but the network’s action cemented Herridge’s place on the conservative calendar of martyrs. It also got her this tender moment with Rep. Jordan this past Thursday. Jordan may have set a land speed record for leading questions.

Jordan: Ms. Herridge, you wrote stories critical of the Biden administration, is that true?
Herridge: That's fair.
Jordan: I mean, you wrote a number of stories about the laptop issue, about Hunter Biden, about the Biden family, the Biden businesses.
Herridge: Congressman, I reported out the facts of the story.
Jordan: You sure did. You reported the facts.
Herridge: I called balls and strikes.
Jordan: You sure did. You reported the facts. And then CBS fired you, is that right?
Herridge: My position was terminated, yes.
Jordan: And you’re an award-winning journalist. How long had you worked at CBS?
Herridge: I worked at CBS News four and half years. During that period we won major awards. I was part of an Emmy-winning team. I was nominated for investigative Emmys. I think the most important projects or projects that drove legislation here on the Hill that positively impacted a million veterans.
Jordan: You’re an award-winning journalist, won all kinds of awards, had worked there almost five years, had extensive experience at a different major network prior to that where you also were an award-winning journalist and all did kinds of reporting critical of the government there as well…

(The other “major network” to which Jordan was referring, but which went curiously unnamed by him, was Fox News. I leave it to the individual judgment of the reader to decide whether Fox News is a “major” network.)

Jordan: …And then you get fired. But it's worse than that, isn’t it, because they didn't just fire you, did they? What else did they do?

And here is where the full Passion of Catherine Herridge is uncorked:

Herridge: On February 13, when I was told on a Zoom call that my employment was terminated, I was locked out of my emails and I was locked out of the office. CBS News seized hundreds of pages of my reporting files, including confidential source information.
Jordan: And that’s not normal, is it?
Herridge: No, that's not been my experience in the other two networks that I’ve worked at, or with my colleagues at CBS News. When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes the reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism.

First of all, I doubt any newsroom run by Walter Cronkite would ever have hired anyone from Fox News. Second, this sounds like the kind of ruthless termination that is more than common in the average major American corporation, which has the collective conscience of a Gaboon viper. But let us return to Rep. Jordan’s regularly scheduled hallucinations.

Jordan: Yes, it sure is. It seems to me there's a pattern developing here. You're critical of the government in Ms. Attkisson’s situation and, shazam! They start doing all kinds of strange things to your phone lines, to your computer. You're critical of the government at a major news organization and you are an award-winning journalist, you been there five years, you get fired. But it's not just you get fired, and maybe there's nothing to that. But what we do know is that they seize your documents and that's scary as well. You talk about a chilling effect on the First Amendment. I don't see how it could be more chilling.

At this point, it's probably futile to try to clear up for Jordan the difference between government action and private corporation action. Thousands of journalists who don't get invited to air their gripes before Congress have had brutal crash courses in that distinction over the past two decades. Maybe he could ask them for some notes.

What bothered me so much is that there are legitimate reasons for that hearing that go far beyond the gruntlement of two people pitching themselves as conservative martyrs to the likes of Jim Jordan. There is a war on the press going on in this country because there is a war on the truth going on in this country. The art of political spin has outdistanced the conventions of political journalism as graphically as the improvement of technology has outdistanced the pad and the pencil. The issues arising from this crisis are far too important to be used as a political hobbyhorse by the likes of Jim Jordan, who's made a career out of peddling phony scandals to cover up for real ones, and peddling them to mock journalists at ideological puppet shows until the dark fables percolate up into the general political zeitgeist. And we get hearings into how the Deep Web is hacking home security devices.

The PRESS Act—Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression—was the ostensible reason for the hearing in question. It is a measure that essentially would establish a national shield law for journalists. The bill itself has garnered bipartisan support. It was introduced in the House by Democrat Jamie Raskin. According to an explanation provided by the office of Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon,

Specifically, the PRESS Act would shield journalists from court-ordered disclosure of information about a source and what the source told them unless disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent, or to identify any perpetrator of, an act of terrorism against the United States, or necessary to prevent the threat of imminent violence, significant bodily harm, or death.

The act passed the House resoundingly back in January. And if the paranoid fantasies of the MAGA faction helped push it over the top, well, it's further validation of what Drew Pearson's fictional President Ben Hannaford said: In America, the right things always get done for the wrong reasons.

Someday, one hopes, the Republican Party, or something like it, will jettison the 20th Century movement conservatism that has driven it insane and driven the republic to the brink, time and time again, economically, environmentally, and now, at last, governmentally. Somewhere in the maelstrom of the Congress, a good piece of legislation is stranded, doomed by its own utility as a weapon of foolishness.

This article originally appeared in the Last Call with Charles P. Pierce newsletter on April 6, 2024.

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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.