Rhetoric, Lies, and the Media: A Quintilian Perspective on Modern Journalism

March 30, 2025 by Roger Kimball

Photo: TV news studio ready for filming. Tv news anchor sitting in his place and two camera men silhouettes in front of him.

The media distorts reality, twisting Trump’s actions into tyranny while excusing its own abuses—an artful exercise in deception and bias.

Where’s Quintilian when you need him? The author of the twelve-volumeInstitutio Oratoria (c. AD 95) knew all there was to know about rhetoric, “the art,” as Aristotle said, “of persuasion.” Quintilian’s chief concern was with turning out able and virtuous orators. But in the course of his inquiries, he also analyzed the workings of deceitful or fraudulent oratory. What a rich hunting ground our dishonest media today would have given the old Roman!

It is amusing to speculate on what Quintilian might have made of The New York Times, for example, a recent story in our former paper of record titled “Elon Musk Is South African. We Shouldn’t Forget It.” Musk left his native South Africa in the late 1980s. He never looked back. But according to the Times, Musk was irredeemably tainted by the racial policies of South Africa. He is, the Times informed its readers, “a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa.” Really?

What follows is an extraordinary web of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies. Quintilian would have delighted in explaining how it all works.

He would also have found much to work with in “Trump’s Assault on Elites Encompasses Almost Every Aspect of American Life,” Stephen Collinson’s recent essay for CNN. Considered simply as an exercise in mendacious rhetoric, it deserves some sort of prize. I think of it as Mary McCarthy thought of Lillian Hellmann. When asked by Dick Cavett what she found to be dishonest about Hellmann, McCarthy said, “Everything. I once said in an interview that everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

So it is with Collinson’s flaccid but scuttling effort to attack Donald Trump.

The master word of Collinson’s essay is “elite.” Trump, he writes, has embarked on a “multi-front assault on what supporters see as an elite establishment, using raw presidential power to bend the government, law, media, public health, foreign policy, education and even the arts to his will.” Two points. By “elite,” Collinson really means “credentialed.” The establishment that Trump is attacking is not elite in the way that an elite sports or military team is “elite.” The latter is elite because of its skill and its achievement. The former is “elite” merely because of its high place in the metabolism of social and financial privilege.

The second point revolves around the word “raw.” When Trump acts, Collinson implies, it is not through power legitimately invested in him by Article II of the Constitution. No, it is “raw,” i.e., somehow suspect or illegitimate presidential power.

Donald Trump was elected with a convincing mandate for change. In particular, he was elected with a mandate to restore our Southern border and immigration policy. He was also elected to bring fiscal and ideological sanity to the government. Government spending has been wildly out of control. Trump was elected to fix that. Racial, sexual, and anti-Semitic extremism have, with government connivance, been allowed to run rampant. Trump was also elected to dismantle those divisive and ultimately un-American initiatives. In just two scant months, he has made extraordinary inroads on all fronts.

But to read Stephen Collinson, you would think that Trump is a dictator who is dismantling the Republic. “Trump left no doubt in last year’s campaign that he’d use executive authority to seek retribution against his political enemies,” Collinson writes. “But his attempt to transform America’s politics and culture is far broader than a personal revenge trip.”

What do you think of those two sentences? I think poorly of them. First, Trump never suggested he would “seek retribution against his political enemies.” What he said was that, if elected, he would seek “retribution” for the many people harassed, attacked, indicted, incarcerated, or otherwise punished by an out-of-control bureaucracy and Department of Justice. Moreover, Collinson’s talk of Trump’s activities being “far broader than a personal revenge trip” slyly assumes that we can take it for granted that Trump’s actions are at the very least part of “a personal revenge trip.”

The real message of Collinson’s essay, and the entire worldview for which he speaks, can be paraphrased as: “Only we are allowed to do such things! We can attack our ideological opponents, thus distorting the rule of law and social comity. But any effort to resist those depredations and restore the rule of law is illegitimate because we alone have the authority to do such things.” It’s nice work if you can get it

Collinson accurately registers the speed and thoroughness of Trump’s efforts to restore the country. But he completely misstates Trump’s intentions. For example, he manages to write about Trump’s intervention at Columbia University without once mentioning anti-Semitism. “The White House,” Collinson writes, “forced Columbia University to restrict demonstrations, review its Middle East curriculum, ban masks in protests, and stiffen law enforcement. Other top educational institutions now feel vulnerable to possible attempts to impose Trump dogma.”

How many things are wrong with these statements? First, the White House did not force Columbia to do anything. It merely said that if they wanted federal funds, they had to stop anti-Semitic demonstrations on campus and hold accountable those who had been guilty of such actions. As for other “top educational institutions” feeling “vulnerable,” wasn’t that the point—to reform those institutions?

The “Trump dogma” Collinson invokes is the “dogma” that rampant ideological harassment, which has long been a growth industry at tony colleges and universities, will no longer be tolerated. In other words, the “dogma” is to insist that dogmatic indoctrination is out and traditional humane values are in.

I have just scratched the surface of Collinson’s unhinged diatribe. He goes on to castigate Trump for opposing district court judges who wish to usurp the power of the executive branch—this he calls an effort “to disempower . . . the federal judiciary”—and winds up in Russia Collusion Hoax territory. The administration’s actions, he writes, “have dark parallels to the tactics of strongman leaders whose assaults on academia, the media, the law, and business led to the shriveling of basic freedoms, democracy, and the proliferation of oligarchical corruption.”

The poster child for all these bad things is Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Yes, Orbán is “a hero of the MAGA movement,” as Collinson says. But have we seen the “shriveling” of “basic freedoms, democracy, and the proliferation of oligarchical corruption” in Hungary? Have we seen such things in this country under Donald Trump? Or is it in fact the case that under Trump “basic freedoms,” such as freedom of speech and freedom from censorship, have undergone an important recrudescence while “oligarchical corruption” is being systematically routed out by Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency?

There is a lot more that might be said about Collinson’s exercise in anti-Trump hysteria. From one perspective, a careful reading is a prophylactic exercise, valuable for the immunization it provides against politicized cant. From another perspective, it leaves one with that Mary McCarthy feeling that one has just been marinated in a rhetoric in which every word, including “and” and “the,” is a lie.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).