2020-10-29 17:37:25
By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Trump’s re-election campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Va., to launch one.
到了10月初，就连白宫内部人士也认为，特朗普总统的连任竞选需要一场孤注一掷的救援行动。因此，三个总统阵线的人聚集在弗吉尼亚州麦克莱恩的一所房子里，准备发起这样一项行动。
The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
据两位知情人士透露，那是与特朗普总统长子小唐纳德(Donald Trump Jr.)关系密切的纽约公关人士亚瑟·施瓦茨(Arthur Schwartz)的家。来客包括白宫律师埃里克·赫什曼(Eric Herschmann)和前白宫副法律顾问斯特凡·帕萨蒂诺(Stefan Passantino)。
Mr. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Mr. Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner.
赫什曼知道他们要讨论的主题。他曾在今年年初的弹劾审判中代表特朗普出庭，当时他试图转移对总统的指控，手段包括提及亨特·拜登(Hunter Biden)在乌克兰的工作。最近，他的名字一直在白宫的工资单上，工作职责含糊不清，被列为“总统高级顾问”，与贾里德·库什纳(Jared Kushner)关系密切。
The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.
三人把总统连任的希望寄托在第四位客人上，他就是《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)的白宫记者迈克尔·本德(Michael Bender)。他们在那里把东西交给了他：一批详细记录亨特·拜登商业活动的电子邮件，他们还通过免提电话与亨特·拜登的前商业伙伴托尼·博布林斯基(Tony Bobulinski)进行了通话。博布林斯基愿意在《华尔街日报》上发表一则爆炸性声明，称前副总统乔·拜登(Joe Biden)知道儿子的活动，并从中获利。特朗普团队离开时相信《华尔街日报》会公开此事，他们的兴奋之情也传达给了总统。
The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.
特朗普的顾问们认为，《华尔街日报》是一个完美的选择，其文章可能会毁掉拜登的候选资格。该报在报道方面的温和保守主义意味着其新闻版面在整个行业中具有可信度，其读者群比其他重要新闻机构更加右倾。两位知情人士说，该报华盛顿分社社长保罗·贝克特(Paul Beckett)最近在一次记者和编辑的虚拟会议上表示，虽然他知道该报经常向许多支持特朗普的读者提供不受欢迎的新闻，但《华尔街日报》应该保护它在各政治派别中受到普遍信任的独特地位。
As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.
在特朗普团队满怀期待地等待《华尔街日报》的曝光时，该报开展了尽职调查：本德和贝克特将报道交给了备受尊敬的中国问题记者詹姆斯·阿雷迪(James Areddy)，以及跟踪亨特·拜登事件的国会山记者安德鲁·杜伦(Andrew Duehren)。阿雷迪采访了博布林斯基。他们开始起草一篇文章。
Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.
然后事情就乱了套。前纽约市长、现为特朗普总统律师的鲁迪·朱利安尼(Rudy Giuliani)在没有提醒其名义上的盟友的情况下突然现身，为麦克莱恩团队精心布置的阴谋带来了一个小报版本。朱利安尼向鲁珀特·默多克(Rupert Murdoch)新闻集团(News Corp.)旗下的《纽约邮报》(The New York Post)——《华尔街时报》的姊妹刊——交付了一批来源可疑的文件，但其中包含一些与麦克莱恩团队相同的电子邮件。朱利安尼一直在与特朗普前助手史蒂夫·班农(Steve Bannon)合作，后者也开始将部分邮件泄露给他青睐的右翼媒体。令问题复杂化的是，朱利安尼声称这些邮件来自亨特·拜登遗弃的一台笔记本电脑，并拒绝让一些记者检查该电脑，这给整个故事蒙上了一团迷雾——《纽约邮报》的报道也是如此，它声称乔·拜登曾经参与儿子的活动，但是无法证实。
While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.
虽然特朗普团队显然非常忐忑，但《华尔街日报》华盛顿分社的编辑们却在纠结一个核心问题：这些文件或博布林斯基能否证明乔·拜登参与了儿子的游说活动？抑或这又是一个小拜登利用其家族的名字进行交易的故事而已？这是一个非常好的主题，但不是一个新的主题，也不是一个在大选前迫切需要披露的主题。
Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day.
班农说，特朗普和他的盟友希望《华尔街日报》的这篇报道能在10月19日周一发表。这算是竞选活动的晚期，但还不算太晚，而且可能会影响当周的新闻周期，使得这个话题进入周四至关重要的最后一场辩论。当天，特朗普在电话会议上对助手们说，《华尔街日报》即将发表一篇“重要文章”。
His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal.
他的话在《华尔街日报》内部并不受欢迎。
“The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.
“编辑们不喜欢特朗普影射我们是被安排来当打手的，”一名没有直接参与报道的《华尔街日报》记者告诉我。但随着周四辩论的临近，记者们继续写稿，对白宫匆忙的时间表无动于衷。
Finally, Mr. Bobulinski got tired of waiting.
最后，博布林斯基等得不耐烦了。
“He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Mr. Bannon said.
“他担心他们不会发稿，”班农说。
At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings.
周三晚上7点35分，博布林斯基通过电子邮件向多家新闻媒体发送了一份684字的正式声明，说明自己的情况。布莱巴特新闻(Breitbart News)发表了全文。第二天，他作为特朗普的意外嘉宾出现在纳什维尔，出席了辩论。在辩论开始前不到两小时，他向媒体宣读了一份六分钟的声明，详细说明了他对前副总统涉嫌参与其子商业交易的指控。
When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.
当特朗普上台时，总统的表现就好像邮件和指控的细节已经众所周知。“我觉得‘大人物’是你。我不知道，也许不是，”他对拜登说，他指的是那些文件中一句模棱两可的话。
As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.
辩论结束后，《华尔街日报》发表了一篇简短的报道，只是阿雷迪与杜伦报道的梗概。其核心是，博布林斯基未能证明自己的核心主张。“《华尔街日报》查阅的公司记录显示，乔·拜登没有在其中发挥任何作用，”该报道称。
Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement.
当被问及《华尔街日报》对这篇报道的处理方式时，主编马特·默里(Matt Murray)表示，该报不谈论其新闻采集的问题。“我们严谨、可信的新闻报道本身就可以说明问题，”默里在一份电子邮件声明中说。
And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.
如果你一直收看候选人辩论，但并不迷恋福克斯新闻(Fox News)或布莱巴特，你就不会知道特朗普在说什么。特朗普团队希望可以颠覆竞选的故事正在迅速消失。
The gatekeepers return
看门人的回应
The McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation — a far cry from the coordinated “disinformation” machinery feared by liberals.
在麦克莱恩会面那群人试图影响大选，却以失败告终，这在一定程度上再次揭示了特朗普行动的混乱和老套——这与自由派担心的协调作战的“虚假信息”机制相去甚远。
But it’s also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence.
但这也与美国媒体的更大转变有关，长期缺席之后，看门人好像又回来了。
It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn’t. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades.
过去几十年毕竟是令人不知所措的。一切都始于德拉吉报道(Drudge Report)、Gawker和博客开始告诉你那些古板的老报纸和电视台不会告诉你的东西。然后，社交媒体带来的内容洪流冲垮了旧有的路障。
By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn’t control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read — and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn’t mean much.
到2015年，老式的看门人陷入了一种信任危机，他们认为，正如克努特国王(King Canute)无法控制潮汐，他们也无力控制网络上的新闻周期。那年夏天和秋天，很多电视网都让唐纳德·特朗普当上了执行制片人。2016年10月，朱利安·阿桑奇(Julian Assange)和詹姆斯·科米(James Comey)似乎比各大新闻机构更能推动新闻周期。旧媒体和新媒体的许多人物都相信，在新的世界里，读者会自行找到他们想要阅读的信息——因此，编辑和制片人关于是否报道某件事以及给予它多少关注的决定已经没有太大意义。
But the last two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion.
但过去两周发生的事证明了相反的现实：像《华尔街日报》这样的老牌看门人仍在掌控议程。事实证明，维基解密和著名媒体对维基解密的报道是两码事，特朗普的一条推文和报道这条推文的文章不一样，即使《华尔街日报》有暗示乔·拜登做了坏事的观点文章，和没有得出该结论的新闻报道也是不同的。
Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.”
哈佛大学(Harvard University)克曼·克莱因互联网与社会中心(Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society)联合主任约凯·本克勒(Yochai Benkler)制作的一张图表，或许是过去四年中最具影响力的媒体资料。该研究表明，一个密集的新右翼媒体圈已经出现——主流新闻媒体就“围着这一右翼媒体圈设定的议程打转”。
Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer.
班农早就明白这一点。他将自己的策略描述为“锚左转右”，早在执掌布莱巴特新闻时，他就已经想方设法在主流媒体上植入对希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)的攻击。2015年春，当《纽约时报》(The New York Times)和《华盛顿邮报》(Washington Post)提前拿到《克林顿现金》(Clinton Cash)一书的时候，这些媒体的认可权力是显而易见的，该书是作家彼得·施韦泽(Peter Schweizer)对克林顿家族模糊商业、慈善和政治利益的调查。
Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.
施韦泽现在仍在这个圈子里。但你不会在主流媒体中看到他的作品。在本月发表了数篇关于亨特·拜登的文章后，他在布莱巴特的日子也结束了。
And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon’s nightmare, and Mr. Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.
鲍布林斯基没有出现在广受尊敬的《华尔街日报》的版面上，而是出现在布莱巴特声明中的现实，正是班农的噩梦，也是本克勒最美好的愿望。各家主流媒体都不相信亨特·拜登的所作所为与前副总统有直接关系，因此基本都没把这件事放在头版，对特朗普及其盟友对他的对手的说法只做出了持怀疑态度的解释。
“SO USA TODAY DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News.
“所以，《今日美国》(USA Today)不愿在本周刊登我写亨特·拜登的专栏，”保守派作家格伦·雷诺兹(Glenn Reynolds)在10月20日抱怨道，并将文章发到了自己的博客上。当试图把关于亨特·拜登的叙事推到CBS新闻里时，特朗普总统自己也撞了墙。
“This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.
“这是《60分钟》(60 Minutes)节目，我们不能播放无法核实的事情，”莱斯利·斯塔尔(Lesley Stahl)告诉他。然后，特朗普做了和雷诺兹差不多的事情，在自己的博客——Facebook上发布了他这边的采访视频。
The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Mr. Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.
当然，媒体对信息的控制不像过去那样全面了。拥有印刷机和广播信号塔的人并不能真的阻止你去看泄露邮件，或是关于乔·拜登对其子的生意往来知情多少的未经证实的说法。但本克勒的研究表明，尽管有社交媒体的影响，精英媒体设定议程的能力依然存在。
We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant.
我们当然早应该明白这一点。我们许多对Twitter新闻标题满腹牢骚的读者已经明白了。特朗普也一直都明白——他对著名媒体的无休止攻击，可以解读为一种迷恋的表达，一种爱的形式。本周，你就可以听到那些人对背叛的呐喊，多年来他们一直声称传统媒体全是偏见，且根本无关紧要。
“For years, we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press,” wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. “Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.”
“多年来，我们一直尊重甚至敬畏自由媒体神圣不可侵犯的地位，”算不上以崇敬传统媒体著称的右翼评论员达娜·洛施(Dana Loesch)写道，她对拜登的故事没有得到关注表示失望。“现在，当你质疑自由媒体的偏好时，他们就用数字钢笔指着你的喉咙。”
On the other side of the gate
门的另一边
There’s something amusing — even a bit flattering — in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you’ve seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period.
由一场根植于设法诋毁独立媒体的右翼运动发出如此热切的抗议，无疑有些可笑的意味，甚至会觉得受宠若惊。你们也看到近年来许多记者都在强调对信息的控制。在最好的情况下，这种控制也能让一种新流行起来的肮脏伎俩在政治舞台上消失，就像2017年的法国，在法律规定的沉默期开始前，媒体基本忽视了竞选最后关头被黑客泄露的埃马纽埃尔·马克龙(Emmanuel Macron)总统团队的邮件。
But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. “The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it,” my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience.
但我承认，我对看门人的这种报复深感矛盾。在今年3月进入时报工作以前，我的职业生涯都是在门的另一边度过的，把信息传递给大多都在网上的受众，我默认他们已经看到了泄露或谣言的内容，并认为我的工作是引导他们穿过信息丛林，而不是遮蔽他们的眼睛。“媒体崭新而陌生的使命，就是提供一个框架来帮助受众理解他们不可避免会看到的疯狂的、未经审查的、使人无比迷惑的信息——而不是忽视它，”我和（现也在时报工作的）同事约翰·赫尔曼(John Herrman)在2013年写道。2017年，我决定发布未经证实的“斯蒂尔档案”(Steele dossier)，部分原因是看门人正在审查并受其影响，但却不让受众知道。
This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war — a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election’s outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden — a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Mr. Herschmann, Mr. Passantino and Mr. Schwartz weren’t exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience.
这个秋天，顶级媒体和科技行业的高管准备重打上一场战争——类似维基解密那种由外国支持的“攻击和泄露”行动，以试图影响大选结果。正是对此的高度警惕，导致Twitter屏蔽了《纽约邮报》报道亨特·拜登文章的链接——对其他媒体都在谨慎处理的这一新闻，Twitter的反应夸张到可怕。赫什曼、帕桑蒂诺和施瓦茨的阴谋跟维基解密还不太一样。但包括本报在内的许多媒体对亨特·拜登邮件的来源感到特别紧张，很大程度上还是受了维基解密报道经验的影响。
I’d prefer to put my faith in Mr. Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.
我更愿意相信默里和像他一样谨慎专业的记者，而不是社交平台的产品经理和高管。我希望那些对看门人重新确立地位感到欣慰的美国人民也会去关注谁获得了话语权，以及话语权有多集中，并支持新声音对其进行纠正和挑战。
Ben Smith是媒体专栏作家。在担任BuzzFeed News创始主编八年后，他于2020年加入《纽约时报》。创办BuzzFeed之前，他曾为Politico、《纽约每日新闻》、《纽约观察家》和《纽约太阳报》报道政治相关内容。欢迎在Twitter上关注他：@benyt
翻译：Harry Wong、晋其角
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