Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via AP
President Biden delivers a prime-time speech in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, September 1, 2022.
For people of goodwill and good sense, I think the hardest thing to deal with in present-day American politics is the sense of hopelessness it inspires. Our democracy barely survived four years under a presidency that rotted from the head down, and the head was an insane, traitorous, sociopathic, and lawless combination con man/conspiracy nut with zero relevant experience who liked to brag about grabbing women “by the pussy.” We (just barely) managed to elect a sane, decent, deeply experienced man with moderate-but-empathetic politics. And yet it remains a toss-up whether we will return to power a man determined to destroy literally everything democratic (and most of what is competent) in our system of government.
There are countless culprits in this story, but I like to focus on the media, so let’s take a look at the response to President Biden’s speech last week in which he tried to warn people who were not paying sufficient attention to the threat, and quite specifically laid out the target, careful not to cast too wide a net or overstate his case.
What happened? Well, as The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi notes, the television networks (at first) ignored it entirely. ABC went with a game show, Press Your Luck; NBC, with a rerun of Law and Order; and CBS picked a rerun of Young Sheldon. On cable, CNN and MSNBC ran it, but Fox ran Trump’s fellow fascist wannabe, Tucker Carlson.
When they reported on the speech, the networks amplified the Trump cult’s hypocritical whining about how mean and hurtful the president had been. The most egregious offender, at least on network television, may have been Martha Raddatz of ABC News’s This Week program, who both encouraged and then participated in what turned out to be a veritable propaganda video for lies in the service of the Trump Republicans’ feigned outrage. Speaking to the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, Raddatz falsely insisted that Biden called every Trump voter a threat to democracy when, in fact, he specifically insisted that “to be very clear—very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”
Raddatz then gave free rein to McCaul to purposely mislead the program’s millions of viewers. After quoting Trump uncritically terming the FBI and the Department of Justice “vicious monsters,” she invited McCaul’s meandering into whataboutism: “I think the perception is what a lot of Republicans I know see on the heels of the Russian investigation, the Steele dossier. There’s a certain ‘distrust but verify’ attitude when it comes to the Department of Justice and the FBI,” McCaul said. Next came a completely nonsensical and dishonest defense of Trump’s clear crimes: “I have lived in the classified world most of my professional career, I personally wouldn’t do that. But I’m not the president of the United States. But he has a different set of rules that apply to him. The president can declassify a document on a moment’s notice.” As numerous people have pointed out, while the notion is ridiculous, it would have been far worse if Trump had, somehow, declassified these supersecret documents (which include details of a foreign country’s nuclear program), because they would then be available to anyone through a Freedom of Information Act request. Nobody should know that better than the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Do I even need to type the words “But her emails …”)
Reporters everywhere were shocked—Captain Renault style—that the president criticized the people who had been speaking of his party as one run by pedophiles, etc. NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid tweeted, “This is clearly a political, campaign speech. It’s clear who/what this speech is about. In the first 3 minutes, President Biden said Donald Trump—by name—twice.” Heaven forfend! “Whatever you think of this speech, the military is supposed to be apolitical,” tweeted CNN anchor Brianna Keilar. “Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that. It’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it.”
Trump, of course, gave many speeches with Marines in the background. Matthew Sheffield helpfully noted that “Trump called Democrats ‘fascists’ in ’20 while surrounded by military officials.” As Chris Hayes noted, the reason Trump “got basically zero coverage” was that “it was completely par for the course for Trump.” No one remembers those events because Trump’s comments are routinely inflammatory hysteria, and Dems didn’t feel threatened by his false claim.
Trump also did his damnedest to show the reporters how stupid they were being by going full—what is the right word here—um, “Trump” in a speech in Pennsylvania just two days afterward, claiming that the Democratic candidate for Senate from that state, John Fetterman, supports taxpayer-funded drug dens and the complete decriminalization of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and ultra-lethal fentanyl. “By the way, he takes them himself,” Trump said, before going on in that vein all night, calling, for instance, the FBI and Justice Department not only “vicious monsters,” as noted above, but also “controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers, and the media, who tell them what to do.”
Above a big-think article on this entire phenomenon, the awful New York Times headline writers went for a permanent place in the “Both Sides” Hall of Fame: “Parties’ Divergent Realities Challenge Biden’s Defense of Democracy” over an article that, beginning in its eighth paragraph, actually began to tell the truth:
The Republicans’ reaction to Mr. Biden’s speech was remarkable. For years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone who disagreed with him—encouraging supporters to beat up protesters; demanding that his rivals be arrested; accusing critics of treason and even murder; calling opponents “fascists”; and retweeting a supporter saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.
The Times went on: “When it comes to democracy in America, there is no real equivalence, of course. The elder Mr. Trump sought to use the power of his office to overturn a democratic election, pressuring state and local officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own vice president to disregard the will of the people to keep him in office. When that did not work, he riled up a crowd that stormed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes and threatening to execute those standing in Mr. Trump’s way.”
And on: “Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has continued to demand that the election be reversed and even suggested that he be reinstated as president, all based on lies he tells his supporters about what happened in 2020. He has forced Republican officeholders and candidates to embrace his false claims and sought to install election deniers in state positions where they can influence future vote counts.”
Speaking of CNN, the network did its damnedest to prove previous Altercations here and here prescient. One CNN panel member compared a Trump rally speaker supporting literal Nazis to the background of Biden’s speech featuring a U.S. Marine as both being “issues with optics.” The network’s Poppy Harlow demanded to know of Biden’s spokesperson whether the president will “apologize” to the Republicans. Another CNN reporter felt it necessary for some reason to repost a four-month-old article about Hunter Biden’s laptop as if it were somehow news.
But the real news at CNN could be found in the HR department. The network cut loose its longtime White House correspondent John Harwood, who still had years left on his contract. In his final appearance on the network, Harwood called Trump a “dishonest demagogue,” and went on to explain: “We are brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements.”
As if to make the intended Foxification of CNN clear, days later, its president Chris Licht announced the hiring of John Miller to be CNN’s “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” He neglected to mention that when Miller served as deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism with the New York Police Department, Miller testified at a March 2022 city council hearing that there was “no evidence” that the NYPD ever spied on Muslims in mosques after 9/11.
This was a lie. As the AP reported, the NYPD “built an aggressive domestic intelligence program after the Sept. 11 attacks that put Muslim businesses, mosques and student groups under scrutiny.” It “systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents.” Councilmember Shahana Hanif called for Miller to be investigated for perjury, but instead he will apparently be free to continue in the grand CNN tradition of the network’s former contributor, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. And that was back in the days when the network was allegedly dominated by liberal shills. (I sure hope the invaluable Daniel Dale still has a job and is on the case …)
Finally, I have no space for this but read this article to prepare yourself for Politico to go (even further) in the directions described above.
I have no room for this either, but here’s more evidence, from Aspen, Colorado, that oligarchic media power is incompatible with democracy. Also, here is an excellent L.A. Times piece on why this phenomenon is so dangerous.
Given what a bad mood I’ve just put everyone in, how about Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”; Patsy Cline with “I Fall to Pieces”; and all of it topped off with John Prine and Iris DeMent on “In Spite of Ourselves.”
