Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Supporters of President Donald Trump wait for his arrival at a campaign rally at Capital Region International Airport, October 27, 2020, in Lansing, Michigan.
A few things to keep in mind:
- President Biden is pretty popular (more so than Trump was at any time during his presidency).
- His coronavirus stimulus program is even more so.
- Republicans have no program of their own to offer save for their cultish fealty to their insane king. (Recall they could not even come up with a party platform last year.)
So when The New York Times publishes articles with headlines that read like this one in Thursday’s edition—“Republicans Won Blue-Collar Votes. They’re Not Offering Much in Return”—they are missing quite a few points simultaneously. This subhed—“Party leaders want to capitalize on Donald Trump’s appeal to the white working class. But in recent weeks, they’ve offered very little to advance working people’s economic interests”—deserves a Golden Globe award in the category of cluelessness. At what point in history, pre- or post-Donald Trump, did the modern Republican Party “advance working people’s economic interests”? Have the Times journalists, their editors, headline (or subhed) writers ever heard of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, or Trump himself? Good God, as far as working people’s economic interests go, it has been the party of “Let them eat rhetoric,” one that unashamedly enriches the rich and impoverishes tens of millions. What’s changed primarily is the brazenness on both ends of this bad bargain, as with Trump’s trillion-dollar giveaway to the wealthy coupled with his ratcheting up of the hate that his party and its proponents in the media sell as a sop to the suckers. Everyone at the Times presumably knows this, but they publish this crap to try to protect themselves from working-the-ref-style attacks from the right. It never works, but it never stops just the same.
ANOTHER PIECE OF PUZZLEMENT I’m reading this week is this Washington Post piece explaining that “Fox News once banned its hosts from speaking at partisan events. Then it went all in on CPAC.” It would be more accurate to say, “Fox News always pretended to ban its hosts from speaking at partisan events, though it never really did. Now it’s pretending a little less.” The mainstream media consistently treats Fox as if there were some golden era when it was not dedicated to lying, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and occasionally violence against liberals and vulnerable members of society (even if it was run by sex criminals), and has now, all of a sudden corrupted itself. My good friend Jane Mayer is universally acknowledged to be one of the most valuable journalists alive, and she wrote an excellent piece on Fox two years ago, but she pitched it in this same misguided frame.
In the Post, Paul Farhi termed the high-profile presence of Fox personalities at CPAC last week “unusual. [D]isturbing to some experts in journalistic ethics—was the Republican conference’s conspicuous affiliation with Fox, an ostensibly nonpartisan news network.” He added that “[t]he network disciplined two of its biggest stars, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, after they appeared onstage at a rally for President Donald Trump in 2018—although it didn’t say what their punishment was.” My guess is that their punishment took the form of raises, as both were special favorites of Trump. Anyway, we’ve been to this movie before and it always ends the same way. Here is what I said about it in Lying in State:
Just before the 2018 midterm elections, the Trump campaign website announced that Hannity would be appearing onstage with Trump at a preelection rally. Hannity immediately sent out a tweet refuting the announcement: “I will not be on the stage campaigning with the president,” he said. It was Fox’s stated policy not to allow its anchors to show such open partisanship, and of course Hannity pretended to be an independent voice on his program. But hours later, Hannity was up there onstage with the president, conclusively demonstrating that any protestations he might have made to defend his—and Fox’s—journalistic independence were nonsense. (In fact, Fox hosts regularly appeared at political and fundraising events for Republican candidates. A December 2019 Washington Post article noted, among the many other examples, that “[Jeanine] Pirro, the host of the weekly Fox News program ‘Justice With Judge Jeanine,’ appeared at an event hosted by the Volusia County Republican Party in Daytona Beach, Fla., last month [November 2019]. The keynote speaker at the gathering was Dan Bongino, a regular Fox contributor and sometime fill-in host for Hannity. Another Fox contributor, Tomi Lahren, keynoted the event in 2018. The next week, Pirro appeared at a fundraiser staged by the Seminole County Republican Party outside Orlando.” The article also noted that the network said it did not “condone” such appearances, something its spokespeople said whenever asked about its hosts’ “apparently routine” practice—the Post’s words—of flouting its own alleged regulations.)
The author of that piece I quoted? Paul Farhi.
IN RELATED NON-NEWS, I read in The Daily Beast that “Fox News Insiders [are] Rag[ing] Against Hiring ‘Mini Goebbels’ Kayleigh McEnany”:
“It’s truly disgusting they fired hard-working journalists who did care about facts and news reporting only to turn around and hire a mini-Goebbels whose incessant lies from the White House helped incite an insurrection on our democracy that got five people killed, including a police officer,” a Fox News insider raged to The Daily Beast. “Post-Trump Fox is quickly becoming a very scary place and quite dangerous for our democracy. It’s not even conservative news anymore. They’ve plunged into an alternate reality where extremist propaganda is the only course on the menu.”
We don’t like to use profanity on Altercation, but if you are a “Fox News insider,” you should really take your paycheck home and STFU about journalistic ethics or propriety. This brave soul gets extra points for anonymity and the Beast a few of its own for bestowing it to no purpose. Here’s another anonymous quote from someone who, to reverse one of my favorite phrases, should actually quit his or her day job and go into stand-up comedy: “It bothers me in that it is basically a slap in the face to the hardworking journalists that value real news and facts”—as if Fox News’s devotion to real news and facts was real and factual.
It’s easy (and necessary) to make fun of Fox, and all the more important to point out when other news organizations treat it as a legitimate news source or adopt its practices of deliberate deception for the purposes of advancing the interest of right-wing Republican lies. So maybe now is a good time to remember that it was originally CNN’s Jeff Zucker who hired pathological liar McEnany, who had a pre–White House stint on CNN alongside Jeffrey Lord, when she was just a pretty young law student, for the purpose of lying on Trump’s behalf. Here’s how Zucker justified the hires of these unqualified (in both senses of the word) liars: “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’” he said. “But you know what? They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.” The notion that this somehow justified their lies and the lunatic conspiracy theories they passed along to viewers unchallenged on behalf of a man who would go on to call honest reporting “fake news” is something to keep in mind the next time you hear CNN bragging about its alleged commitment to “straight news.”
Remember, also, that McEnany rose to prominence, and presumably attracted Zucker’s attention, thanks to her Twitter feed. Back in 2012, she tweeted that she would enjoy watching a TV series called “How I Met Your Brother” and then followed up with the hilarious observation “Never mind, forgot he’s still in that hut in Kenya,” adding the hashtag “#ObamaTVShows.” She is today perhaps most famous for the tweet “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn’t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?” which apparently got her the job as Trump’s press secretary. I don’t know why the great journalists at Fox are so upset; after all, I read in the Daily News, upon her appointment, that she is just a “soft-spoken Bible-loving conservative rising star.” And I learned in The New York Times that her “energetic spinning of the administration’s struggle against the coronavirus” has earned “grudging respect for her sheer doggedness.” I also learned from Axios’s Mike Allen that she had promised, “I will never lie to you,” and I read the same thing in a Times headline. (Note: The Times headline writers appear much more eager to suck up to Trump and company than are its journalists, as in this story, which was pretty good, but belied by its misleading headline.) And yes, I get it. These are what’s known among journalists as “source-greasers.” But they are also evidence that the mainstream media never (never) faced up to who and what they were dealing with until, very briefly, on January 6, and then forgot again. Anyway, you can expect Ms. McEnany to make a lot of money speaking at Republican and other partisan events, and Fox to promise to really, definitely, totally punish her for that … next time.
I DO THIS ONCE A WEEK (as you know if you are subscribing). Eric Boehlert has an excellent Substack which does so every day. He took care of Maureen Dowd’s typically terrible column here and there’s more where that comes from. I like it when Maureen gets attention for her terribleness, and I like to think I was there early with a column I wrote ten years ago. It’s one of my favorites, so please indulge me and read it here, especially if you are what Brian Morton calls a “Dylanist.”
Cancel culture update: I hear (because I do not watch) that the big news on Fox this week is all about Dr. Seuss and “cancel culture.” It’s not like there was anything else to talk about. Anyway, I’ve not looked into the racist drawings, and I’m sure they’re bad and all, but speaking of the good doctor, Michael Kazin wrote a nice piece in Dissent a mere 20 years ago called “The Seussian Left.” Unless you have access to some sort of database, you probably can’t get it. But the upshot is “Burn!” on Fox, yet again. The dude they are defending was a raging leftist.
And anti–cancel culture heroine Bari Weiss warns us in a piece not entitled “The Protocols of the Meetings of Learned Elders’ Zealous Cabals” that “[t]oday’s taboos, on the other hand, are often fringe ideas pushed by a zealous cabal trying to redefine what is acceptable and what should be shunned. It is a group that has control of nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life: media, to be sure, but also higher education, museums, publishing houses, marketing and advertising outfits, Hollywood, K-12 education, technology companies and, increasingly, corporate human resource departments.” Ask yourselves: Just who does it sound like Ms. Weiss is accusing in her attack on this “zealous cabal” that dare not speak its name?
Save this column: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Feven Merid profiles Marc Lacey, who CJR says “has been tipped as a possible successor to Dean Baquet,” as executive editor of The New York Times. I don’t know who will succeed Baquet. My guess would be Clifford Levy, but it’s just a guess. But I have a guess who will succeed Baquet’s successor: Ezra Klein. You read it here first (or second, or third. I don’t know, maybe I read it somewhere else. Who can keep up these days?).
A couple of updates: Update on Facebook’s overall evilness and promotion of the kind of violence that caused the House of Representatives to shut down on Thursday, here.
Update on everything Donald Trump has to worry about, slammer-wise, here.
A few words about TV (and Israel): Speaking, as we were, of zealous cabals, I really enjoyed and appreciated the intelligence and overall spookiness of Apple TV’s terrific Israeli series Losing Alice. Interestingly, it’s made in Israel and the language is Hebrew, but there’s no hint of Jewishness or even that it is taking place in Israel anywhere in the eight episodes (which means that it goes without saying that you also see no Arabs). That seems a smart marketing strategy, but also a sad example of how culturally isolated Israel is making itself. After all, my other favorite show, Call My Agent, could not be more obviously French if it was an adulterous affair that was cool with everyone involved (or was a surrender to Germany).
But back to Apple TV for a moment: The Morning Show got beat up a great deal when it was first released because it was, if I’m not mistaken, the most expensive per-episode show ever produced. What was missed was the fact that it was also really good (and demonstrated what a terrific actress Jennifer Aniston has morphed into). I think one of the reasons journalists were so sour on it was how true it was, relative to the fairy tales they like to carry around about themselves. Over at Public Seminar, Claire Potter wrote about its portrayal of workplace sexual harassment and credits the usually delightful Reese Witherspoon.
One last TV thing: I’ve not seen much written about another Israeli show, Valley of Tears, which takes place during the opening days of the 1973 war in the Golan Heights. In many ways, it’s amazing and can be quite punishing in terms of its (relatively) realistic portrayal of war. It also brings to light the routine discrimination in Israeli society against Mizrahi (Arab) Jews. In other (mostly political) ways, it’s sadly lacking. (Unpacking that would take another 3,000 words, sorry.) But if the topic interests you, it’s intense and worth your time (on HBO Max).
Odds and (finally) ends: Here is Roberta Flack singing “What’s Going On,” which apparently has just been discovered by the good people at Rhino.
Here is Dave Alvin singing in the Victor Krummenacher–directed video for “On The Way Downtown,” in memory of Gene Taylor, Chris Gaffney, and Amy Farris. It’s on Dave’s new album, From an Old Guitar: Rare and Unreleased Recordings.
Also, if you are unaware of this, my friends John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey will improve your pandemic life for sure with their Radio Deluxe program. You can start with their recent tribute to Chick Corea.
Lou Reed would have been 79 this past Tuesday. Here’s a complete show he did at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic in 1984, which was a particularly good period for this moody, profoundly inconsistent, and often rude genius.
Finally, given that we are still very much in a pandemic (sorry, Texans), here is perhaps the greatest and maybe craziest time-waster I think I have ever seen: “Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Reviews of All Time (work in progress).” Now you can argue with 20-something Jon Landau about whether Cream actually sucked and Hendrix rarely bothered with writing decent melodies. (I agree, alas.)
