Evan Vucci/AP Photo
NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander, second from right, attends a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House, March 20, 2020, in Washington.
Thanks to a heads-up from Mediaite, we may take a moment to focus on what ought to be considered a seminal moment in the history of the White House press corps. It came last week when, during one of Jen Psaki’s briefings, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander tried to script Joe Biden with a demand that he praise Donald Trump’s vaccine performance. I swear I’m not making this up.
(One reason, by the way, that even political obsessives may not be aware of it is the fact that, as Eric Boehlert notes, while CNN ran “virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety,” it stopped after a month of Biden’s.)
Sounding like a made man in the Trump crime family, Alexander complained that, in Biden’s speech to the nation last week, “there was no mention of the president under whose administration these vaccines were developed … Does former President Trump not deserve any credit on vaccines?” Psaki didn’t take the bait, praising “science and medical experts,” who, you know, actually developed the vaccine, and also noting that “most of the infrastructure to vaccinate people was not in place when Biden took office.” After not getting the answer he wanted, Alexander nevertheless kept at it. “But on the development of the vaccines, it was Operation Warp Speed that was invented, executed, initiated under the former president.”
That’s all bad enough. But here is what would be called “the beauty part” were it not so damn morally, intellectually, and professionally revolting. Alexander went on: “So in the spirit of bipartisanship and unity last night, as opposed to the first comments which were about the denials in the first days, weeks or months, why not just say, ‘With credit to the previous administration and the former president for putting us in this position, we are glad that we have been able to move it forward?’”
Got that? This guy is not from Fox or Newsmax or Breitbart or OAN or Gateway Pundit or Ben Shapiro or National Review or Sinclair or The Daily Caller or The Washington Times, etc., etc. And he’s not merely demanding to know why the president is not crediting the man who regularly accuses him of being senile and having stolen the election and having a son who belongs in jail and of hating his country, but the man who in his spare time totally screwed up virtually everything having to do with both the virus and vaccine, because in addition to all of the above he’s an egomaniacal psychopath. That’s why, when Stephen Colbert asked Dr. Fauci “what changed” under Biden, the good doctor grinningly replied, “Everything.” Don’t forget also that we know that the Trump administration did not bother to come up with a plan to distribute the vaccine, though even here, Alexander took up the Trump team’s dishonest propaganda: “You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all,” though, in fact, dropping vaccines off at the airport in each state and saying, “Go to it, guys,” is pretty damn close to unusable.
What I would ask, if I didn’t already know better, is what the hell is an NBC reporter doing trying to script the president on behalf of Trump in the first place? And no less important, why is he doing so, when, even narrowly speaking, he’s talking bullshit? And why didn’t the rest of the room burst out in hysterics? And why hasn’t he been fired for it? And really, how can we ever believe anything he ever reports again, knowing that this is his attitude toward covering the Biden administration? And what business does NBC News think it’s in, anyway?
This is a short newsletter, so here are some short answers.
- White House reporters think their job is to play “gotcha,” not to get news.
- White House reporters cannot admit that one of America’s two major political parties has become a cult in thrall to autocratic, conspiracy-minded lunatics who care not a whit about governance, even if that means hundreds of thousands of people must die unnecessarily.
- There are exceptions, of course, but most TV journalists think of themselves as entertainers, not as news gatherers. They care about their Q Ratings far more than about telling the truth. They understand, likely accurately, that their corporate bosses don’t want the truth and their audiences have not been prepared to hear it. That’s why they loved Trump; he cast them as “the enemy of the people” and gave them a clear role to play. It’s also why the members of the White House press still have not figured out how to handle a president whose only concern is how to get the job done that he was elected to do, without theatrics and the kind of childish playacting that so many White House reporters think the job entails.
This is only my fifth Altercation, and I don’t blame you if you are already tiring of my calling attention to the fact that the ginormous tech companies that control our social media outlets don’t give a damn about democracy, but are interested only in selling ads with the information they glean from our accounts, and therefore enable the innocent and gullible to swallow insane right-wing conspiracy theories, etc. But dammit, take a look at this article in The Atlantic, entitled “Right-Wing Propagandists Were Doing Something Unique.” Its author kinda feels sorry for the tech companies, who were “put in a bind.” Yes, a bind. For instance, what would Mark Zuckerberg do if his net worth, now estimated at approximately $97 billion, had stayed stuck at the mere $71 billion back when he was a pauper four years ago?
The article’s evidence poses the problem quite starkly, even if its author does not.
Part I: “The process of producing viral misinformation hits followed a familiar pattern throughout the 2020 campaign: Prominent pro–Donald Trump influencers or hyper-partisan conservative outlets would pick up a real-world event—in many cases an isolated incident that bubbled into the national conversation via social media—and shoehorn it into a far broader narrative. Many of the narratives involved hints of conspiracy.”
Part II: “Online influencers and hyper-partisan micro-media properties don’t all possess robust distribution channels of their own. The Gateway Pundit and Donald Trump Jr. achieve their reach, and their ability to promote viral lies, because social networks allow them to. The platforms—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Parler—offer an audience of millions of users, sophisticated targeting, and curation algorithms that amplify precisely the kind of wildly sensational, high-engagement content that these influencers traffic in.”
The net result: Tech companies make billions spreading lies, not merely undermining the fundamental conditions of democracy, but also encouraging deeper and deeper engagement with conspiracies that might lead to, oh, I don’t know, maybe a violent rebellion of the kind we saw on January 6.
That’s the “bind,” and whatever the remedy is, you can forget about it, because the people doing all the damage are far more powerful than any government that might try and regulate them—save for the totalitarian ones, and that’s no answer at all.
Meanwhile, at the same time these companies are pleading nolo contendere to the onslaught of published hate and incitement to violence, we learn from the Anti-Defamation League that “white supremacist propaganda reached alarming levels across the U.S. in 2020.” Their new report tells us that “there were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters.” That’s nearly double the 2019 figure. “Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it’s likely those cases reached into the millions,” they estimated (ahem, see above …).
Odds and Ends
- Here is the tribute I wrote to my undergraduate adviser and mentor Walter LaFeber, and to another guy that he also inspired, who you’ve never heard of.
- Here’s a fun interview with my friend, the great writer Vivian Gornick, inspired by her terrific new collection, Taking a Long Look.
- My friends at Library of America and HarperCollins audio have just published an audiobook of the “never before seen” novel by Richard Wright, called The Man Who Lived Underground. They say that Wright considered it his finest work, and that’s good enough for me.
- Here’s Stevie Winwood singing “Can’t Find My Way Home,” all by himself.
- Here is Bonnie Raitt singing the same song and flirting with Lowell George, who is also on the recording, as are John Hammond Jr. and Freebo.
- The Tedeschi Trucks Band, featuring the guy who, at present, I think, is the best guitarist working—today, that is, not ever—is doing a series of home performances. They have so far raised over $100,000 to benefit Music Health Alliance, NAACP, Sweet Relief, Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, Feeding America, and World Central Kitchen, via their free Swamp Family TV webcast series. Here are “When Will I Begin” (3/4/21) and “Whiskey Legs” (2/25/21).
