Tag Archives: media

Legacy Media Bends The Knee

The Right’s propaganda ecosystem is a huge problem. The spinelessness and cowardice of today’s legacy media is arguably worse.

A week or so ago, I argued that Trumpism has been aided by the inadequacy of our mainstream, “legacy” outlets. As I pointed out, there’s a reason that so many professional journalists have decamped to places like Substack– a reason why so many of us depend upon daily reports from reputable scholars like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman. My complaint was aimed at news reporting that “sanewashes” and normalizes behaviors that are objectively insane and abnormal, and as an example, I cited NBC’s report of the attack on California Senator Alex Padilla when he tried to ask Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem a question. Tom LLamas repeated Noem’s  assertion that the Senator had failed to identify himself–but made no mention of the fact that widely available video of the incident showed that Padilla had in fact done so. 

It wasn’t a “one-off.”

A couple of nights ago, NBC reported on the status of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and rather than describing any of the truly horrific elements that explain public resistance to that legislation–its vast increase in the deficit or the millions who stand to lose healthcare– it reported that the bill would “reduce taxes,” and ignored the fact that those reductions would lopsidedly benefit the rich. 

NBC’s evident fear of incurring Trump’s wrath–its “compliance in advance”– pales, of course, in light of Paramount’s recent agreement to pay off the Mafia Don who occupies the Oval Office. Paramount has been in the process of an $8 billion merger with Skydance, for which it needs regulatory approval. The company settled a lawsuit with Trump that was so ridiculous that a first-year law student could have predicted it would have been laughed out of court. (Trump sued over what he claimed was unfair editing in a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris.)

Paramount’s agreement to pay sixteen million dollars for dismissal of this laughable threat was widely–and accurately– seen as a kickback that will allow the merger to go forward. It was payment for a government approval–in other words, a bribe. CBS thus joined Disney (the parent company of ABC News) another part of the mainstream media that has bent the knee to our gangster President.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post summed up the betrayal of 60 Minutes and professional journalism.

After “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens in April announced his resignation, correspondent Scott Pelley said on air, “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Honest journalism requires noting that Paramount’s leaders will never, ever hear the end of this abject decision. Nor should they. Much has been made in the recent past about attacks on the First Amendment, whether it’s the administration’s expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it won’t swallow “Gulf of America” (a dispute that’s tied up in the courts); the targeting of student protesters for their speech; attacks on lawyers for their past work; or any number of actions seeking to snuff diversity language from the handbooks of corporate America.

There is ample case law establishing the right of editors to choose what material they publish and the manner in which they cover public issues and officials. “That very function — the one that happens many times a day at newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, networks, social media accounts, newsletters, whatever — is what Paramount failed to stick up for. It doesn’t deserve the likes of “60 Minutes.”

So here we are. We’re awash in propaganda from Fox News and its even more pernicious clones. And now we’ve learned that we can’t depend upon the so-called legacy media to set the record straight. Sometimes, it’s sins of omission–NBC failing to provide even rudimentary “both sides” coverage. Increasingly, it’s the betrayal of the very purpose of journalism, which is to inform as accurately and completely as possible.

It’s one thing to make honest mistakes. It’s another thing entirely to allow your bottom line to dictate your coverage. 

America’s experience under Trump has made one thing abundantly clear: American institutions are filled with self-protective cowards devoid of integrity. Those cowards dominate Congress and corporate boardrooms. The lesson of Paramount’s shameful capitulation to our gangster President’s blackmail is that corporate ownership of previously reliable media outlets  deprives We the People of news we can trust.

Unfortunately, without a fully and accurately informed electorate, democracy cannot exist.

Comments

The Loss Of The Lie Detector

As the country I thought I inhabited continues to disintegrate, I’ve become more and more convinced that what I’ve called our “information landscape” is a major contributor to our civic woes.

We have created a world that allows us to “curate” our realities, to engage in what we used to call “cherry picking.” Want to believe that science is a scam and vaccines are mechanisms for inserting Microsoft chips in our bodies? A bit of Internet “research” will locate “news” sites that confirm your suspicions. Want to believe that the deranged ignoramus in the Oval Office actually knows what he’s doing? Ditto.

The media we now refer to as legacy outlets were far from perfect. “If it bleeds, it leads” dominated decisions about what was front-page news, and even outlets with a professional devotion to the obligations of gatekeeping overlooked important events and misread others. But at their best, they acted as lie detectors–and public figures who feared that function were careful to moderate their misinformation, or at least cloak efforts at misdirection in ambiguities.

The Internet’s Wild West, where social media echoes and promotes the proliferation of Rightwing propaganda sites, is liar’s heaven. A buffoon as ridiculous as Trump, with his constant crazed, childish and misspelled posts, would never have ascended to the Presidency when actual journalists were the primary gatekeepers.

Cult leaders (Trump is the Jim Jones of MAGA) have always been able to bamboozle a slice of the population; a portion of humanity is demonstrably impervious to fact and logic. A healthier information environment would not diabuse the True Believers, who see Trump as the champion who will kill “woke-ism” and return straight White (Pseudo)Christian men to dominance. But the current fire hose of competing versions of reality is having the effect desired by autocrats everywhere–it paralyzes much larger segments of the population, who gradually despair of determining what is true, and simply check out.

Megan Garber addressed the issue in a recent essay in the Altlantic.

She noted that Trump had been reelected despite–or perhaps because of– the Big Lie, and she mused that, these days, false assertions evidently aren’t liabilities but selling points, “weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.”

For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.

Garber quoted Walter Lippman’s classic book, Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy is a task of data management. American democracy “is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.”

The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be….

In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile.

As Garber quite accurately notes, every lie Trump tells, no matter how consequential or petty (and Trump is nothing if not petty), erodes people’s ability to trust any and all information.

Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.

As the zone is flooded with bullshit (in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase), citizens check out. And the liars cement their power.

Comments

About Those Executive Orders…

I spent 21 years teaching college students about law and public policy–about the limits that a country’s legal framework imposes on the policies that legislators can legitimately consider. For a significant portion of those years, I was also an annoying scold, ranting about the undeniable fact that most Americans were uninterested in and unaware of the provisions of the constitutional framework that constrain what American government can legally do.

We are now reaping the consequences of that massive constitutional ignorance.

A would-be dictator has taken residence in the Oval Office, and has proceeded to ignore the legal restraints on presidential power. Given his intellectual deficits and manifest ignorance, it is very likely that he is as unaware of those restraints as he is of the American Idea–the underlying philosophy of the Constitution–and of the basic operations of government. (I doubt he could even spell philosophy, given his third-grade vocabulary.)

I have previously cited the constitutional provisions vesting Congress with exclusive authority over many of the areas Trump purports to “rule” with his firehouse of Executive Orders. Such orders have a limited provenance; as  Josh Marshall explained on Talking Points Memo a while back explained more clearly than I have.

Most people, including a lot of journalists, don’t understand what an executive order even is. It’s not a law or even a quasi-law. An executive order is really just a memo from the president to his staff (in this sense, his staff of two million civil servants) to take certain actions. Do this and don’t do that. Enforce this law in that way. Those can be actions the Constitution empowers him to take or ones Congress specifically assigns to him through laws. I interpret the law this way, so take this action, etc. In areas where presidents have a lot of power — say, in border and immigration enforcement, for instance — executive orders are a big deal. Courts can say: no, the law or the Constitution doesn’t empower you or allow you to do those things. But executives act and courts mostly react. So in this area of broad executive power, they’re a big deal. That’s also where you get into the territory of genuine constitutional crises and potential presidential dictatorship, because the outer limits of some of those powers aren’t clearly charted.

In other areas–very much including election administration–an Executive Order is flat-out unconstitutional.

But presidents have little to no power over election administration. States administer American elections, for state and federal office. Congress is empowered to create certain baseline rules for how states administer elections, in addition to those enumerated in the Constitution. But that’s the federal role — a critical fact under present circumstances, as I noted a week ago. The president has very little power beyond having the Justice Department bring lawsuits over claimed constitutional infractions or failure to follow federal law. In other words, an executive order on election administration is mostly meaningless — and this is the case for multiple reasons…. Elections are administered by state officials and they are part of a separate, untethered sovereignty. The U.S. president can’t fire a governor or a mayor, ever. Federal law is supreme over state law. That makes states subordinate to but still not at the command of the president. They’re separate sovereignties. It is as though the tendons or draw-wires that connect a head of state down to local government in a unitary state have simply been severed in a federal one. He doesn’t just lack the authority. He lacks the power. As I explained Monday, the real issue is going to come when the president tries to use his unauthorized power to extort compliance by withholding money.

As Marshall notes, it’s one thing when most Americans don’t understand this; it’s close to unforgivable when most journalists don’t–when they cannot even offer clear descriptions of how the mechanics of government are actually supposed to work.

We are, as he says, “ten years in,” and yet Trump is still able to project an authority he very clearly does not possess. His ability to do so is a direct consequence of civic illiteracy–not just the public’s lack, but that of a worrisome percentage of the media. And when cowardly Republican office-holders are joined by cowardly law firms and universities that have bent to financial extortion, and by plutocrats willing to trade the stable governance that made their riches possible for an autocrat’s promise of special treatment…constitutional limits evaporate.

Civic ignorance has consequences, and we’re experiencing them.

Comments

A Functional Media?

Research strongly suggests that Americans are split between an informed electorate and those delicately referred to as “low information voters” (also known as “MAGA”). As I’ve pointed out repeatedly on this blog, our current information environment reinforces misinformation and disinformation, catering to those who simply want their prejudices confirmed. The Internet has proved to be a warm and fuzzy place for those whose “research” is confined to searches for confirmation of their pre-existing biases.

That reality allows Trump to engage in fact-free bloviating–also known as lies–secure in the knowledge that a multitude of propaganda sites will obediently echo them, no matter how ridiculous or easily and repeatedly debunked.

A recent essay from the Bulwark posits that today’s media falls into roughly three categories:

There’s the state media—Fox, Newsmax, the Federalist, HughHewitt.com—which have become pure propaganda outlets.

There’s the “neutral” media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, CNN—which believe that politics should be covered as a sport with reports about who’s up and who’s down. Extraordinary efforts are made by these institutions to present both sides of every question, even if it means presenting the case for illiberalism or platforming people who the media orgs know are lying to their audience.

Finally, there’s pro-democracy media—outlets which understand that America is experiencing an ongoing authoritarian attempt and that they must stand on the side of small-l liberalism.

The author believes that maintaining these categories is unsustainable-that the three spheres will soon “collapse into just two: Media organizations that oppose authoritarianism and media organizations that accept it.” He quoted an editorial from a technical publication–Techdirt— which recently made a surprising announcement:

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few people reach out about our coverage these days . . . [and about] how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. . . .

We’re going to keep covering this story because, frankly, it’s the only story that matters right now, and one that not everyone manages to see clearly. The political press may not understand what’s happening (or may be too afraid to say it out loud), but those of us who’ve spent decades studying how technology and power interact? We see it and we can’t look away.

So, here’s the bottom line: when WaPo’s opinion pages are being gutted and tech CEOs are seeking pre-approval from authoritarians, the line between “tech coverage” and “saving democracy” has basically disappeared. It’s all the same thing.

Digital illiterate that I am, I had never heard of Techdirt. But the quoted language confirms something that most political scientists know instinctively: at base, everything is politics. The people who refuse to follow the news of what government is doing, who claim that they “aren’t political,” are kidding themselves.

When the federal government stops funding cancer research, when Social Security checks fail to appear in a timely manner, when government operatives are erasing efforts to counter discrimination (or, as they currently are, reinstating discriminatory messages and behaviors)–when federal officials are telling states to handle their own fires and floods, and threatening your employees with deportation, when insane policies are threatening to tank the economy and erode your retirement–it is no longer possible to tell yourself that “politics” is irrelevant to your life.

The article suggests that tech outlets are among the first to speak out because “they have specialized knowledge—and because they don’t have relationships with people in politics to tend to.”  They are able to see clearly what is happening and willing to speak out against it.

We have seen the exact same thing with some specialized legal publications. Lawfare and JustSecurity.org were once destination sites for law nerds. Today they have become two of the most essential media organizations in America.

Why? Because since these people specialize in the law they know exactly how serious Trump’s attack on the rule of law is—and how dangerous it is.

Like Techdirt and Wired, serious people in the legal space are being radicalized—democracy pilled?—because they understand that this isn’t a game and that the liberal press does not have an obligation to present illiberalism as a point of view worthy of consideration.

The people in pro-democracy media understand that liberalism has a moral obligation to take its own side.

“Fair and Balanced” was never accurate, because “balance” by its very nature/definition cannot be accurate. And stenography–he said/she said–isn’t journalism.

Comments

Trump’s Mental Decline

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

Google “Trump’s mental breakdown” or something similar, and Google obliges with numerous hits. Even the New York Times, which has been inexplicably unwilling to hold Trump to the same standards they applied to Biden, has noted the evidence. Under the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” the Times noted Trump’s age and the fact that

the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Other outlets have been less restrained. The Boston Globe addressed the seeming reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic:

We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy. So why are Republicans and the press holding Trump to a different standard than Biden?…

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.

Forbes —hardly a Left-wing publication–has also weighed in, noting that

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

The article went on to catalog the reasons for concluding that Trump’s senility has become too obvious to ignore. And the New Republic–which is Left of center–recently noted that efforts to normalize what is decidedly not normal have finally given way to concerns over Trump’s very obvious mental incapacities.

Newsweek has also covered Trump’s decline. The article quoted Trump’s niece and fierce critic, Mary Trump, a psychologist by training, who pointed out that her uncle is “the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency,” and that “he can’t pronounce words or stay on topic,” and “engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking.”  Huffpost ran a similar critique by an unrelated mental health expert,. who warned that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told the website. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

There’s much more, but the relative recency of these articles is unnerving, because rational observers have noted his mental issues–including an inability to engage in complex thought or analysis– for far longer. Yet the same media that hounded a much more mentally-competent Joe Biden out of the race basically engaged in what has been aptly called “sane-washing.”

As a September article from Mother Jones put it:

In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.” This is similar to the more common phrase “normalization,” but it extends beyond what we’ve seen for years—the media reporting on Trump as if he is a regular politician who operates within the conventional bounds of political spin and human actions—to covering up (or sidestepping or downplaying) Trump’s apparent cognitive flaws.

Among other examples, the article cited Trump’s claim that schools are providing sex change operations to children without their parents’ consent. Direct quote: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

What is wrong with our country is the prospect that this lunatic will get millions of votes.

Comments