Let's Fix This Country

We Could Be Down to One Party If Democrats Don’t Solve Their Media Problem

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After a crushing defeat at the polls, the Democratic Party is in a quandary, trying to find a way forward. It has seen its traditional constituency, the working class, usurped by the Republican Party – or should we call it the Trump Party — and must discover how to bring the flock back into the fold. The left espouses a host of programs that voters want, but there’s a problem: How will Democrats make themselves known? How will they reach the public?

The Trump campaign emerged from the election well ahead of Democrats for having exploited every avenue to reach voters. They exhibited remarkable savvy about where all age groups go to form their opinions, leaving Democrats breathless trying to catch up. We touched on this a few weeks ago but the right-wing’s dominant saturation needs emphasis.

elephantine

Cable may be fading, but the right-wing fields three national channels of any weight — Fox, Newsmax, and OAN. The left only one. In broadcast, the Sinclair network has gobbled up 300 local television stations that deliver a decidedly right-wing slant in news programming — all of them on occasion even required to recite verbatim on a given night a political message supplied by management. Right-wing and Christian talk radio, built up over decades, boasts over 1500 stations, says one source, demonizing the left around the clock.

What’s new is Elon Musk’s X – Twitter newly given over to unmoderated misinformation from those in Trump world who have no voice elsewhere. And the Trump campaign courting TikTok influencers. And being smart enough to exploit the podcast realm, where such luminaries as Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, and Ben Shapiro lead a large contingent of right-wing dissidents. Rogan has claimed “I go left on everything”, but he soured on Biden’s Covid mandates and progressive extremes and switched sides. His 14.5 million adherents on Spotify, which paid him an estimated $350 million for rights to his show, skew 80% male and download his two or three weekly podcasts some 400 million times a month. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump, Vance, and Musk paid multiple visits to the podcasters to win especially the young male vote. Rogan’s three-hour interview with Trump scored 52 million views on YouTube. Rogan endorsed Trump just before the election.

In contrast, Kamala Harris avoided interviews but did go on Alex Cooper’s podcast “Call Her Daddy” (followers 90% female, says Cooper). The subject was women’s rights. A booking with Rogan was in the offing but Harris reportedly required Rogan to travel to her rather than she to him. He declined. No interview.

overwhelmed

This phalanx has totally eclipsed the meager number of left-wing counterparts. There are the left-tilting Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) but the support they receive from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s $535 million in annual government funding will have DOGE duo Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy asking why should the government go on and on subsidizing television and radio as if it’s still 1967 when the CPB was founded.

The left has the one cable channel, MSNBC, but media colossus Comcast is planning to spin off its cable properties which include MSNBC and CNBC as a separate entity whimsically named SpinCo. That news had Donald Trump Jr. tweeting on X ”Hey
@elonmusk I have the funniest idea ever!!!” suggesting that Musk buy MSNBC. “I mean it can’t be much. Look at the ratings”. It started as a joke but quickly spurred investor interest. That would shut down the one on-air voice the left-wing has.

That leaves the press. The right proclaims that mainstream media is dead, left to the older generations who still watch broadcast news and read the liberal New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and a few others in a flickering universe. Younger generations have decided to go elsewhere. They had already left, article illustration
well before the election, but their defection was validated when owners Jeff Bezos of the Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the L.A. Times halted publication of their editorial boards’ endorsement of Kamala Harris. Yale history professor and fascism scholar called out their “anticipatory obedience”; he would be quoted often (reduced to “surrender in advance”) as others caved, such as ABC television paying $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump. Soon-Shiong is now meddling further, telling the edit staff to “take a break from writing about Trump”.

No wonder “that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers” have to say, writes Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. It’s the distrust that awaits a thesis to explain how that came to pass over recent decades, with only 31% telling Gallup that they trust the mainstream media. Many cite the objectivity standard giving way as opinion crept into the news columns, but readers prefer opinion to news, so that doesn’t hold up as a principal reason.

Already by 2014, Pew Research found that 75% of adults they surveyed said that they felt more informed by the Internet and social media than traditional sources. Pew says newspaper readership nosedived in 2021 and 2022, especially. With the 2020 election and insurrection over and Trump consigned to Mar-a-Lago and golf, the news evidently lost its entertainment appeal. Republicans might argue that the liberal media drove away readers with their obsession for diversity and equity and a preoccupation with LGBTQ and transgender issues, whereas the nation at large was stressed by the threat of losing jobs to the flood of migrants and the soaring prices at the supermarket.

anything goes

Journalism prides itself on fact-based reporting – applied to commentary as well. A good newsroom is steeped in ethics. Those standards and practices are up against an online world of streaming talk with no self-restraint and a disregard for facts. “An allergy to editing”, as Warzel puts it. Millions of younger people have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and TikTok and the hours-long rambling of podcast hosts as trusted purveyors of news. From all these right-wing conduits, devoted followers were hearing before the election that crime is at unprecedented levels (it has been declining for years), that hoards are still crossing the southern border (the numbers are way down), that the economy is a disaster (it’s booming). Tressie McMillans Cottom is an associate profesdor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Here is her take on podcasters from a New York Times guest column:

“To be a podcast bro you generally must be marginally famous for some inscrutable reason, make contrarian ideas out to be intellectualism and promote yourself as an ‘independent thinker’ while booking attention-grabbing, politically extreme guests. Then you can monetize your show, looking entrepreneurial by selling a range of junk goods that cozy up to disinformation about vaccines, health, fitness and investing.”

The rule for success on the Internet is omnipresence, capturing eyes and ears with constant video and posting to create a relationship with viewer or reader, a kind of intimacy. But the commentary is whatever comes to mind, with falsehood and truth randomly intermixed and many of the influencers themselves likely not knowing which is which.

Their utterances become the news for the legions of followers. Or, as Musk and others have taken to telling them, “You are the media now”. They are told to “do your own research” and “be a freethinker”, a prescription to steer them away from factual reporting. MAGA world sees the possibilities of influencing the influencers. It is an ecosystem that trades in unsourced gossip, QAnon conspiracy theories (the government caused Hurricane Helene!), and misinformation.

where to?

This is the thicket that Democrats must penetrate and discredit if they are to regain the allegiance of the public. They will need to build an infrastructure in this new media mix where people now go to find out what’s new. They will need to go about it very differently, though. Quality reporting that exposes the lies of the opposition could prove to be an attractant for those suffering from “brain rot”, the Oxford Word of the Year.

Turns Out He Did Nothing Wrong

< law|231||The campaign to make Donald Trump's criminal prosecutions fade away>

Like a magician’s disappearing act, Trump’s attempt to take over the government and usurp the presidency from Joe Biden has vanished. In accordance with Justice Department practice never to prosecute a sitting president – an exemption nowhere found article illustration
in the Constitution — Special Counsel Jack Smith is closing his two federal cases against Donald Trump. He is doing so without prejudice, which means they can be brought again when (or should we say if) Trump leaves office, but that is unlikely.

We have been witness these last four years to how the propaganda of denial can successfully become the dominant ethos at the expense of both truth and justice. In what follows we trace the evolution of how the right-wing persuaded their millions to think of Trump as victim rather than villain.

Outrage

The stunning blow against the Constitution and its democratic process January 6, 2021, was originally met with outrage from all quarters, not least from Republicans in Congress. After all, their lives had been threatened that day by a violent mob of thousands, some with murder in mind. Speaking in the House of Representatives that night, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said,

“The violence, destruction, and chaos we saw earlier was unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”

In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke of…

“violent criminals who tried to stop Congress from doing our duty…They were provoked by the President and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government.”

The nation was in a state of shock and disbelief. A columnist at the conservative Wall Street Journal wrote about Trump:

Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government ‘function,’ he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country.”

what insurrection?

Soon thereafter, though, Republicans shifted gears. With the realization that reminding the public about the treasonous actions of January 6 was not good for the brand, they began to downplay the criminal acts of that day. The insurrection became a “riot”; the riot became just another protest that got out of hand, and a false flag operation at that. The mob was antifa members dressed to impersonate right-wing militias; FBI implants had ginned up the violence. Two-thirds of Republicans believed (and believe to this day, without a wisp of evidence) that Trump won the 2020 election.

“[T]o call it an attempted coup is preposterous” wrote Barton Swaim, an editorial page writer at the Journal. The newspaper became a principal voice working to subvert Smith’s pursuit of justice. Swaim, writing in the fall of 2021, averred that,

”The idea that Donald Trump and his followers had any chance of overthrowing the U.S. government, or even that they aimed at that outcome, is a delusion.”

Accordingly, we are delusional if we think that the aim of all the plotting – the threatening of Vice President Pence if he refused to disrupt the certification process, the 147 members of Congress who voted against the states’ Electoral College submissions, the assault on the Capitol – was the overthrow of the U.S. government. So what was the mob there for? Was their choice of January 6, which just happened to be the constitutional date for the official counting of the states’ votes for the presidency, just a coincidence? And, by the way says Swaim, it’s not an insurrection if it is unsuccessful.

“Insurrection is not the word recommended by the events of Jan. 6”, the Journal would later say, “it’s only the word the narrative framers find most delicious.”

A five-day trial by a Colorado district court determined that January 6 had been an insurrection and that according to Section 3 of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which disallows anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office, Donald Trump had to be stricken from Colorado’s ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed.

Section 3 reads as being self-executing, just as the due process section in the same amendment always been self-executing. But the Supreme Court decided unanimously that a state cannot block from the ballot a candidate for federal office. While you may agree that was wise, that a patchwork of states voting this way or that would be chaotic, the court prescribed no process for exercising the insurrection clause. It voided part of the Constitution.

Republicans saw an opening: “Democrats tried to keep the presumptive Republican nominee off the ballot”. “Destroy democracy to save democracy is no longer a joke” wrote John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution. “The existence of the deep state seems to be confirmed with every outrage.” Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times wrote that,

“[T]his style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot.”

Except that it was only Colorado, not “Democrats”, not Cochrane’s “deep state”, and the Colorado case was brought by six Republicans.

The campaign to demonize opposition to Trump was underway. Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson said about Colorado’s decision, “Well, radical leftism has infiltrated every institution in this country.”

Republicans shifted blame for the Capitol attack to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who the mob threatened to kill. She failed to call out the National Guard, which she had no authority to do and which Trump could have done. “If the Capitol Police had done their job, we would be having a different conversation today”, wrote columnist Holman Jenkins at the Journal. Their few hundred should have beaten back a few thousand in a four-hour pitched battle, that is. And that conversation would be what, that it was just a run of the mill coup d’état of no moment?

sleepwalking

For Democrats, Merrick Garland will be remembered for letting almost two years go by before appointing Jack Smith as special counsel to pursue the two federal cases. Trump attorneys’ claim of immunity from prosecution for January 6 was denied by the district and appellate courts in D.C., but the Supreme Court took their appeal and did “their damnedest to clear the path for Trump to be the next president”, as we put it. With a nation wanting to know guilt or innocence before the election, the Court sat on the case until the beginning of this July, conferring not only immunity but even blocking the use of certain key evidence.

The focus had shifted to court decisions, not the crimes, and the right-wing adroitly kept it there. That the left was outraged was a “vicious campaign to vilify the court as partisan and corrupt”. The Journal editorial board lectured that…

“The job of the Supreme Court isn’t to follow the election calendar. Its duty is to consider the facts and law in the context of America’s constitutional order.”

No mention that neither should it be the job of criminal prosecutions to follow the election calendar. The special counsel and the D.C. court had been under a months-long Supreme Court order to do nothing. Once the order was lifted, any resumption by Smith was called “election interference” by Republicans and right-wing media with the election four months away.

“They prosecute him in several courts so that he can’t campaign. Arresting potential challengers is what former KGB operative Vladimir Putin routinely does.”

That came from Russia scholar Gary Saul Morson. “The special counsel’s later filings” — referring to a superseding brief Smith filed to reflect the hurdles thrown up by the immunity decision — “suggest that he didn’t take the hint” of the court to drop the case. A New Yorker article observed that…

“Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed that the ‘deep state’ has weaponized federal law enforcement against Trump and his supporters”. Republicans had steered the federal cases away from the crimes to a plot against Trump as victim. The Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel wrote…

“Only by convincing themselves that Mr. Trump threatens the existence of the republic can they justify their own weaponization of government to stop him.”

Weaponization of the justice system had become the endlessly repeated trope. Garland had spun off Smith as special counsel to prevent any implication of the administration’s thumb on the scale of justice, but right-wing commentators such as Sean Hannity at Fox would pay that no deference. With no evidence, it was always “Biden’s Justice Department” that was seeking to derail Trump. Newly tapped to be Trump’s vice president, JD Vance decreed that the Justice Department is the “most corrupt” in U.S. history — prosecutions of Democrats Hunter Biden, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and New York Mayor Eric Adams notwithstanding.

what crimes?

One would never know Trump had committed crimes. I suppose we must add the obligatory “alleged” but we all watched the insurrection on television — Trump telling the crowd of thousands to “fight like hell” or “you won’t have a country anymore” and that “we’re going” to the Capitol &0151; and we had heard the tape at Mar a Lago of Trump boastfully showing top secret documents to anyone who happened to be in the room.

It was incontrovertible that major crimes had been committed. And yet in a remarkable feat the right-wing media had expunged any mention that crimes were the reason for the federal indictments. Greg Jarrett, Fox News’s in-house legal analyst, would say:

“These two federal cases…they should never have been brought. No fair and neutral prosecutor would have done it. They were purely political, legally anemic.”

The cases were a “campaign of lawfare”, wrote Marc Thiessen, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post, a word unknown to dictionaries that became a universal addition to Republican vocabulary. “Their campaign of lawfare locked in Trump’s nomination,” he added.

For Jarrett at Fox it retrospectively became an “eight year old lawfare campaign that began with the Russia hoax and ended with these federal cases backfired on them”. (The “Russia hoax” meme is an identical crusade that has been running for years to bury all mention of the Russia contacts in Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency). As the January 6 case inched toward the Supreme Court, the Journal’s Strassel was concerned “whether the three liberal justices understand the grave risks of this lawfaring agenda.” Andrew McCarthy at National Review provided a definition:

”Lawfare is the noxious practice by which the incumbent government exploits its prosecutorial power to brand its political opponents…as dangerous criminals who pose an existential threat to the body politic.”

The special counsel’s prosecutions were politically motivated lawfare. Nothing to do with the actual crimes. They’re never mentioned anymore.

Besides, there’s an election coming, so shouldn’t the Justice Department end the prosecutions and “leave the presidential election to be decided by the voters”, said National Review. Forget the indictments. Ancient history. The law should be cast aside. Let the public render the verdict.

triumph

Which is what happened. “Americans decided it wasn’t disqualifying”, said David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour about January 6 and stolen documents. Thomas Goldstein wrote in the Times, “Democracy’s ultimate verdict on these prosecutions was rendered by voters on Election Day.”

We elected as president the man who tried to overthrow the government and who intends to pardon most of the rabble who helped him. Goldstein, who runs the well-regarded Scotusblog website that analyzes Supreme Court decisions and who has himself argued before the court, urges that all four cases — two federal, two state – be dropped:

”[T]he Constitution trusts the judgment of the American people to decide whether the cases against Mr. Trump, as he has argued, were political and calculated to stop him from being elected…Rightly or wrongly, they carry the stench of politics and, if pursued, could lay the groundwork for political prosecutions of future presidents.”

Missing is any mention of the political stench of the Supreme Court pushing the federal cases up against the election calendar so that they could not happen and making Trump immune in the process. Brooks echoes Goldstein…

”And in my view I see that there is the danger in putting him sort of above the law, but to me the greater danger is that we use trials as political weapons in the years ahead.”

But wouldn’t such trials require not only that a crime be committed by a future president but a crime entirely removed, thanks to immunity, from any connection to the office? That threads a needle, making Brooks’s vision of commonplace trials unlikely. Whereas by waiving the Trump prosecutions haven’t we instead made insurrection legitimate for any future president loath to leave the White House?

Then comes this from Goldstein:

”A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.”

So there we have it. Donald Trump is unique and therefore deserves to be uniquely above the law.

Besides, that wasn’t an insurrection, says Trump:

”That was a day of love. They didn’t come because of me. They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically,’ nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong.”