One of the positive things to come out of the Trump years was that much of the mainstream media found a backbone when it came to covering the President and his constant lying. Let's hope it's not a temporary phenomenon. Republicans of course are not happy about journalists practicing journalism instead of just providing a microphone for lies and disproven conspiracy theories, now that Republicans make their own reality and rely on "alternative facts". As Stephen Colbert once observed, it seems reality has a well-known liberal bias.
This week Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC. It did not go well. This exchange between the two regarding the 2020 election speaks volumes about what's wrong with this country:
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STEPHANOPOULOS: The Department of Justice led by William Barr said
there's no widespread evidence of fraud. Can’t you just say the words,
this election --
PAUL: No.
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- was not stolen?
PAUL: Well, what I would suggest is -- what I would suggest is that if we want greater confidence in our elections, and 75 percent of Republicans agree with me, is that we do need to look at election integrity and we need to see if we can restore confidence in the elections.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, 75 percent of Republicans agree with you because they were fed a big lie by President Trump and his supporters to say the election was stolen. Why can't you say --
PAUL: Well, I think --
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- President Biden won a legitimate, fair election --
PAUL: -- I think where you make a mistake in -- hey, George. George. George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything's a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything.
Historically what would happen is if
said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone
else who said there wasn’t.
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Let me first offer some very on-point commentary on the above from Steve Bennen of MSNBC:
"After a contentious back and forth, Stephanopoulos eventually reminded his guest, "I'm standing by facts. There are not two sides to facts.... It is a lie to say it was stolen."
It was an enlightening exchange because it shed light on a pernicious strategy. Rand Paul wants not only to peddle nonsense, he also wants independent news organizations to present his nonsense to the public as if it has merit.
In the Republican's vision, journalists have a responsibility to present the public with both lies and facts. Media professionals who alert the electorate to the truth, in Paul's vision, are doing the public a disservice. Real journalism, according to the hapless senator, means giving equal weight to garbage and reality.
Only "the liberal side" disagrees.
To be sure, in more instances than anyone could possibly count, this both-sides approach was -- and in some circles, is -- a popular approach to reporting the news. But thankfully, Rand Paul is not a news director or an editor, and responsible media professionals are telling the public the truth: the election was not stolen. The Republicans' Big Lie has no basis in fact."
I'm reminded of the excellent 2009 book from journalist Charles P. Pierce entitled, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Pierce looked at recent events in America, such as the Terri Schiavo debacle, the opening of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, and most of the work of the George W. Bush administration, and determined that that in the U.S., "fact" is merely what enough people believe, and "truth" lies only in how fervently they believe it.
According to Pierce, "The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites...although both of these things are part of it. The rise of idiot America reflects -for profit, mainly, but also, more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power- the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
This is how idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist.""
Conservatives of course hated real jounalism a long time before the rise of Idiot America. Richard Nixon famously went to war with the press just because he didn't like the way they covered him. From John Avlon of The Daily Beast:
"The heated domestic debates over Vietnam had overturned decades of deference in press coverage of the president. The new technology of television broke down barriers that brought the reality of war into America’s living rooms, upending their assumption that journalists would almost uncritically support the president in times of war.
In the legion of great newspaper reporters who earned their stripes covering the war in Vietnam – David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Marguerite Higgins and Sydney Schanberg among them – the White House recognized that television correspondents had disproportionate power in the fight for hearts and minds at home."
Nixon would have loved Twitter and other social media vehicles for the same reason that Trump loved them: Twitter allowed Trump to deliver his message to his audience without a filter, without any fact-checking, without any follow-up questions and without any commentary.
How Republicans would like the mainstream media to function was summarized neatly by Sharron Angle, the GOP's 2010 nominee for Senate in Nevada. From Eric Kleefeld of Business Insider:
"Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle has further expounded on her
strategy of courting conservative media and avoiding more mainstream
sources -- it's not just about money, as she's said before, but also about only being asked the questions she wants.
"We needed to have the press be our friend," Angle said in an interview that aired on Fox over the weekend.
"Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend?" said a disbelieving Carl Cameron. Before Angle could fully answer, he added: "That sounds naive." Apparently this was too much for even him.
"Well, no," said Angle. "We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."
Angle continued: "And when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.""
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