More stuff other people said

Hot off last night's post, in which I both (a) complain about the corporate media coverage or lack thereof regarding the fascist idiot hatemonger that's running for president as a Republican, and (b) quote Craig Calcaterra on something entirely different, came today's edition of Craig's Cup of Coffee newsletter. Craig unconsciously rebuts some of my complaint while also supporting it, because Craig is a smart guy. I'll share the entire section for you here and also suggest that, if you are interested in baseball, politics, and/or relatively obscure indy musicians, Craig's newsletter is $7/month.

The problem with covering Donald Trump and J.D. Vance

Almost every day on social media you see a tweet in response to something Donald Trump has said or done to the effect of “why isn’t the [name a publication] covering this?!” I’m sure I’ve shared that sentiment myself at times. Usually when stuff happens like Trump telling people at a rally that he’ll suspend all laws as they apply to policing, round up 20 million brown people with a domestically-deployed military, and put them in concentration camps, the day after which the New York Times leads the front page with “How do Trump and Harris’ tax credit plans compare?”

This is galling, but it’s also the case that the news media is covering Donald Trump. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t know about his insane ideas. They do stories on his authoritarian proposals, his racist and sexist comments, and all of those things. Indeed, about 95% of the time you hear someone say “why isn’t the media talking about . . .” the media has, in fact, talked about it already, often extensively.

When people say stuff like that I think they’re saying one of two things.

The first thing they’re saying, at least implicitly, is “why hasn’t the entire country rejected Donald Trump out of hand based on this appalling information?! Why has this appalling information not created a Joseph N. Welch-style ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last’ moment in which the bad actor is effectively vanquished?” That, of course, is a very different question than one of coverage and a lot of it is tied up in the fact that a hell of a lot of Americans actually want the same horrible things Donald Trump wants. I don’t think our media has done a particularly great job of covering Trump and the Republican Party’s descent into abject fascism—let alone talked seriously about the practical implications and effect of those things Trump and his supporters say they want—but this dynamic is less of a media problem than an America problem.

A different thing people are saying when they talk about coverage—and it’s usually the more media-savvy people who are saying this one—is “while the media may have reported on this or that bad thing Trump has said or done, why hasn’t the media, en masse, made this a daily drip-drip-drip story the way it made Hillary Clinton’s emails or Joe Biden’s age? Why hasn’t the media given us the sort of coverage it has given all manner of other topics and figures for years—the sort of coverage that frames big ideas for weeks or even months at a time?”

I think that is a somewhat more valid criticism in many respects, and that at least part of it is a function of the American media being cowed by decades of bad faith conservative attacks on the press which, in the Trump era, have been weaponized in all manner of ways. Indeed, you can almost hear the meetings at major media outlets in which someone softens language or buries coverage in its entirety because of the fear of blowback from the cable and online conservative movement.

But I don’t think that accounts for it all. Rather, I think there’s a far more basic issue at play. One which I’ve been unable to really articulate before now but which Andrea Pitzer wrote about in a new piece over at her Degenerate Art newsletter on Monday.

Pitzer borrows a term from climate change studies—stationarity—which describes the human tendency to believe in a world that no longer exists. It gets at the idea of how even institutions, policymakers, an commentators who aren’t abject climate change deniers can nonetheless help exacerbate climate change by seeing the world through a prism of past circumstances which keeps them from adapting to present events. Sort of an institutional inertia that fails to properly clock the problem and thus fails to address it.

Pitzer argues that the media has done the same with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other Republicans. They have continued to approach stories and controversies as if Republicans and Democrats both want what’s best for most of America but simply disagree on the means. As if facts and integrity still matter to everyone involved and that merely shedding light on lies or general abhorrence will both cow the liar and/or abhorrent actors and inform those to whom they appealing.

Except, as Trump and Vance have shown, they do not want what’s best for most of America, facts and integrity do not matter to them, and they do not agree to the same set of basic assumptions of how the world works that almost all politicians did before they came onto the scene. The media, however, has not changed its approach to coverage to account for this sort of shamelessness and the result are stories which cast truth and lies as if they are merely competing policy positions to be weighed and cast inherently illiberal or authoritarian pronouncements as if they are equally as valid as whatever normal political actors are proposing. At times they go out of their way to normalize Trump’s and Vance’s radicalness specifically because they do not know how to properly process and report on such radicalness. Some say that’s because they are invested in the concept of “balance.” Some say it’s because the media favors Trump and wants him to win. I think Pitzer’s idea—that they are psychologically tied to a past world, even if they claim otherwise—explains a hell of a lot of this dynamic.

Another thing that is happening which support’s Pitzer’s notion is the way in which the media has continued to behave as if old markers of inherent legitimacy and integrity serve, in and of themselves, as guardrails against extremism. Stuff like a candidate coming from a putatively respectable profession like real estate or finance. Stuff like a candidate being a member of an established religion or political party. Stuff like the fact that they have wives and children and otherwise appear like normal people. There’s, in essence, an institutional bias in the press which equates signifiers of traditional normality with mainstream politics and when normality does not present itself, that normality bias seeks to shove the radicalness into a preexisting frame. Trump CAN’T be a dangerous chaos agent, because the Republican Party nominated him! Vance can’t be a misogynist who wants to make “The Handmaid’s Tale” a reality, because he has a wife with an advanced degree! This happens despite ample press coverage of their words and deeds and is way deeper than anything traditional media criticism can handle. It’s a root psychological problem that both the media and millions of non-MAGA hat-wearing voters who nonetheless vote for Trump because he’s the Republican are experiencing.

I don’t think that the press is the only reason we have Trump and that, if Trump wins, it will be the press’ fault. That’s a facile notion because, again, it ignores the fact that some 80 million voters and many more non-voters are just fine with a president who wants dictatorial powers to go after immigrants and minorities, wants to subjugate women, and wants to hardwire the American system to do even more than it already does to make sure the wealthy stay wealthy and that the non-wealthy know their place. It’s a more popular platform than any of us would like to admit because America is a way more dark and messed-up place than most of us would like to admit.

But yeah, it’s pretty clear that the press is not just fighting the last war. It’s fighting a war from three wars back. The biggest reason it’s doing it runs way deeper than simple editorial choices, but either way it’s doing the country a disservice.

Also, one more quote, this time from one of the links Craig included above (Andrea Pitzer):

The joke about Trump goes that dealing with him is like playing chess with a pigeon who knocks the pieces over, shits on the board, and struts around saying he won. But what’s happening now is that our political and legal institutions have let the pigeon sign up for another chess tournament, and too many news outlets are spending an inordinate amount of time analyzing him like any other contender.

I've never heard that one before, but I now can't think of the orange buffoon as anything but a strutting pigeon taking dumps on a chessboard.