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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

How Not to Stamp Out the Big Lie
Plus: Janet Malcolm remembered

Returning to the issue of Republicans who continue to lie about the 2020
election on network television news programs-and in doing so,
undermine the foundations of our democracy in the process-the AP has a
new story here

on former journalist, now Daily Show producer Matt Negrin's heroic
campaign to try to hold these programs accountable. In my view, the
calculation ought to be a simple one: If someone is going to come on
your program to lie, and you, the host, are not willing to say, "Thank
you, but that's a lie. Why do you feel a need to lie to our
viewers?" and then follow this up with "OK, we know you are willing
to lie about what is literally the most important issue in our political
lives; how can you ask us to believe anything you'd say about anything
else?"-then you may as well not bother to have the interview at all.

This won't happen, of course, because it's not nice. Niceness-or
likeability, as measured in Q ratings-is the statistic that matters
for TV interviewers. It is Joe Louis to the truth's "Bum of the
Month Club"-a knockout blow to the concern for facts. Note that
former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno tells the AP, "It's
not a question of banning them [the liars]. You just don't want them
on the air because they're not going to be a good guest." What Sesno
means by "good guest" is someone who plays along with the format
and, on a good day, says something that might end up trending on
Twitter. He does not mean "honestly inform our viewers about what is
actually true in the world so that they might properly exercise their
rights as citizens of a democratic republic." Were a producer to
object to a guest on that basis, his colleagues would laugh him out of
the room. Note that no network honchos were quoted in this piece. Note
also that most of the corporations that said they would no longer fund
election-deniers after the insurrection of January 6-the very same
ones that in some cases sponsor some of these programs-have quietly
dropped that policy. The vast majority of Republicans now believe
Trump's election lie, and so do a number of independents. And why
shouldn't they? They've heard it repeated over and over, and most
often, I'm guessing, with little or no pushback. Remember this
interview
,
for instance? Another truth TKO at the hands of election liar and
Republican Minority Whip Steve Scalise.

The Republican campaign to destroy our democracy is the most important
of the myriad emergencies that face our political system today, but
these lies are just the most visible tip of an iceberg that is now
piercing into virtually every aspect of the way political news is
reported and received in this country. On Wednesday morning, for
instance, the Politico Playbook authors sent out the news

that "More than six in 10 Republicans (63%) oppose critical race
theory being taught in K-12 schools, vs. 13% of Democrats and 38% of
independents in opposition." They did not bother to mention that
pretty much no K-12 school in America teaches critical race theory. If
your child is learning it in school, well then, mazel tov (or perhaps
condolences) on having a future attorney in the family. (We also note
the authors' screaming headline that Monica Lewinsky attended a party;
this on the day after the Republicans filibustered a voting rights bill
in the Senate that had been the only chance of ensuring reasonably fair
elections in 2022 and 2024.)

And speaking of Tucker Carlson, remember this quote from Ben Smith's
Monday column

(and be sure to click on it for the visual): "If you open yourself up
as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don't even have to
ask them to go soft on you." It was spoken by a journalist who
declined to be identified. If Ben had called me, I'd have been happy
to say it on the record.

We just had a Democratic primary election in New York City. There's
been a great deal of attention paid to ranked-choice voting, which I
think worked out quite well so long as you didn't overthink it and
just listed your favorites in order. What the need to pick a bunch of
different candidates did do, however, was make endorsements more
important than ever. The New York Times' Garcia endorsement made her a
credible candidate overnight. It also may have elected the excellent
progressives Brad Lander for comptroller and Alvin Bragg for DA.

This gets me to one of my pet causes. Media institutions should only
endorse in local races, where the media matter, not national ones, where
they don't. Casual news consumers do not distinguish between the
"news" side and editorial. They assume, understandably, that if the
Times endorses only Democrats for president, then it's a "liberal"
newspaper that slants its news coverage to benefit Democrats and
liberals (and maybe even socialists). This leads to "working the
refs" attacks on media institutions that, whether consciously or not,
respond by bending over backwards to be extra-sympathetic to
right-wingers in their news coverage, in order to demonstrate that the
charge is false. What's more, people don't need an endorsement in a
presidential race to pick a candidate. The entire exercise is Kabuki
theater designed to pump up the egos of everyone concerned. The cost to
the institution's credibility, however, does not begin to justify the
bragging rights they enjoy with their friends and families.

The week has been filled up with tributes to the late Janet Malcolm and
the 58 years (!) she spent writing for The New Yorker. She was a rare
combination of intellectual, investigator, and a writer of supple,
sometimes poetic prose. I loved this quote from Jordan Ellenberg when
asked by the Times Book Review, "You're organizing a literary dinner
party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?" His entire
response: "Not Janet Malcolm
-the
idea of being observed by her pitiless gaze is too terrifying."

Many tributes focused on the work that made her simultaneously famous
and infamous: lengthy articles that became the books The Journalist and
the Murderer, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and In the Freud Archives. (Her
admiration for the Gossip Girl novels
, less
so.) But the Malcolm piece that blew me away was one that gets no
mention anywhere. It was a 1990 profile of Daniel Kumermann
, a
Prague-based former foreign-affairs journalist, who signed the human
rights declaration Charter 77 in 1978 and consequently spent his next 12
years in that city as a window-washer.

I had met Daniel in Prague in 1986 when I was bumming around Eastern
Europe with a backpack and a Eurail pass. He sought me out in the
city's synagogue, to which I had gone in order to sit in what had been
(and was still marked as) Franz Kafka's father's seat. Though older
than I was, Daniel was perhaps the youngest practicing Jew in Prague and
a big Philip Roth fan. We spent a couple of memorable days together. I
agreed to smuggle out some samizdat literature for him, which scared the
shit out of me at the border checkpoint. Daniel was a wonderful
raconteur and guide to the city, and I left him with both sadness for
his plight and admiration for the stoicism with which he bore it. But
when I read Malcolm's profile, I realized I would never, ever be the
kind of journalist she was. Her descriptions were so precise and
complex; she saw so many things about him, his life, and his city that
had barely registered in my consciousness until I read them on the page.
I remain in awe of both her perspicacity and generosity in this piece,
and in so much else of what she published, regardless of whether I
agreed with her conclusions.

I saw Daniel years later when he visited Washington. I was eager to hear
from him what "freedom"-with all its disappointments-felt like
after he had worked so hard to achieve it. Damned if I can remember what
he said, but in a wonderful denouement to this story, the next time I
heard his name, it was because President Havel had appointed the
window-washer to be the Czech ambassador to Israel.

Our country is opening up again, you may have heard. I crazily went to
the very last concert at Madison Square Garden just as the pandemic was
starting to strike. (My building had the first case in the city.) The
occasion was the 50th anniversary show of what remained of the Allman
Brothers on March 10
, where
we all obsessively wiped off our seats and washed our hands during the
three-hour 20-minute show. Last week, I got to experience its reopening
at a wonderful, Juneteenth-inspired show by the Jazz at Lincoln Center
Orchestra at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park,
sponsored by the City Parks Foundation's SummerStage program. Wynton
Marsalis and company played Sonny Rollins's five-part "Freedom Suite
"
and followed it up with Charles Mingus's "Freedom
."
They also threw in a generous helping of Ellingtonia. To be honest, I
was expecting to be annoyed at this show, because whenever I've gone
to free shows in the park, most people paid little attention to the
music and made it impossible for me to do so. This show, however, had
assigned seating and (reasonably) comfortable chairs laid out, and the
crowd was just as quiet, attentive, and appreciative as they'd be at
Lincoln Center. It was a beautiful night, and we were all thrilled to be
there, saluting, enjoying, and appreciating our great city and the
personalities and institutions that help make it so. Here

is an excerpt from Marsalis's recent composition "The Democracy
Suite." Here
is a column I
wrote about jazz criticism, featuring an interview I did with Wynton,
back in 1997 on the occasion of his having received the Pulitzer Prize
for music. I found it on the Jazz@LC website.

Finally, here is an
interview I did last week with the website Frank News, which is aimed at
youngish people, about the sad state of the journalism profession today.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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