A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

On the Media's Resurrection of Chris Christie

Who, he tells us, doesn't watch Fox News so can't comment on it. If
you believe that ...

In the midst of its weeklong cheerleading session for Chris Christie's
pretense that he is in any position to challenge Trump for the
presidency (after having repeatedly prostrated himself before the Donald
throughout 2016 and gotten nothing for it), MSNBC's Nicole Wallace
(herself a recovering Republican) decided to play skunk at the garden
party. She asked why his book "about liars and conspiracy theorists"
didn't mention Fox News. Christie dodged the question with the
ridiculous contention that he does not watch Fox and had no idea what
Tucker Carlson et al. were saying these days
. In
that regard, Christie was lucky that he could not be asked to take a
position on Carlson's insane contention that January 6th was a
"false flag" operation
.

People who know Tucker even casually, myself among them, know that he is
not nearly stupid or crazy enough to believe the things he says on air.
Like so many of the Fox hosts, he says what he needs to in order to keep
himself both rich and relevant to the audience of lunatics that Fox
increasingly attracts and misinforms. It can be complicated sometimes to
catch these clowns in a clear lie because they are so shameless about
what they pretend to believe. So kudos to Chris Hayes for taking the
trouble to point out a deliberate, premeditated lie by the network; a
rather inconsequential one, but all the more revealing for having been
so. President Biden was paying tribute to the great Negro League pitcher
Satchel Paige, and Fox snipped the tape to make it appear that Old Man
Biden was referring to him as just a "Negro" rather than referring
to the Negro League he pitched in, and then guffawed about the old guy.
In fact, as Hayes notes, Fox "was caught red-handed committing one of
the gravest of all journalistic sins ... deceptively editing a sound
bite to make a politician say something they did not say." You can see
it here
.

Fox's complete lack of journalistic integrity and willingness to lie
when it suits their overseer's political purposes have real-life
consequences. In my final Nation column
, I noted
that due to a "2018 examination of the political 'knowledge' of
more than 3,000 Fox News viewers by political scientists Sanford Schram
and Richard Fording, we know that 'relying on Fox News as a major news
source significantly decreased a person's score more than relying on
any other news source.'" Not surprisingly, people also vote on the
basis of these lies. A 2017 study by political scientist Gregory Martin
and economist Ali Yurukoglu found that the effect of watching Fox News
was powerful enough to change the results of almost any close election
and even some that would never have been close without it.

Just recently, the Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
published a working paper entitled "Cable News and COVID-19 Vaccine
Compliance
" by
three scholars, which found that "in the later stages of the vaccine
roll-out (starting May 2021), higher local viewership of Fox News
Channel has been associated with lower local vaccination rates." The
authors noted, "We can verify that this association is causal using
exogenous geographical variation in the channel lineup." (The other
two major television networks, CNN and MSNBC, evinced no such effect.)
Another study, an NBER Working Paper on "The Persuasive Effect of Fox
News: Non-Compliance With Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic
," found a direct connection
between Fox viewing and a refusal to comply with commonsense
social-distancing measures. In addition to perverting our political
system, that is, Fox is also killing people.

And don't forget one of Fox's most important impacts, one that
rarely gets enough attention: its power to successfully "work the
refs," and thereby make other news sources far more sympathetic to
right-wing falsehoods than they would otherwise be. It's a tangential
point in this fine New York magazine story, "Inside Felicia Sonmez's
War Against the Washington Post
,"
but in it, we learn from former Post reporter Christopher Ingraham that
"[m]anagement effectively let the policy be dictated by the worst
elements of the far right. A surefire way to get a Post reporter in
trouble at work was to get a critical mass of conservatives mad at that
reporter on Twitter."

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I must say I was surprised by just how upset Martin Indyk got over the
short item I wrote about all the attention being showered on Master of
the Game, his "love letter" to Henry Kissinger
,
in last week's column/newsletter, responding with a never-ending
series of tweets and testimonials. He also called me an "incorrigible
bounder," an insult I had to look up to find out what it meant. As I
tried to explain to the angry Mr. Indyk, the item wasn't really about
him or his book; it was about the overwhelming embrace by the mainstream
media and foreign-policy establishment of a work that celebrates what
are really the costly failures of a man whose cynical lack of regard for
human life resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths during the course
of his career. Those failures include his actions related to the 1973
Yom Kippur War that Indyk finds, um, "master[ful]."

One of the great things about Substack is that it allows one to ignore
people who just waste your time with nutty beliefs and conspiracy
theories. I haven't checked, but I'm sure my blood pressure
appreciates the fact that I have pretty much no idea what Bari Weiss,
Glenn Greenwald, or Matt Taibbi think about anything anymore. The
biggest blessing, no doubt, was the departure from the MSM of Andrew
Sullivan. No more having to read about "liberal" publications
whoring for racist eugenicists
;
no more attacks on the "decadent left" and "paralyzing,
pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column."

No more attacks on yours truly, who, together with Susan Sontag and
Michael Moore, and later Katha Pollitt, was described as a literal
traitor to America
.
I could go on, but the point is that 60 Minutes had even less reason to
celebrate, last Sunday, the now irrelevant gay-Catholic-Tory-Gap model
than the entire MSM did to throw a party for New Jersey's least
popular governor ever
.

Here
is
that 60 Minutes segment, if you must. Me? I'm too busy with this book,
which is, so far, the best I know of with the title Master of the Game
.

Altercation Gift-Giving Guide

For the next few weeks, I'll be adding to my already extensive
résumé for public service by recommending gifts to buy yourselves and
others, this being the season and all. It will be almost all music and
books. My first suggestion is the surprisingly decently priced five-CD
box set devoted to Joni Mitchell's 1968-1971 period, which included
her (all but) undisputed masterpiece, Blue. It's called "Joni
Mitchell Archives-Volume 2."

The set is made up of 122 tracks-though some are spoken
introductions-of recordings that are home demos, studio outtakes, and
live versions, nicely cleaned up, of songs that appeared on Song to a
Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, and of course, Blue. Volume 1,
which documented Joni's genuine beginnings, was really for Joni's
hardcore devotees. This set is aimed more at committed Joni fans, if not
people who just kind of like her songs. It includes three full shows,
one at Le Hibou Coffee House in 1968 in Ottawa (rather incredibly,
personally recorded on tape by Jimi Hendrix); in 1969 at Carnegie Hall;
and one in London in 1970 where she was joined by her then-boyfriend
James Taylor. The rest is a mix of tapes she made in Saskatchewan, on
the John Peel program, and on Dick Cavett's talk show. A big bonus is
the fact that the author of the liner notes in this handsome set is
Cameron Crowe. Dollar for dollar (whether U.S. or Canadian), you'll be
hard-pressed to find a nicer gift for anyone in this price range.

(Lately, I have seen a number of people insisting that Joni is the
greatest songwriter of her generation, even including Dylan. Graham
Nash, another ex-boyfriend, said it to me, in this 2014 interview
.
I disagree, but if you just feel like reading a lot about Joni, check
out this reading list.
)

If someone on your list is really into Christmas-and you also want to
look like you spent more money than you really did-then I'd
recommend the four-CD, 82-song box set "Elvis Back in Nashville."
These are the studio sessions that yielded Elvis Sings the Wonderful
World of Christmas (1971), the gospel He Touched Me (1972), Elvis Now
(1972), and Elvis (1973), but all the (literal) bells and whistles have
been wiped away and what you get is just Elvis and his excellent band.
One can, as one almost always must with late Elvis, take issue with many
of the song choices. Even without the backup singers, strings and horns,
etc., there's still a lot of shtick here in the form of quite a few
schlocky songs. But this being Elvis, greatness nevertheless abounds.
The songs are not the famous ones; not even the famous Christmas ones.
But that just makes the experience of discovery more fun. There's one
CD of Elvis fooling around with the popular music of the period ("Lady
Madonna," "Don't Think Twice," and "Put Your Hand in the
Hand"). And there's also an extended unedited version of "Merry
Christmas Baby" that, I promise you, will never get old. (And hey, if
you give it to someone you love, you can say "Merry Christmas,
Baby," so they know you are not part of that evil War on Christmas
that will no doubt be raging as you speak those words.) There's a nice
booklet too, but I see people complaining about its accuracy, so no
endorsement there.

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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