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

President Biden Spoke the Truth About Trump. Corporate Media Threw a
Fit.

Trump himself continues to spew lies and insults about Democrats every
day.

For people of goodwill and good sense, I think the hardest thing to deal
with in present-day American politics is the sense of hopelessness it
inspires. Our democracy barely survived four years under a presidency
that rotted from the head down, and the head was an insane, traitorous,
sociopathic, and lawless combination con man/conspiracy nut with zero
relevant experience who liked to brag about grabbing women "by the
pussy." We (just barely) managed to elect a sane, decent, deeply
experienced man with moderate-but-empathetic politics. And yet it
remains a toss-up whether we will return to power a man determined to
destroy literally everything democratic (and most of what is competent)
in our system of government.

There are countless culprits in this story, but I like to focus on the
media, so let's take a look at the response to President Biden's
speech

last week in which he tried to warn people who were not paying
sufficient attention to the threat, and quite specifically laid out the
target, careful not to cast too wide a net or overstate his case.

What happened? Well, as The Washington Post's Paul Farhi notes
,
the television networks (at first) ignored it entirely. ABC went with a
game show, Press Your Luck; NBC, with a rerun of Law and Order; and CBS
picked a rerun of Young Sheldon. On cable, CNN and MSNBC ran it, but Fox
ran Trump's fellow fascist wannabe, Tucker Carlson.

When they reported on the speech, the networks amplified the Trump
cult's hypocritical whining about how mean and hurtful the president
had been. The most egregious offender, at least on network television,
may have been Martha Raddatz of ABC News's This Week program, who both
encouraged and then participated in what turned out to be a veritable
propaganda video for lies in the service of the Trump Republicans'
feigned outrage. Speaking to the ranking Republican on the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, Raddatz falsely
insisted that Biden called every Trump voter a threat to democracy when,
in fact, he specifically insisted that "to be very clear-very clear
up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans,
are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme
ideology."

Raddatz then gave free rein to McCaul to purposely mislead the
program's millions of viewers. After quoting Trump uncritically
terming the FBI and the Department of Justice "vicious monsters,"
she invited McCaul's meandering into whataboutism: "I think the
perception is what a lot of Republicans I know see on the heels of the
Russian investigation, the Steele dossier. There's a certain
'distrust but verify' attitude when it comes to the Department of
Justice and the FBI," McCaul said. Next came a completely nonsensical
and dishonest defense of Trump's clear crimes: "I have lived in the
classified world most of my professional career, I personally wouldn't
do that. But I'm not the president of the United States. But he has a
different set of rules that apply to him. The president can declassify a
document on a moment's notice." As numerous people have pointed out,
while the notion is ridiculous, it would have been far worse if Trump
had, somehow, declassified these supersecret documents (which include
details of a foreign country's nuclear program
),
because they would then be available to anyone through a Freedom of
Information Act request. Nobody should know that better than the ranking
Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Do I even
need to type the words "But her emails ...")

Reporters everywhere were shocked-Captain Renault style-that the
president criticized the people who had been speaking of his party as
one run by pedophiles, etc. NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid
tweeted , "This
is clearly a political, campaign speech. It's clear who/what this
speech is about. In the first 3 minutes, President Biden said Donald
Trump-by name-twice." Heaven forfend! "Whatever you think of
this speech, the military is supposed to be apolitical," tweeted
CNN anchor
Brianna Keilar. "Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden
for a political speech flies in the face of that. It's wrong when
Democrats do it. It's wrong when Republicans do it."

Trump, of course, gave many speeches with Marines in the background.
Matthew Sheffield helpfully noted that "Trump called Democrats
'fascists' in '20 while surrounded by military officials." As
Chris Hayes noted, the reason Trump "got basically zero coverage
" was that
"it was completely par for the course for Trump." No one remembers
those events because Trump's comments are routinely inflammatory
hysteria, and Dems didn't feel threatened by his false claim.

Trump also did his damnedest to show the reporters how stupid they were
being by going full-what is the right word here-um, "Trump" in a
speech in Pennsylvania just two days afterward, claiming that the
Democratic candidate for Senate from that state, John Fetterman,
supports taxpayer-funded drug dens and the complete decriminalization of
illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and ultra-lethal
fentanyl. "By the way, he takes them himself," Trump said
,
before going on in that vein all night, calling, for instance, the FBI
and Justice Department not only "vicious monsters," as noted above,
but also "controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers, and the
media, who tell them what to do."

Above a big-think article on this entire phenomenon, the awful New York
Times headline writers went for a permanent place in the "Both
Sides" Hall of Fame: "Parties' Divergent Realities Challenge
Biden's Defense of Democracy" over an article

that, beginning in its eighth paragraph, actually began to tell the
truth:
The Republicans' reaction to Mr. Biden's speech was remarkable. For
years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone
who disagreed with him-encouraging supporters to beat up protesters
;
demanding that his rivals be arrested
;
accusing critics of treason
and
even murder
;
calling opponents "fascists"
;
and retweeting a supporter saying "the only good Democrat is a dead
Democrat."

But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that
Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.

The Times went on: "When it comes to democracy in America, there is no
real equivalence, of course. The elder Mr. Trump sought to use the power
of his office to overturn a democratic election, pressuring state and
local officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own
vice president to disregard the will of the people to keep him in
office. When that did not work, he riled up a crowd that stormed the
Capitol
,
disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes and threatening to
execute those standing in Mr. Trump's way."

And on: "Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has continued to demand that
the election be reversed and even suggested that he be reinstated as
president, all based on lies he tells his supporters about what happened
in 2020. He has forced Republican officeholders and candidates to
embrace his false claims and sought to install election deniers in state
positions where they can influence future vote counts."

[link removed]

Speaking of CNN, the network did its damnedest to prove previous
Altercations here

and here

prescient. One CNN panel member compared a Trump rally speaker
supporting literal Nazis to the background of Biden's speech featuring
a U.S. Marine as both being "issues with optics
." The
network's Poppy Harlow demanded to know of Biden's spokesperson
whether the president will "apologize" to the Republicans.

Another CNN reporter felt it necessary for some reason to repost a
four-month-old article about Hunter Biden's laptop
as if it
were somehow news.

But the real news at CNN could be found in the HR department. The
network cut loose its longtime White House correspondent John Harwood,
who still had years left on his contract. In his final appearance

on the network, Harwood called Trump a "dishonest demagogue," and
went on to explain: "We are brought up to believe there's two
different political parties with different points of view and we don't
take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that's not what
we're talking about. These are not honest disagreements."

As if to make the intended Foxification of CNN clear, days later, its
president Chris Licht announced the hiring of John Miller to be CNN's
"chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst." He neglected to
mention that when Miller served as deputy commissioner for intelligence
and counterterrorism with the New York Police Department, Miller
testified at a March 2022 city council hearing that there was "no
evidence
"
that the NYPD ever spied on Muslims in mosques after 9/11.

This was a lie. As the AP reported
,
the NYPD "built an aggressive domestic intelligence program after the
Sept. 11 attacks that put Muslim businesses, mosques and student groups
under scrutiny." It "systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods,
listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed
law-abiding residents." Councilmember Shahana Hanif called for Miller
to be investigated for perjury
,
but instead he will apparently be free to continue in the grand CNN
tradition of the network's former contributor, Trump campaign manager
Corey Lewandowski
.
And that was back in the days when the network was allegedly dominated
by liberal shills. (I sure hope the invaluable Daniel Dale
still has a job and is on the
case ...)

Finally, I have no space for this but read this article

to prepare yourself for Politico to go (even further) in the directions
described above.

I have no room for this either, but here's more evidence
,
from Aspen, Colorado, that oligarchic media power is incompatible with
democracy. Also, here is an excellent L.A. Times piece

on why this phenomenon is so dangerous.

Donate to TAP's Midterm Tracker Travel Fund

to send our reporters to cover elections around the country. You can
tell us where to go, too!    

Your 100% tax deductible donation goes directly to our edit team to
cover expenses for reporting and travel.
Thank you for your support!  

Given what a bad mood I've just put everyone in, how about Kitty Wells
singing "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels
";
Patsy Cline with "I Fall to Pieces
";
and all of it topped off with John Prine and Iris DeMent on "In Spite
of Ourselves
."

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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