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

The Sunday Shows Enable Republican Extremism

TV bookers apparently can't stop themselves from giving an uncritical
platform to anti-democracy demagogues.

Paul Farhi, The Washington Post's media reporter, recently asked just
how relevant the Sunday news shows were anymore. "There are friendlier
forums for a politician to deliver a message, with sympathetic
moderators and like-minded viewers," he said. "That leaves little
incentive for a newsmaker to face probing questions from tough, seasoned
interviewers."

Thing is, the shows' producers and anchors know this and so are
increasingly willing to bend their programs to accommodate the
pathological lying and crazy conspiracy-mongering that has become the
coin of the realm among Republicans in the Trump era. The result is not
"news," but the kind of propaganda purposefully designed to destroy
democracy, making the networks themselves-networks that receive free
access to the public's airwaves in exchange for their alleged
public-service broadcasting-guilty in their role as voluntary
transmission belts.

One could see evidence of this tendency during the October 9 interview
of Arizona gubernatorial candidate and prominent election denier Kari
Lake by Major Garrett on CBS's Face the Nation. Over and over, she
spouted obvious nonsense about how, as governor, she would invoke the
Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, which, she says, "calls for
the federal government to protect us from invasion." What
"invasion," you ask? It's apparently "the cartels, these narco
terrorist groups have operational control. And they're using Arizona
to smuggle people, to traffic children and to traffic the most dangerous
drug we've ever seen, fentanyl." At this point in the interview, she
switches to Arizona's own Article I, Section 10, which, she said,
confers on the state the "authority to take care of our own border and
protect our own border. It's right there in black and white in the
Constitution. And we meet all three criteria, we have an invasion, our
people are in imminent danger, and time is of the essence. There's no
time for delay."

Of course if you go to Arizona, you will find no evidence of any such
invasion, any more than people did when they stepped outside of their
homes after reading H.G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds

back in 1898.

Leaving that nonsense aside, it's impossible to know what, if
anything, was true in Lake's pronouncements-because Garrett made no
attempt to fact-check anything she said. Are we really "losing more
people to fentanyl in Arizona since Joe Biden took office than we lost
in 9/11 or during COVID"? I have no idea. It sounds like a lie, and it
also sounds like something Joe Biden has nothing to do with, but you'd
never know that from watching the program.

She went on: "We had a 16-year-old die here in the metro area last
week from a fentanyl overdose. We can't keep having this happen.
We're losing our young generation." Again, Garrett did not reply,
"Um, relevance?"

Wait, there's more. If Biden resists this nonsense, "then it would
really look like he is on the side of the cartels. And I don't think
he wants the people to think that." Will people really "think
that"? Garret apparently had no opinion.

Lake then moved on to Nancy Pelosi, about whom she said, "The most
racist thing, I think, I've heard her say-although she's said
quite a few things that are offensive-she said these people coming in
illegally should go pick fruit in the South. I mean, I couldn't
believe my ears, Major, when I heard that."

(Did Lake actually hear that? I doubt it. I could not find any evidence
of it. But in the spirit of due diligence, I called Pelosi's press
office to find out what Lake might be referring to. The woman to whom I
spoke asked me to email in my inquiry. I did, and no one in the office
bothered to respond.)

Wait, there's (much) more!: "We don't have free speech anymore. We
can't speak out against our own elections. All I'm asking for is the
ability to speak out when our government does something wrong. We should
be able to speak out against it." Garrett did not say, "Um, Ms.
Lake, you're doing that right now on network television ..."

Garrett then invited Lake's Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of
State Katie Hobbs, to engage in responding to the nonsense Lake had just
spouted. She explained that she would not debate Lake (and implicitly,
respond to Garrett's attempts to goad her to do so) because "I have
no desire to be a part of the spectacle that she's looking to
create." Then came one of the dumbest (and most incoherent) quotes
I've heard from a "journalist" for quite some time: "Sometimes,
voters learn things from moments of duress or challenge or circus.
Don't you think you're strong enough to handle any kind of circus
Kari Lake might present, if, in fact, she were to present one? Don't
the voters of Arizona deserve to see that real?"

Once, in refusing to speak to a journalist from The Atlantic, Lake, a
former TV "reporter" (and also apparently former "queen of the
gays
"),
accused the writer of "judgment, not journalism
."
Sadly, given the way the profession increasingly defines itself, she had
a point.

[link removed]

Way back in July of last year, inspired by the decidedly uninspiring New
York City mayoral race, I wrote an Altercation column about the
hysterical coverage of crime in my city
, in
which I lamented the willingness of so many in the mainstream media to
go along with the scare tactics employed by the (since successful)
campaign of Eric Adams, despite the fact that virtually none of the
available data supported his alarmist assertions.

This problem is a perennial one. Voters almost always have misguided
impressions of the state of violent crime, both locally and nationally.
This is due to the success that politicians almost always enjoy in
hyping the issue on local news programs, which love to run the footage
to which police departments happily give them access. Highlighting crime
almost always favors right-wing candidates in any election, because
their perceived "toughness" appeals to voters-see above-despite
the fact that the "solutions" they propose often, if not always,
turn out to be counterproductive.

Reinforcing those points is a recent column in The Washington Post by
Philip Bump

that took a look at the manner in which Fox News covered what its paid
propagandists call the "crime crisis in America." Bump noted,
"Data released by the FBI on Wednesday suggested that violent crime
nationally didn't increase much

in 2021 relative to 2020. That comports with recent figures

from crime victimization data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS), which indicated that reported violent crime was flat in 2021 and
down from before the pandemic." And while the "best available data,
though, suggest violent crime isn't up significantly since last
year," the lack of precise data from many localities provides an
"opportunity for those who might find it useful to suggest that crime
is out of control."

For instance, we have no reliable data in New York City because the
police department refuses to provide it. In fact, the department is
about to forfeit many millions of dollars

in order to keep it secret. The FBI tried to improve its reporting
system, and following six years of warning the NYPD and other police
agencies, and even providing New York City almost $24 million in grants
to help it get its act together, the department continues to refuse to
comply.

One can only speculate at the reasons for this reticence, but none of
them are at all edifying. The most obvious one is that it allows the
police to insist that they need more cops and more money to fight
alleged crime waves; this despite the fact that if crime keeps rising,
the solution of more cops looks a lot like throwing good money after
bad; or, to employ another common metaphor, "crazy" in the sense
that we keep on doing the same thing over and over and yet expecting a
different outcome.

But it might be good business for the department even despite the loss
of more federal funds. The lack of good information acts as a kind of
engraved invitation to the lying liars at Fox News. "Though it's
hard to contextualize individual acts of criminality," Bump observes,
"it's easy to cast those individual acts as representative of
broader trends. Fox News and others in the conservative media were
effective at portraying the protests during the summer of 2020 as
incessantly violent and enormously damaging to a large number of major
American cities over an extended period of time, even when that was
easily disprovable. Now, with the midterms looming, Fox News is talking
about crime more than ever." Bump then asks the question to which, so
far, Democrats and liberals have had no success in finding a politically
effective answer, despite the fact that they have faced it now for well
over six decades: "How do you counter an endless loop of criminal
activity shown on television without knowing whether those crimes are
anything more than sensationalism?"

One obvious problem with the crime wave hype is that it is in many ways
a stand-in for racism. We can thank racist Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville
for making that explicit: "They're not soft on crime," Tuberville
said. "They're pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because
they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.
They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are
owed that." (And by the way, look at the awful headline AP put on this
story
,
furthering Tuberville's racist rant without context or comment. It's
not until paragraph five in the story we learn that the charge is
"false.")

Still, this stuff works. And it needs a response. And except those like
Adams who are willing to implicitly endorse this strategy, Democrats
still don't have one.

See you next week, I hope with room for music.

~ 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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