Preview

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.

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.