HOW THE FOURTH ESTATE BECAME MAGA'S FIFTH COLUMN

Back about 20-plus years ago, Paul Krugman published a column abut the media’s coverage of the George W. Bush campaign and later administration. Russell Baker reviewed it. A reader wondered about Krugman’s criticisms of the media.

Baker responded that “something more fundamental than household economics may be reshaping journalistic attitudes toward public issues. Today’s top-drawer Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative.

“Most probably passed childhood in economically sheltered times, came to adulthood in the years of plenty, went to good colleges where they developed conventionally progressive social consciences, and have now inherited the comforting benefits that 60 years of liberal government have created for the middle class.

“This is not a background likely to produce angry reporters and aggressive editors. If few made much fuss about President Bush’s granting boons to those already rolling in money, their silence may not have been because they feared the vengeance of bosses, but only because the capacity for outrage had been bred out of them....”

Tim Rutten of The Los Angeles Times talked with Baker further on the topic. He said of the DC press that , "They lack empathy for the rest of the country. If you’ve never lacked health insurance -- and most reporters and editors never have -- you don’t understand what it means for the 43 million Americans who are doing without it, any more than the Congress does.”

He went on to say, "The old-timers I met were an odd mixture. Many had only high school educations. One very good correspondent for the Scripps chain had spent the Depression pounding out tunes on a piano in a five-and-dime. They had a raffish but informative experience of the world that is very hard for journalists to acquire now. When I started out as a police reporter, I lived next door to a cop. Reporters don’t come out of those neighborhoods nowadays. We’ve all moved uptown. Today, reporters join clubs. They play golf. They are paid better, and they make extra spouting off on TV. This is the pluperfect description of what has gone wrong in DC.”

Trying to persuade campaign reporters to place the substantive stakes of American elections at the center of their coverage is a worthy pursuit, but a grueling chore.

Usually it fails, sometimes disastrously.

In 2000, watchdogs were at pains to convince “horse race” journalists that there was much at stake that November beyond the pressing question of which candidate was the more affable dude you’d like to have a beer with.

George W. Bush’s policy agenda was written to mislead voters. It posed a threat to the viability of programs like Medicare and Social Security. Don’t voters deserve to know? Media elites were unmoved, and we’ve been living in the Bush v. Gore era ever since.

The 2012 election proved a rare exception; fateful decisions aligned to make the competing policy visions of the Obama and Romney campaigns central to media narratives.

Romney - the richest man to run for the presidency to that time - nominated Paul Ryan as his VP. The party, convinced of impending victory, intended to finally delivering the death blow to the New Deal they’d been wanting to do for 78 years. At the outset of the campaign, Barack Obama was at the nadir of his popularity, trailing generic Republicans in head-to-head polling.

Thus, the GOP took the calculated risk of making Ryan’s infamous federal budget proposal the centerpiece of their agenda, though they did not go out of their way to be scrupulously honest about the implications of their plan.

Romney disclaimed this policy ambition during his first debate with Obama; they used voodoo math to rebut rigorous analysis showing their reforms would deliver a windfall to the rich and hardship to the poor.

However, their basic proposition is still the core of conservative politics: if we win, we will cut taxes for affluent Americans and their businesses, and make up the budget shortfall by dissolving the safety net.

These facts weren’t enough to make political reporters perk up. A big part of the Obama campaign’s re-election strategy involved simply reciting the radical details of the Romney-Ryan blueprint as though they were self-discrediting.

Unfortunately, the stories that covered that didn’t make the front-page very often. Obama’s pollsters found many voters simply didn’t believe Democratic claims about Romney’s agenda. Why on earth would anyone run for president promising to give billionaires a tax cut and plug the revenue gap by cutting Medicare benefits?

But Romney screwed up! As the primary ended, Eric Fehrnstrom - Romney’s most senior adviser - revealed the campaign’s plan to “shake the Etch-a-sketch” and erase all the unpopular commitments Romney had made to sew up the nomination. It was “We won the GOP primary promising our angry voters mass austerity; now we’ll make a whole different set of promises to seize the center.”

By pre-Trump standards, this was an unusually cynical admission. It gave both the Obama campaign and the DC media a subplot more salacious than any policy contrast. Obama stopped repeating raw facts with increasing exasperation, and instead the campaign promoted the impression of deceit.

What are they hiding? What is he hiding. That storyline was tempting for reporters: What’s Romney’s game here? What’s he really after?

Romney promised very specific marginal tax cuts for rich Americans, but, when asked to account for lost revenue, he would wave his hands about closing loopholes and deductions. Which deductions? He wouldn’t say.

Showing the way for the next Republican presidential nominee, Romney was extraordinarily reluctant to release his tax returns.

Why? Was it because we’d be able to infer the magnitude of the tax cut he intended to give himself? Does he even pay taxes? Why does he have a Swiss bank account?

Romney’s financial disclosures revealed an IRA valued at $250 million dollars. But annual IRA contributions are limited by tax law to orders of magnitude less money. How had he pulled that off? He wouldn’t say.

Romney hash was fried when the bartender at a private gathering where he spoke recorded his speech where he attacked the 47% of Americans who were too poor to pay income taxes as “takers” who he cared nothing for.

Suddenly there was a drumbeat, and it was all about the contrast in vision between common-good liberalism vs. a new gilded age.

Obama comfortably won re-election that November.

Republicans learned a lesson from that 22012 that drove them toward Donald Trump and his emphasis on identity appeals. They didn’t have to soften their policy agenda, since Trump’s antics did a great job of concealing them.

In 2016, the “mainstream media” devoted their coverage to Hillary Clinton’s email practices, in the process becoming pawns in a potentially lethal assault on American democracy.

When he was criticized for CNN’s decision to broadcast Trump rallies live, CNN honcho Jeff Zucker (known to we in Hollywood before his ascent as Zucker the Fucker when he was at ABC) pointed out that “Donald Trump brings high ratings.”

Had it not been for COVID-19, the Republican strategy most likely would have worked in 2020.

In 2024, they got lazy. They assembled a governing blueprint for a new era of GOP control. This time, they outsourced it to the HeritageFoundation, which instead of calling it something conventionally antiseptic like “Pathway to Prosperity” or “Roadmap for America’s Future,” they called it “Project 2025.” Project 2025 is like the Ryan budget and a presidential transition plan combined. Trump simply hoped it’d go unnoticed so he could tiptoe back into the White House and spring it on an unsuspecting public.

The underlying Republican machinery is unchanged. Ever since the conservative movement completed its takeover of the Republican Party, its leaders have viewed GOP office holders as ceremonial figureheads. The idea since their victory has been that fanatical ideologues f the “Conservative movement” write policies that Republicans in Congress turn into bills, that Republican presidents sign into law.

It is very unlikely that the fall campaign will play out as it did in 2012 - a heady contest of ideas about the proper role of government. That’s because it is completely unlikely that the major media will strike a balance between covering substantive news and Trump’s freak show.

Trump couldn’t run an ideas-based campaign if he wanted to, and the stakes of the 2024 election actually transcend normal policy to reach the question of whether the U.S. should be a democracy where everyone has equal rights. It doesn’t help that those who guide the day-to-day work of the press - like the Executive Editor of the New York Times, who is on record in a June interview saying that it is not the job of the press to “defend democracy,” and that democracy itself is “just another issue,” like inflation.

Tom Nichols has observed in a recent article in the Atlantic:

“Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

“And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.”

Consider Trump’s press conference last week yesterday in Florida. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press,so Trump concluded it was time to emerge from his sanctuary. “Fat Elvis” did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.”

And then he moved on to new material was pretty shocking.

He declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room - something he’s been saying for year - and then added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states.

He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol (four people died that day).

He (again) asserted that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, then went on to say how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.

He claimed Harris was sliding in the polls, then added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people. He followed all of this by going for the gold: His rallies are not just big, they’re the biggest ever.

“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me.” Then he compared the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6 to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people... But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”

Then things got even weirder. Trump claimed former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said bad things about Harris while he and Trump were on a helicopter together. “...he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he—he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he—he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”

Whatever Willie Brown or Nate Holden have said in response hasn’t been worth the effort.

The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional. If any other candidate had done this - Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true - it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate. Reporters might listen to Trump and be understandably reluctant to write stories that seem like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle:

Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.”

The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.”

The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims.”

CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.”

Yes, all those headlines are technically true, but they miss the point:

The Republican nominee for president, who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him. But the press, which has never missed an opportunity in the past three years to take after Biden for any gaffe or misstatement, remains silent about what is right in front of them.

Over the weekend, Politico revealed they had received documents hacked from the Trump campaign, that the campaign claims is an attack by Iran. That might be true, but the facts are ambiguous: Microsoft reported to the Trump campaign that an Iranian group attempted to hack the campaign in June. Politico says they have had the documents for three weeks.

If the Iranians are using an AOL email account to cover their hack, they have a keen sense of American culture, history, and humor.

The WaPo admitted in their article that followed Politico’s revelation, that the paper had possessed the leaked materials for three days. It has not published or described their contents. This is completely unlike its treatment of the hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the contents of Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop.

Politico, The Post, and the New York Times, have all suddenly recovered their ethics. And the rest of the D.C. Press Corpse is following ther example.

The editor-in-chief of Semafor and former New York Times columnist Ben Smith tweeted, with a straight face:

“Hopefully (seriously) Trump will benefit from what the media learned in 2016, when it got played by state-sponsored hackers into publishing a drip-drip of Clinton information on the hackers’ schedule.

“Which is to say — journalists can/should report seriously on real documents that shed light on real stories, but should also foreground the hackers’ motives and not publish personal information gratuitously. And, in general, not treat a drip-drip of random documents as hot scoops.”

In other words, in order to benefit Trump this time, the media should apply all the “lessons” it learned when it trashed Democrats in 2016 and again in 2020.

What fucking horseshit!!! Forgive me if I say the mainstream media has zero integrity and its bias toward Trump is a continuing threat to our democracy.

Why did the “hacker” send the material to Politico, which is now part of the Axel Springer media empire owned by pro-Trump billionaire Mathias Döpfner?? Döpfner himself is Rupert Murdoch-lite in Europe; his media is like Fox News. To give a sense of how much of a Trumper he is, right before the 2020 election, Döpfner urged executives from his media empire to put Donald Trump in their prayers. Döpfner said of Trump,“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more.”

So, a company owned by this guy is the one “Iranian intelligence” sends negative material on Trump to??? And after three weeks of no action by Politico, the hacker goes to the Washington Post which… also sat on the story? And then the NYT - which also sat on the story?

According to Politico, they talked to the Trump campaign to authenticate the hacked documents - and Trump didn’t immediately inform the FBI?

What continues to be so disturbing is that the press takes a pass on a story like this if Trump could be harmed, while they exhibit no restraint or journalistic integrity when it’s the Democratic nominee who will suffer.

So, why is this?

It’s because the elite press and cable news lost half their readers/viewers since Trump left office. Like Zucker the Fucker said, “Donald Trump brings high ratings.” The intergalactic widgetmakers who own these companies want to unload them - they’re the “legacy media” and they don’t fit in the new wonderful world of streaming. To get rid of them, they must be “profitable” so that the rube who buys them thinks they still have value.

“Donald Trump brings high ratings.”

Follow. The. Money.

So far as the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable low achievers of the upper middle class - the graduates of Ivy League “journalism” skoolz where they were taught how to be “journalists” by failures who (if they had any talent) would be doing the job, where the “education” consisted of parroting back the BS spouted by the failures - are concerned, their worry is that they’ll be next on the chopping block when the widgetmaker who owns them decides to “cut costs.”

As George Orwell pointed out, “It is difficult for a man to recognize the truth when his paycheck demands that he not do so.”

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