305

It’s amazing but they’ve literally been using the same exact narrative post Kavanaugh as they did in 2016: Dems may have a wave but do they have a message? They have no message and you may not like Trump’s message but at least he has one. Literally this has been the media’s coverage of the 2016 race daily the last two weeks. Going by MSNBC-the allegedly ‘liberal’ network, this has been every MSNBC show prior to maybe Ari Melber’s at 6 PM-he at least brings a little facticity to his analysis.

But prior to that, every program has been the same format. Each hour there’s a new show and a new host but the framing is the same: the host starts by asking rhetorically ‘Trump is telling a lot of lies and engaging in blatant race baiting over the caravan… But will it work? HIs base loves it and it worked in 2016. How worried are the Democrats?’

This has been the windup on every single program that each new host asks each new set of guests. They then mostly agree that Trump knows how to rouse the base and it did work in 2016 so maybe it will. And the Democrats have no message.

And this is amazing as this is exactly what they said about Hillary-and Al Gore and John Kerry. We’re having a huge  Democrat wave election-see all those special election wins and close losses in places no one ever dreamed the Dems could compete. See all these close races now in red states like Georgia and Florida-where based on polls it certainly looks as if the Sunshine State is going to elect its first Democratic governor in 20 years and first African American ever. In Georgia, despite the outrageous cheating of Stacey Abrams opponent she’s in a very close race-as a Democratic woman in Chuck Grassley’s state.

UPDATE: Gillum did come up a little short as it happened; what was weird about that race is while all the polls were close all had Gillum ahead.

Yet the media considers the real scandal not her GOP opponent Jack Kemps’ outrageous cheating-where he’s both the Secretary of State in charge of the vote and a candidate-Jake Tapper is instead accepting Trump’s false frame and likening legitimate protests to Trump’s fictional ‘angry mobs’-ironically the only angry mobs were the GOP and the Proud Boys riot at Nancy Pelosi’s event with Debbbie Wasserman-Schultz in Florida last week as we saw in (Chapter Z).

Overall, this entire media meme-‘Dems have no message, can they get one’ is purely fact free speculation. Much of it clearly wrong-they very clearly do have a message as we’ll get into in more detail below-healthcare-while Trump and the GOP really have no message other than appealing to pure fear and xenophobia and much of the rest of it highly questionable. Even if it were true, it’d be pretty vapid and boring to have the same exact-even accurate-points made in the exact same way, hour after hour every single day of the week. But much of it isn’t true-none of it is justified by facts. This is why Melber is at least relatively better as he does insist on facts. While he somewhat pushes the same narrative, his looking at facts dilutes it-as do many of his liberal guests.

One of the very curious features of MSNBC’s campaign coverage is that they’ve had very few liberals and Democrats on. Hallie Jackson was speculating on this same meme of ‘Dems have no message, Trump has a message, sure there’s a blue wave but now the GOP has the momentum post Kavanaugh and the caravan. She had no Democrats or anyone remotely skeptical of this-quite fraudulent-meme. She had Michael Steele-the former RNC chairman-and far Right Trumpster A.J. Stoddard-who not surprisingly totally agreed with the false meme. There was also a journalist on the panel who covers the Trump Russia House. He certainly offered no resistance to this same fake meme that they’ve literally recycled from Hillary’s outrageous coverage of 2016.

Indeed, the more I think about it, the clearer it’s getting that this is more or less the media’s stock election analysis for the Democrats every two years. Gore had no message, Kerry had no message, Clinton had no message. Now in the middle of an extremely energized and motivated Blue Wave we’re hearing the Dems have no message.

Indeed, this is very strange in the sense that they are judging these Congressional races like a Presidential race. They simply assume that Trump’s nationalizing these races and making it all about him is great for GOP chances.

UPDATE: This assumption was way off to say the least as was obvious at the time-nationalizing the race was literally the worst thing for most House GOP candidates

But then, it reminds you of a point made in Ezra Klein’s very interesting-and relevant-discussion with Jay Rosen where Klein asks explicitly if the media is making politics worse?

The short answer is: yes and this has been true over the last 26 years or so-starting with the rise of the Clintons-which may not be a coincidence. One point Jay Rosen makes is that the reason the media prefers the pack mentality is that even if a journalist or pundit is totally wrong, they have a lot of cover. While this may be helpful for them, it has the inconvenience of when the there is an error in coverage it’s often universal-as in 2016 in the media freakout as well as today with the media’s quiet dubious GOP comeback story.

“There’s always a risk that if you follow the story of the day, you are missing what’s actually happening, and you can look at this pack journalism phenomenon as a way of spreading that risk. If everyone is wrong, no one is wrong. If everyone is following the wrong pattern, it’s not a problem for any individual professional because everyone missed the same story.”

“That’s one of the reasons why, after these major crashes and failures in the press system, like the runup to the Iraq War, like the failure to alert the nation about the financial crisis, like the debacle of 2016, you don’t see the press sort of called into crisis. You don’t see the equivalent of a 9/11 Commission to examine what went wrong. You don’t see collective action within the institution. You just go on to the next story because everybody was wrong, so it’s not really a problem.”

Klein defends the media coverage to an extent:

 “I agree with that halfway. I do think there’s been a lot of a reckoning in the press post-Donald Trump. There’ve been these peculiar, but nevertheless agonizing, arguments over whether or not to call things he says that are untrue lies, or just misinformation.”

“There’s certainly been a move into a more oppositional space. It really surprises me, actually, the degree to which publications frame themselves antagonistically to this president.”

This is true after they were so complicit in electing him as a few journalists are willing admit-or at least Amy Choznick as we saw in ‘Chapter X).

FN: And as noted elsewhere regarding Emailgate and Comeygate you can hear the crickets as they know how much they weaponized the damn emails was simply absurd-and the most simple and proximate cause of Trump’s ‘win’ even more than Russian collusion was the Comey letter that only had its great effect thanks to the media’s absurd amplification.

But as noted in (Chapter Y), media coverage largely lost the thread after Kavanaugh and it’s now gone back to stenography and both sides do it.

As Rosen notes, the tendency of the media  to hunker down and just play the court stenographer is one way journalists cover their ass.

“In 1979, Herbert Gans, a sociologist, published a really interesting book called Deciding What’s News. And in that book, which is a study of how journalists make decisions, he points out that one of the factors that goes into decision-making in a newsroom is the simple truth that journalists have to present their work every day whether it’s ready or not.”

“They publish their mistakes constantly, and so they are uniquely vulnerable to criticism. And because they are vulnerable to criticism, legitimate criticism, they need ways to protect themselves against the critiques that they know are not only coming, but are, in many ways, deserved. And so one of the ways they do that is by saying, “What’s your problem? We quoted your guys and we quoted the other guys.”

“Routines that offer a protection become extremely important to them. Paul Taylor, who was a reporter for the Washington Post back in the ’90s, wrote something about this that was really insightful. He said [paraphrasing], “When I write my story and I look for the mid-point between the worst and the best that could be said about somebody. … I’m seeking truth, yes, but I’m also seeking refuge.”

FN: Next to this you have Michael Wolff’s insight that for the MSM the truth is always a negotiated truth. To be an establishment  US journalist means you  have to negotiate against what you know.

“I think that’s a really important insight is that lots of things that journalists do, do not because they are strictly truth-telling; it’s because they provide protection.

So this maybe explains their mad passion for ‘the middle.’ Except when the subject is Hillary Clinton-then they reject the midpoint for the worse thing that can be said about her.

Rosen explains the media’s false equivalence this way:

“I think, over time, political reporting started to rest on a picture of the political system that most journalists carried around in their heads. In that picture of the political system, you have these two parties, they’re roughly equal in weight, and they have different philosophies about what’s good for the country. And there’s a battle between those philosophies every election.”

“But they’re roughly equivalent, and so as a political reporter, you can stand between them and develop sources on both sides and tell the story of politics as a battle between these two beasts.”

“When one party, as Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann have documented, starts to behave in a different way than the other one, all those routines start to crash. But the people who have made careers out of those routines and who have come to power through them don’t want to deal with that.”

“The asymmetry between the parties built up way before Trump came on the scene, and the press kind of let it go. They knew it was happening, but it was too hard to redraw the entire system, so they kept fitting politics to a symmetrical picture as it became more and more asymmetrical.”

Klein is right that at times the media has called out Trump’s lies-though there is still wide squeamishness about calling anyone a liar-other than Hillary Clinton.

But Rosen explains that on some level the media congenitally adverse to calling a-non Hillary Clinton-politician a liar.

“The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions. A simple example would be: Savvy political reporters took it for granted that all candidates would be risk-averse. They didn’t even have a category for the political candidate who was risk-friendly. And that’s what Trump is. He risks everything every time he opens his mouth.”

UPDATE: Finally with Ukraine are you listening his luck seems to be running out.

“So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.”

Exactly-playing court stenographer with Trump who’s ‘risk friendly’ plays right into his hands. The media itself has admitted that while Trump is simply a pathological liar who consistently lies over 70% of the time, he has still managed to improve on that in the last few weeks. He’s lying more and even more brazenly than usual.

As to why-he feels so brazen after the Kavanaugh ram through-that the media was also totally complicit with-and, again, the media coverage has retrogressed just at the right moment for him-just before the midterms.

But this is where the MSM’s court stenography gets us:

Meanwhile in a major shocker, Trump’s own staff admits that-Trump doesn’t care if what he says is ‘100% accurate.’

Not 100% accurate? He manages to say things that are 100% inaccurate-like the middle class tax cut he will pass before the election or that brown hordes are literally under your bed from the caravan right now.

That Trump doesn’t care if what he says is true is not exactly news. The scandal is the media doesn’t care either or their coverage certainly doesn’t make it seem like they do. The play is the media will let him get away with it.

Indeed, the pundits will admit if pushed that of course what Trump is saying isn’t true. But then they don their amateur political strategist hats: ok he’s lying but will it work?! Rosen has an explanation for this as well.

“Another form of protection is what I call the savvy style in political journalism. The question, “Who’s gonna win?”, which is the classic horse race question, is a safe question because it’s clearly not ideological. You use it to start chronicling the game aspect of politics.”

As Rosen says, it’s a very strange media meme: is the point that voters should vote for the candidate with the best strategy-or even worse, who the pundits-who are not political strategists and have the track records to prove it-assert in their ad hominem way has the best strategy?

In a sense this is sort of the result. When Morning Joe-and Morning Mika-declare that the Democrats have no message and are in disarray, it isn’t that they are really offering the Dems ‘advice.’

When the media goes on about the alleged ‘bad political strategy’ of this or that candidate or party-usually the Democratic party-that’s negative coverage that has a negative impact though, it hurts subconsciously. On a conscious level why should someone’s poll numbers go down just because some talking heads have decided in a fact free way that this or that candidate has a bad political strategy?

As Ezra Klein says, the media’s outrageous weaponization of Clinton’s emails in 2016 actually misinformed the public.

“’I’m always more concerned about the problems with real news than the issue of fake news. It’s really easy to know what to do about fake news: You should get rid of it. But take the way Hillary Clinton’s emails were covered. Oftentimes, and not always, that coverage was true. But it was so disproportionate to what was happening that I think it was actually misleading. It created an equivalence that shouldn’t have been there. But we don’t have a good way of talking about the hard problems of truth, about whether our work is giving you an accurate perspective of the world in context.”

As we saw in (Chapter W) a lot of the Times coverage of Emailgate was inaccurate-the endless navel gazing around will she be indicted was misleading as that was never a likely outcome-ChapterA.. But Klein’s point is well taken-the way the media chooses to frame it was a huge problem.

And this is the biggest problem with the media’s awful coverage with its stenography, false equivalence, and amateur political strategizing-it actually misinforms. By taking Trump’s latest outrageous and even more brazen lies at face value, they actually misinform the public. As for bad framing this is a classic example:

The media has been utterly devoted to their fact free narrative that the GOP is on the comeback trail and just might win as the Democrats ‘have no message’ Trump is nationalizing the race-and the base loves Trump. As to the majority of Americans who decidedly do not love Trump, the pundits hand wave this majority of Americans away-those who hate Trump have hated him all along-how much angrier can they get? Now the GOP base is getting energized.

In the service of this quite dubious narrative the media grasps at any and all straws. Yesterday Halle Jackson went so far as to totally misinterpret the meaning of the battleground state polls.

She actually completely misread the importance by declaring-Only three points! The Dems edge is slipping. But she fails to appreciate that these are battleground polls-and that 63 of the 69 battlegrounds have been in districts the GOP won in 2016- 90% of the battleground is on the GOP’s own turf. 

“Dan Balz and Scott Clement report that Democrats are in a strong position in the most competitive House districts:

The contest for control of the House remains close and hard fought, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll of the most-contested districts in the country, with Democrats holding a statistically insignificant lead over Republicans.

The latest survey shows only a marginal change in the race during October, with 50 percent currently supporting the Democratic candidate in their district and 47 percent backing the Republican. Candidates from the two parties collectively are running almost even in 48 contested congressional districts won by President Trump in 2016, while Democrats hold the advantage in 21 competitive districts won by Hillary Clinton. The Democrats’ lead in those Clinton districts has narrowed a bit since the beginning of the month.

The overwhelming majority of the districts surveyed — 63 of the 69 — are currently represented by a Republican in the House. Collectively these battleground districts voted strongly for Republicans in the 2016 election. The fact that the margins today are where they are illustrates the degree to which the GOP majority is at risk but also the fact that many individual races are likely to be close. Democrats need to gain a net of 23 seats to take control of the chamber.

“Just to be clear, these are only the closest districts, almost all held by Republicans. If they split evenly, Democrats take the House.”

Jackson wasn’t clear-quite the opposite and so she managed to aggressively misinform the public. To be clear-she’s a very good reporter, my point is not to pick on her. But it’s shocking that an elite journalist can so mis-analyze polling data-it goes without saying that many of  her fellow Beltway brothers and sisters make similar and worse errors  and certainly no one on the set offered anything but bobble-headed agreement.

Not for nothing, if they so badly understand polling analysis maybe they ought to lose their amateur strategist hats?

Which only happens because the media allows it to.

And not for nothing, with Trump and the GOP’s blatant appeal to some very nasty xenophobia the media’s vapid  focus on strategy comes across as morally callow or even monstrous.

The media isn’t repulsed by it-they just want to know if it works, and even in framing the question you can tell they strongly suspect that it does. But here’s the thing-there’s just no evidence at all that it does work. 

But to prove that you had to go through a whole day of MSNBC talking heads spouting on and on about Kavanaugh Momentum and Caravan Momentum and wait until 9 PM EST for Rachel Maddow to get us beyond Rush Limbaugh’s world-the way things aren’t-to the real world-the way they actually are.

I’ve discussed how utterly refreshing her domination of the cable news ratings is in Chapters A and B as she totally violates the MSM-CNN-Chris Cilliza-Chuck Todd rules on what’s supposed to work in cable news-she doesn’t have many guests, but employs the old Dan Rather style Voice of God model. She’s a liberal-and the long assumption has been that liberalism doesn’t sell. Oops.

She doesn’t try to mirror what she thinks the public is thinking-in an earlier (Chapter D) we looked at Ezra Klein’s crucial analysis on the media tendency to rather than inform the public mirror where it thinks-basically conjectures that is to say guesses-the public is.

Of course it’s even worse than that as how does it come by it’s not so educated guess of public opinion on a particular issue? What guess seems to most confirm their own current narrative-again normally their narrative is wrong and to the extent it’s right it’s only by accident. As Jay Rosen explains a MSM take is less about being right than seeming savvy.

OTOH Maddow deals in facts rather than punditry-her few guests augment her own story-she doesn’t use them as a crutch. Her guests have knowledge and expertise-she has them on so she and we viewers can learn from them not so they can engage in uninformed, fact free punditry of what they think will be the political effect of this or that Trump tweet.

Crucially Maddow starts where the MSM hits a wall-they are squeamish in calling Trump a liar and spend hours mooning over his latest false and inflammatory tweets trying to figure out  what Trump really meant. 

Her point of departure is: Trump is a liar and so are the people that work for him. So in a sense his words don’t matter. They matter least of all. Indeed, Rosen made this same point in his own tweet yesterday:

Maddow was able in her patented way to completely dismantle the false media narratives of Kavanaugh Momentum and Caravan Momentum.

She pointed out that a Fox News poll shows that the most popular thing out there for voters today is actually-Obamacare. She also pointed out that the poll showed that the issue voters care most about is: healthcare.

Then she points out something that should be very uncontroversial-it’s just a very simple fact that the Democratic candidates have been focused like a laser beam on: healthcare, specifically protecting preexisting conditions.

It should not be at all controversial as it’s very abundantly clear the Dems have been talking about healthcare and protecting preexisting conditions ad nauseum to the point almost of boredom, though not nearly as boring as the fake MSM memes about Kavanaugh Momentum and Caravan Momentum.

I say almost to the point of boredom, as, while I’m a passionate liberal Democrat-and totally believe Obamacare must be both protected and built on-believe it or not, I sometimes like to talk about Russia and Comeygate. I don’t know if you noticed…

But you can’t argue with success and the Dems are talking about what voters want to hear about. You’d think that was a very good strategy but not only has the media been impressed it’s not clear they’ve even  noticed.

UPDATE: For context, this was written on October 24, 2018

Indeed, the media has been loudly and vapidly insisting for two weeks the opposite-that the Dems have no message, despite it being abundantly clear that their message is healthcare and protecting preexisting.

Timothy Johnson talks about this blatant falsehood by the media, about its lazy, fact free talking points about the Democrats and elections. 

Lazy conventional wisdom is running abound in horse race coverage of the upcoming midterm elections.

“The October 22 broadcast of MSNBC’s Morning Joe devoted a lengthy segment to claims that the Democratic Party has no messaging or, if it does, the message is packaged incorrectly. This evaluation of Democratic Party election efforts is evidence-free — Democrats have largely coalesced around the issue of health care — and it is also a gift to the Republican Party, as it plays into the argument that Democrats have no principles or plan for governance.”

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski opened the discussion by saying, “Donald Trump is talking about trade, crime, immigration, and judges. What are the Democratic issues that pack the same kind of inspiring emotional punch? Democrats can still win these midterms, but with time running out, the message and the momentum appears to be on Donald Trump’s side.”

“Brzezinski’s claim that Democrats have no response to Trump’s midterm rhetoric probably says more about the beltway press — which tends to cover Trump’s every move, at the expense of other topics — than about reality.”

Exactly-Mica and Joe and the rest of the Beltway press are clearly inspired by Trump’s xenophobia and wild lies about Soros and a tax cut before the election. The evidence shows voters as a whole are much less impressed.

“What is happening on the ground tells a different story. Although it is important to note that the idea that a party needs a singular national message to be successful in elections is itself largely empty conventional wisdom, Democrats have unified to a great extent around the issue of health care in their messaging. Wesleyan Media Project — an initiative that tracks and analyzes all broadcast election ads — found in a September analysis that “Pro-Democratic messaging in federal races is concentrated primarily on healthcare, with 44 percent of airings in U.S. House races and 50 percent of airings in U.S. Senate races featuring the topic.” An October 18 report from the project stated, “It’s official: the 2018 midterms are about health care.” The “typical” message, according to an analysis by Vox, is that “the Republicans voted to take away people’s health care and end Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions.”

“The media, however, have largely not been interested in covering health care policy, which could explain the perception that Democrats have no message on the issue. An October 19 Media Matters analysis found that broadcast nightly news shows did not air a single substantive segment about health care policy between January 1 and October 18.”

“Despite Brzezinski’s suggestion that Democrat messaging is inept, polling suggests that what the Democrats are doing is working. According to Morning Consult, a survey research company, the “strategy” to focus on health care “is paying off” because it is a high priority issue for voters and “voters who say health care is their top priority favor Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 28 points.”

Johnson then points out as Maddow also pointed out last night that it’s clear that the Dems strategy is working as the GOP has rebranded itself as the party to protect Obamacare-even Ted Cruz now claims he will protect preexisting conditions.

“Republicans have also been clearly put on the defensive by this messaging strategy. As The New York Times reported on October 16, “For months, Democratic candidates have been running hard on health care, while Republicans have said little about it. In a sign of the issue’s potency, Republicans are now playing defense, releasing a wave of ads promising they will preserve protections for Americans with pre-existing health conditions.” (It should be noted that these ads include false claims — many of the Republicans running them have clear voting records of supporting legislation that would threaten mandatory coverage of pre-existing conditions.)”

Yes-Scott Walker literally is claiming with one hand to be protecting preexisting conditions and with the other is the first listed plaintiff in a lawsuit to: end Obamacare, ie, allow insurance companies to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions.

As for the the charge by Morning Mika above that Democrats don’t have a good answer to Trump’s xenophobia, it’s not true. I mean the best answer to it would be that he’s been ‘President’ the last two years so why hasn’t he and his GOP co-conspirators got it done on immigration reform?

The GOP response here is risible-it’s all the Democrats fault, we need a bigger majority. Sure, you’ve utterly failed so by all means let’s reward you with even greater power to fail while obstructing Russia even more than the first two years.

The true culprit is the GOP House. Mitch McConnell’s Senate passed immigration reform in 2014 and then Boehner and then Paul Ryan left it to gather dust on the shelf. Then the GOP and Dems had an immigration deal at the end of 2017 that Trump then blew up.

Indeed, as I argue in another chapter(F)it’s possible a Pelosi House and McConnell Senate could pass immigration reform-after all McConnell passed it in 2014 so the only reason he wouldn’t again in 2019 is if he saw this for some reason not to his political liking-maybe Trump will push him not to bring it to the floor. But by 2019 Trump may be so unpopular that McConnell will just go for it.

UPDATE:  In retrospect even this was too optimistic. While my premise that since McConnell passed immigration reform before he’d do it again was logical, it left out of the equation  #MoscowMitch’s sociopathic partisanship andabsolute obsequiousness to Trump. But after seeing McConnell allow the government to shutdown for three weeks even though he knew it was a terrible idea just so as not to have to ’embarrass President Trump’ its hard to see him being willing to do the Dream Act. Still-follow the poll numbers. As Trump gets less popular McConnell may be willing to defy him more. He did allow a Senate rebuke of Trump’s pull out from Syria last week.

Ok so are the Democrats pointing out this true history of immigration reform? I don’t know that they have. But there’s a case to be made that they’re right not to directly react to Trump’s every lie and outrage-like the media. Ironically, while the MSM claims that the Dems have no message, to the contrary, their slowness to react to Trump’s latest boner is what actual political strategists would call message discipline. 

After Maddow’s segment totally dismantled the media’s lazy, fact free election narrative she had Steve Kornacki on. That was actually kind of interesting-he’s the resident MSM polling guy. He had to agree that Maddow’s numbers and analysis on healthcare and the Dems messaging was correct-though with some reluctance it seemed to me. Oh he smiled and did his usual upbeat shtick. But he knew this was off message from the dominant media narrative and so was a little out of his comfort zone.

He agreed the Dems messaging here is smart-which already falsified the media claim the Dems have no message.

But he did try to regroup a little at the end by declaring that he thinks-not knows based on polling data or other evidence-that the GOP has been coming back thanks to Kavanaugh Momentum.

In fact the real polling experts will tell you that while in the short term Kavanaugh Momentum may have been a thing it’s over with now.

Silver had declared Kavanaugh Momentum basically over a few days ago.

The media has also botched Trump’s approval ratings treating the one poll that came out on Sunday which showed him at 47% as his average.

Silver was on George Stephanopoulos this week-a pun as the show is literally called This Week.

You saw Stephanopoulos engage in the MSM’s aggressive bias in favor of the GOP comeback story. When Silver stated the Dems had a 21% chance in the Senate Stephanopoulos basically declared ‘Ok so the Dems chances in the Senate are dead’ but when Silver said the Dems have an 85% chance in the House he responded ‘so they still haven’t closed the deal?’

It’s actually surprising that Nate didn’t correct him here-that 85% is actually a very high likelihood for a political race. He made the point in 2016 that many pollsters showing Clinton with a 95% or 98% chance were half baked-as in complex and messy human affairs like Presidential elections 90% is basically the peak in terms of certainty in a particular outcome.

When the media talks about how wrong the polls were in 2016 they are actually-wrong. The national polls as Silver has tried without success to explain to them were actually quite accurate. They had her with a +3.8 margin and she won the popular vote by 2.5%. But he had her chances at winning the electoral collage only in the low 70s. Her chance at the popular vote was 88%-roughly in line with Obama’s 2012.

Clearly the media learned the wrong lesson from 2016.

MSM’s takeaway seems to be that Trump and the GOP will always win no matter what the polls say. Which is not what 2016 showed to say the least. There’s also the absurd extrapolation that everything Trump does works because he ‘won’ in 2016. 

Ok, so this has been a barnburner of a chapter meant to really catalog the media’s election coverage which to date-October 24, 2018-has been fact free, inept, wrong, and in some ways morally monstrous as they are playing into Trump’s hands and some things-like his absurd lies about a coming tax cut and even more the blatant lies and xenophobia on the caravan-require more than bland fretting over wether or not this is ‘smart politically.’

This is my last chapter in this book about the media coverage. I could easily go on but I’m still trying mightily to publish this tome prior to if not November 1, then at least the election itself. As Maddow would say, watch this space…

UPDATE: This was decidedly not the last chapter in the book about media coverage and today is February 12.

This book is about not just Russiagate and Comeygate but the shameful way the media made Watergate 2.0 with its bad coverage-it’s very bizarre priorities, the complete weaponization of what-as noted in (Chapter E) the Washington Post editorial page called-too late-a ‘minor email scandal.’

That Post op-ed could have been heroic if it came out in September, 2015 rather than September, 2016-when the cows had long since left the barn and the weaponization of Emailgate was baked into the cake.

That this is about the media’s almost criminally incompetent coverage as much as it is about Comey, Putin, Roger Stone, Trump, and Julian Assange, is underscored by this book’s subtitle: But What About Your Emails Secretary Clinton?

The media coverage of ‘President Trump’ that totally failed in its coverage of candidate Trump has done a lot of good work, certainly a lot of great investigative journalism. But there is still a lot of room for improvement.

They still have trouble calling Trump a liar and they’ve totally given up the ghost during this election season-precisely the wrong time. So they have straight headlines talking about Trump’s made up ‘tax cut’ and the imminent invasion of brown people, thereby amplifying his despicable, racist lies.

What can they do? Well first they have to admit they have a problem. As Klein says, they still haven’t as a group even started that. With the exception of Amy Choznick. (As detailed in Chapter B) and to an extent, Katy Tur, proving the rule

So maybe they should start by reading her book that she previews here.

Beyond that, the media ought to speak to their more enlightened fellows like Rosen, Klein-maybe Silver can give them some remedial lessons on polling. Until then maybe pull back a little on the all day political strategist bull sessions-maybe just do that half a day and sometimes even try talking about stuff voters actually care about-like healthcare in the other half. I know-pace Krugman-there’s nothing MSM pundits like less than discussing policy.

And they should bite the bullet and research Maddow’s show and how she does it. There’s only one Rachel but they sure could learn a lot from her. Maybe do some actual journalism rather than settle for being the mirror for Trump’s lies and bigotry.

One final thought for the Beltway pundits. In 2016 you all decided instantaneously that ‘deplorable’s was a huge gaffe. Indeed, the meme still exists today. I know you might think that validates the media spin but as Klein says, the media doesn’t just report the news they also shape it. I’d be fascinated to  see a kind of natural experiment-if this were possible-a parallel universe where the media didn’t have a huge freakout over ‘baskets of deplorables’ if it would still have become the meme it did. I’m skeptical.

Just like the Comey letter wouldn’t have had its election flipping effect if the media hadn’t so absurdly weaponized the damn emails in the first place. Sure Comey blew it up but the media handed him the kerosene.

Note now the very different media reaction to Trump’s regular attacks on Democrats and their supporters as ‘evil and crazy mobs.’

The response has been-totally tepid. The only question has been: will it work and what will the Democrat response be?

No doubt the media response to this is the same ‘Sure but will it work?’ 

Yes, the media has a lot to learn a great deal of room for improvement. It’s not clear at all that they will even salvage themselves a little during the current midterm election.

But what about your emails, Secretary Clinton?

UPDATE: As notes Margaret Sullivan with impeachment Trump has finally meet a media story he can’t control. 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/TreasonHappens/status/1178671457364320261l

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

License

October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book