Our Unsolvable Problem

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In case you hadn't noticed, we are currently hip deep in deeply reported books about the inner workings of a couple of overlapping monstrous institutions:  The Republican party and Conservative media.  

Of course, most of the books about the grotesque goings' on inside Trump world have been either written by recently-former Trump lackeys looking to have their absolution tour underwritten by a publishing house...or by Beltway political reporters who didn't use their access to anonymous sources inside the madhouse to report to the public in real time what they were seeing and hearing, but instead used their special access to harvest gossip and quotes that they could put to use as later as $29.95 per copy book fodder. 

There have been movies, miniseries and best sellers about what a toxic hellpit Fox News is -- 

-- and you could build a respectable sized ziggurat out of all the books written by everyone from porn stars -- 

Stormy Daniels' tell-all book on Trump: salacious detail and claims of cheating

-- to former FBI directors --

Comey paints unsparing portrait of Trump in devastating tell-all book

-- about the voracious evil of Donald Trump and his Republican party.

By 2018, the Guardian newspaper had  estimated that more than 4,500 English-language books about Trump had been published since he took office.  Because tell-alls about the fascists who are trying to kill our democracy are both non-denominations and very profitable.  From The New York Times three years ago:

Trump Books Keep Coming, and Readers Can’t Stop Buying

White House memoirs, journalistic exposés, full-throated defenses of the president: Publishers are producing books for every partisan and wondering if the gravy train ends on Election Day.

...

Books about politicians and government are not considered surefire commercial hits. But since President Trump entered office, books about his campaign, his administration, his family, his business, his policies, even his golf game have poured out of publishing houses big and small.

And many of these titles have sold extraordinarily well.

“No matter what your political position, there’s really no doubt that the strong feelings around the Trump administration have pushed book sales in a way we’ve never seen before in the political arena,” said Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at NPD Books, a market research firm. “The volume of best-selling titles is really remarkable.”...

“Political books broadly have worked more or less in proportion to how polarizing the figure that they orbit is, and you don’t get more polarizing than Donald J. Trump,” said Eamon Dolan, an executive editor at Simon & Schuster who edited Ms. Trump’s book. “However you feel about the president in political terms or existential terms for what he might do for or to the country, he makes great copy.”

Despite how divisive Mr. Trump has been as a leader, “Trump is a very unifying figure for book buyers,” Mr. Dolan added...

 Thomas Spence, president of Regnery Publishing, which publishes conservative titles, said political books usually perform better when they can rail against the opposition in power. But the Trump years have been good for Regnery.

“We’ve had a lot of successes,” Mr. Spence said...

“Negative, positive, left, right — this last three or four years has lifted all boats,” said Robert B. Barnett, a Washington lawyer who brokers major book deals on both sides of the aisle...

And yet, despite all of that, there is one institution which is every bit as culpable as Conservative media and the Trump Republican party for the fraying the last few threads by which our democracy is hanging.  But as yet, and no one has really laid a glove on them.   

Can you guess what that institution is?  

It's the one Liberals like me have been writing about for going on 20 years now.  From Left Jabs this week, with the way too hopeful headline, The Media Wakes Up and Smells the Fascism

This new wrinkle in Trumpian rhetoric has caused whiplash in the mainstream media, who are so deeply invested in the “both-sides” narrative, they can’t see beyond the next electoral horserace. If the story isn’t about who’s ahead, who’s in trouble, who made a gaffe, or who tanked in the latest poll, they seem totally lost. They crave conflict and controversy, even where there is none, so they can keep their readers reading and their viewers viewing.  

Which means that, even as Republicans plot a complete take-down of democracy, the press continues to compulsively run stories that make Biden look old and Trump look shrewd. This is how they compensate for the wild disparities in intelligence, competence, and basic humanity of the two horses in this race.

And they always follow the same tired formula: Pretend both sides are equally bad. Pretend Democrats are in disarray. Pretend Republicans are adults. Pretend Trump is sane.

But Trump, as usual, isn’t following anyone’s formula, which has the press totally flummoxed. What’s the other side of Nazism again?

The Times was especially disconcerted by the Vermin speech, though they shouldn’t have been, having covered Hitler himself firsthand in the thirties. They started by dipping a reluctant toe in the water, running a remarkably tepid headline — "Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction" — which mentioned the word ‘vermin’ once in the second paragraph, and never again.

When they were instantly smacked down by most of the Western world, they reran the article with a new headline — “In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to ‘Root Out’ the Left” — which was a little better, but they were still burying the lead.

It wasn’t until two days later that they succumbed to reality, putting ‘Vermin’ in the headline and ‘Hitler and Mussolini’ in the subhead. This surely gave the entire editorial board vapors, but there it was...

Sadly, while it is true that some of  us loudmouths on the Left have been writing about the complicity of  mainstream media for decades, it is also true that even the most powerful adjectives repeated by 1,000 voices 1,000 times amount to nothing by light, glancing blows.  Because for all the legitimate, indignant bellowing and hand-waving about "the media"...that's all it is.  Bellowing and hand-waving about an amorphous cloud of toxic gas called "the media".  

Bloggers "documenting the atrocities" on NBC every Sunday morning didn't get David Gregory fired from Meet the Press.  That decision was taken and executed by a small number of executives who wear expensive suits and dwell in corner offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.  They fired David Gregory...and replaced him with the equally awful Chuck Todd.  

Then, a few years later, another small number of executives in corner offices sacked Todd and replaced him with the equally awful Kristen Welker.  

Bloggers have also been hammering away at The New York Times for decades for their panicked appeasement of the bloodthirsty Right during the Age of Dubya by apparently grabbing the first two mopes they founding loitering outside the Men's Room at The Weekly Standard and giving them seats at the pinnacle of the "liberal" media.  

20 years later one of those mopes is still there, and still stinking up the joint.   His name is David Brooks, and he has used his New York Times credentials (and every other media gig that that title won him) to spread the poisonous "Both Sides Do It" lie    everywhere.  And based on his success in pumping that poison into the body politic, the Times generously hired the likes of Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and David French to help Brooks spread his evangel.  

But like NBC's decision to periodically replace the godawful host of Meet the Press with someone equally godawful, the choice to lard the Times' op-ed page with Conservative freaks and hobgoblins comes down a decision made by one or two executives whose names are completely unknown to the public, but whose ethical operating systems are wrought from the debased moral flotsam as Frank Hackett's in Paddy Chayefsky's Network.

And if you listen to the clip all the way to the end, out of Hackett's mouth you'll hear Chayefsky put his finger on exactly why "the media" will never reform itself, and how that has created an unsolvable crises in our democracy.

Today, if we want it, we all have access to the inner workings of the Fox News machine, and the Trump cult.  We know degenerates like Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch by name.  We have the thousands of emails that the Dominion lawsuit pried out of their treasonous paws.  We know a great deal about what was said and done behind closed doors, who did it and why, and we know the fallout from those actions.   

And thanks to that ziggurat of Trump cult books, we also know an enormous amount about that cult's deranged and thuggish machinery. We have Trump live, on-tape, flashing around classified documents.  Thanks to hundreds of hours of J6 testimony and lawsuit discovery, we have an almost minute-by-minute timeline of Trump multi-pronged attack on American democracy.  We have the names and the dates and the quotes.

But we have none of that detail about the mainstream media.  We can speculate.  We can infer.  But as I have written here many times before, "the media" operates inside a protective shell that it has created around itself.  The "Club" which you and I will never be asked to join.  And the strength of that shell is maintained by a simple transaction: everybody keeps their job and nobody tells tales out of school.

Take, for example, the egregious NYT coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016.  From the Columbia Journalism Review:

In just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.

What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. 

Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. 

Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

And how was ABC News covering the same thing during the same period?  From Salon:

BULLSH**TER OF THE DAY: Matthew Dowd, for elevating the false equivalence to an art form 

 

Every vile deed committed by Trump MUST be paired off with something–anything–that Hillary has done

The first paragraph of that Salon article references this Tweet by Dowd --

"Either you care both about Trump being sexual predator & Clinton emails, or u care about neither. But don't talk about one without the other."

–Matthew Dowd, on Twitter, Nov. 1, 2016

-- which has since been deleted by Dowd, because he is a coward and a fraud.

And so, to quote Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action".

Taking down Hillary Clinton -- grotesquely exaggerating the gravity of her trivial mistakes, while aggressively playing down  Trump's racist, ignorance and bloody-minded fascism so the election could be covered under the "Both Sides Do It" doctrine -- was policy at The New York Times.

It was policy at ABC News.  

It was policy all across "the media".

But policy set by whom?  No one will say.

Enforced how?  No one will say.

Done why?  No one will say?

Was there ever an apology by the makers of this policy?  Any acknowledgement that they people who set and enforced this policy had probably gotten Trump elected?  Was anyone ever fired over this?

Nope.  Just...silence.  After a few more years of lying and equivocating, Matthew Dowd fell off the radar for awhile, and then showed up on the sunny uplands of MSNBC, his past fully expunged by his pals at the network.  Because that is media policy too.  

Much has been written about the epistemic closure of the Republican base. More-or-less one-third of the voting public are now mob of reprogrammable Republican meatbags so completely immersed in their own Conservative-media manufactures delusions and imaginary conspiracies that they are permanently lost to reason.   I wrote this on this disreputable Liberal blog of mine less than 48 hours after Trump declared his candidacy.

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.

This was sheer heresy when I originally wrote it.  Just more crackpot Liberal alarmism.  Now, among the Never Trumpers who have colonized cable teevee and who were mocking us as crackpot Liberal alarmists just  few years ago,  such talk is everyday orthodoxy.  And all the warnings we  Liberal were shouting back during the Before Time have been expunged from the official histories.

But there is another large group of voters whose minds have been just as capture by comforting lies as the base of the GOP.  A group who are just as radically committed to their media-fed delusions, and just as willing to go to any lengths to defend those delusions as any MAGA lunatic.  And we talk about them on this blog all the time.  They are the "independents".  The Sensible Centrists.  

While the Right is using its trillion-dollar bullhorn to shout "Burn it all down", and the Left is shouting for them to "Stop!"... only thing these thoroughly stupefied Sensible Centrists are capable of hearing are Two Sides Being Very Loud.  

So loud!  Too loud!  

And this brings us a real and immediate threat to our democracy for which there is no practical solution.  One third of the voting public is now so pot-committed to Trump-style fascism that nothing on Earth will ever change their minds.  And, after +30 years of being fed comforting, craven lies by "the media",  another one-third of the voting is no longer willing to expend the effort to distinguish between political arsonists and political fire fighters.  

All they know is that Both Sides are So LOUD.  Too LOUD. 

Why can't Both Sides just meet in the middle!  

Why won't Both Sides just split the differences over...whatever...and let us all get back to whatever's on The Masturbation Network at the moment.

So they tune it all out and feel like heroes for doing so because "the media" is right there, every day, telling them that they're wise and righteous and maybe even patriotic for blaming Both Sides for every Republican atrocity.

This, of course, has been the Conservative strategy all along.  This was me writing +18 years ago, in an open letter to the useless Nicholas Kristof back in 2005:

In your weird fetish to be “objective”, the Republicans learned the little trick that makes you dance like organ grinder monkeys. Whatever goofy-assed idea they came up with, you’d reflexively cede them half the distance between the truth and their goal.

There was a book I loved when I was a little driftglass called, “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager, about a talisman that granted the user exactly half of what they asked for. Wish to be ten times stronger that Lancelot, you’ll get five. Wish for a million in cash, you get 500K. In the Mainstream Media, the Right Wing of the Republican Party found their Half Magic Charm. And each time you met them halfway, they moved the goalposts another twenty yards again...and you jogged right on along behind them, ten yards at a time.

The “compromise” between the truth and a lie...is a lie. The “compromise” between science and superstition...is superstition. Now, would you care to guess what the compromise between tolerance and bigotry is? Between knowledge and ignorance? Between Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman?

Yes, everything that is happening in the media today was, in fact, agonizingly self-evident all way back then.  Well before way back then, actually, but I didn't start publishing this blog until April of 2005, and this was one of my very first posts.

Now lets jump ahead through four presidential administrations.  

To the inimitable Digby.  

Today:

Why Are People So Cynical And Angry?

It’s all part of the Republicans’ cunning plan

Yep.  That mainstream media strategy of trying to appease the fascists and soothe Centrists by consistently blaming Both Sides for Republican atrocities continues to bear its lethal fruit every day.  

In her post, Digby cites this excellent Twitter thread by Dave Roberts which I'm going to reproduce here in its entirety:

This [Washington Post] article is worth examining closely. It’s a classic “visit a swing county to hear about politics” piece, so it forces itself to be even-handed & “pox on both houses,” but if you read closely you can glimpse something else.

Why are they upset? “the broader political backdrop— the impeachments, Trump’s torrent of falsehoods about the 2020 election, the Capitol insurrection, the band of hard-right Republicans ousting their speaker —has blocked out notice of what both sides cast as accomplishments…”

Hm… what do all those things have in common? Oh, they’re all about Republican extremism! It’s relentless GOP agitprop & anger & corruption & hysteria that is making politics so draining. Because making people sick of politics *serves the right’s interests*.

Here you see what might have been an alternate framing of the article: “the right’s quest to make politics toxic & to destroy citizens’ trust in basic political & media institutions is working.” The lead anecdote is about a woman seeing a *psychic* for answers.

Then there’s this: “They long for compromise. They want to feel heard and understood. Most Americans, for instance, desire access to abortion, tighter restrictions on guns and affordable health care. Many wonder why our laws don’t reflect that.”

There’s a party that talks constantly about compromise & making sure everyone’s heard. It supports access to abortion, tighter restrictions on guns, & more affordable health care. It’s the Democratic Party. It borders on performance art to refrain from saying so in that graf!

An then this, from a swing voter:

“I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done,” he said, “because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.”

[sound of Dave becoming the Joker]

So what we really have here is an article about swing voters pining for calmer, more sensible politics & a range of moderate policies–EXACTLY THE SHIT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY STANDS FOR. But when they tune in, all they see is madness & ugliness & fighting & claim & counter-claim so they “tune out” & thus do not hear about Biden saying/doing exactly the f’ing things they want someone to say/do. That is the right’s mission, accomplished. That is the core US political dynamic. That’s what these articles should be about.

Everywhere, reactionaries in politics are the same: they try to blur truth, increase bile & anger, exhaust everyone, and convince the public that no one can be trusted (ie, only a Strong Man can fix it). Those are the circumstances in which reactionaries flourish.

That’s what the right is doing in the US & the media is helping them by rewarding them with endless attention when they act out. The public is telling the WaPo here, as clearly as it can: we care about calm, deliberation, substance, policy, but all we get is spectacle.

This is been a head-f’ing aspect of US politics as long as I’ve paid attention: centrists & swing voters pining for someone to do/say exactly what Democrats are doing/saying. They just don’t know Democrats are doing/saying it, because they don’t hear about it.

Keeping up a steady, corrosive and profitable barrage of Both Siderist lies is every bit as much the corporate policy of the mainstream media as keeping up a steady barrage of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and January 6th lies is the corporate policy of Conservative media.

And neither of these ravenous, steamrolling, for-profit corporate behemoths has any incentive to stop telling the lies that make them rich and make the comfortably numb drones who watch their puppet shows happy, because neither of them gives a shit about our democracy.

I Am The Motherfucking Shore Patrol!