There is no journalistic imperative to balance truth with untruth; it’s stupid. And yet we persist.
Talking with ABC’s Martha Raddatz about the classified documents that Donald Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Sept. 4, “He has a different set of rules that apply to him. The president can declassify a document on a moment’s notice.” Yong Kim/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS
There is no journalistic protocol that dictates that we interview at least one radical left socialist meteorologist and one MAGA conservative wingnut meteorologist on the issue of whether or not it’s raining; looking out the window will suffice. And yet we persist.
When nine of the hottest years in recorded history have come in the previous 10 years, and catastrophic weather events are sweeping the planet, we needn’t call Doug Mastriano to tell us that global warming is “fake science,” and that’s not because he won’t talk to us anyway.
When Dr. Anthony Fauci retires after a 50-plus-year career as a decorated immunologist who served eight presidents including George W. Bush, who bestowed upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, we needn’t include in our coverage the reaction of Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose medical opinion is apparently that Fauci requires immediate incarceration. And yet we persist.
The “we” that I’m editorializing about here is the collective “we,” the media monolith that lives in the perception of many distrustful Americans, as though none of us makes a move without the coordination of our institutional biases.
In real life, it’s all we can do to catch most of the typos.
But the purpose of what we do must stand, institutionalized, and just like when I went to journo school in the mid-14th century, it’s not a lot more high-minded than this: Find out what’s true and what’s not, present the former and condemn the latter when necessary.
And it’s rarely been more necessary.
As the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics tweeted only this week, “Any reporters who haven’t appreciated the fascist threat yet aren’t going to appreciate it until the last institution has fallen and been ground into dust; they’ll still be both-sidesing things even once the country looks like Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles.”
President Biden gave a major speech last week in Philadelphia, focusing on the metastasizing threat to democracy. The major TV networks didn’t carry it. Had the whiff of partisan politics apparently.
Look at this exchange, highlighted in Jennifer Rubin’s column in The Washington Post, between Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Martha Raddatz on ABC:
Raddatz: “Do you see any reason that (Trump) should have taken those documents, those classified, highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago?”
McCaul: “Well, look, I – you know, I have lived in the classified world most of my professional career, I personally wouldn’t do that. But I’m not the president of the United States. But he has a different set of rules that apply to him. The president can declassify a document on a moment’s notice.”
Raddatz: “(Trump’s Attorney General William Barr) basically said, if (Trump) stood over documents and said, ‘These are all declassified,’ it was – it’s an absurd idea. You think that’s what happened?”
McCaul: “There is a process for declassification. But again, the president’s in a very different position than most of us in the national security space.”
It apparently didn’t matter to McCaul or occur to Raddatz that Trump is not the president, but the pervasive notion that Trump is above the law and thus can do no legal wrong went pretty much unchallenged.
The reluctance of McCaul to even suggest that something Trump did wasn’t 100 percent on the level is an apt description of the funhouse mirror Republicans are looking into. They feel like they can’t win without Trump, can’t win without the man who lost the Senate, lost the House, lost the White House by 7 million votes and got impeached twice.
But don’t worry, I know I should be getting myself out to a MAGA rally soon enough so that I can learn about the errors in my analysis.
Cuz that’s how we do it nowadays.
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