It's Not a Freak Show!

Stop saying it's a freak show!

Among the post-mortem takeaways from the election is that the media needs to do a better job of covering, well, everything. One not-entirely-incorrect argument against legacy media establishments, in particular cable news outlets, is that their falling ratings and deserting viewership can be laid at the feet of their liberal-leaning hosts, producers, and staff. Looking at my own network, CNN, one could easily come away with the impression that the hosts were more sympathetic to Harris than Trump during the 2024 race. Does anybody think Jake Tapper was secretly rooting for a Trump win, for example? Or Abby Philip? Or any of the other familiar faces?

(By the way, I have no idea what Jake or Abby’s politics are.)

Trump proponents can, and do, point to CNN as a place MAGA guests are treated to tougher questions than their Democratic counterparts. It would take a much deeper analysis than I’m able to conduct to know whether this argument is correct, but I’m not sure that it’s actually relevant. Why? Because one of the tentpoles of the MAGA movement is hostility to all media not within their direct control. Attacking the media has been, and continues to be, one of their most successful plays.

Do my eyebrows look ok?

What would a media look like that isn’t, as Trump has so often described it, “the enemy of the people”?

I know what the Trumpists would say. That the media needs to be “fair,” and, dare I say, “balanced.” That all they’re asking for is equal time, equal opportunity, to make their case. On the surface, that makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to have former Biden and Obama officials on your network, doesn’t it also make sense to have former Trump officials. CNN’s roster of former Trump officials is made up of disaffected Trump staffers like Alyssa Farah Griffin and Stephanie Grisham.

So there’s two questions:

1.    Would hiring more MAGA supporters/officials arrest declining ratings?

2.    Would hiring more MAGA supporters/officials produce better news coverage?

Let me be succinct about the first question: I have no idea, but I doubt it because I don’t think the problem with CNN is that it isn’t confrontational enough, which is what hiring more MAGA supporters/officials would cause.

The second question is more difficult to answer because there are two ways to look at it. News coverage would “improve” in the sense that viewers would probably get a more nuanced look into the thought processes and analysis that led to, say, Matt Gaetz being nominated for Attorney General. On the other hand, what the fuck is Matt Gaetz doing being nominated for Attorney General?

His career to this point has been a short stint as a small-town Florida lawyer, and four terms in Congress. He’s never been a prosecutor, judge, or led a department larger than his own congressional office. The one thing he has going for him is that he’s apparently willing to do whatever Trump wants. One can see why such a person would set alarms ringing.

What would a “more balanced” look at the Gaetz nomination look like? Here are the facts: a controversial Trump-loving Florida congressman who resigned from office rather than have the House Ethics report about his behavior be released and who himself has been under investigation for SEX TRAFFICKING A MINOR, is now being tasked with the job of running the department charged with conducting such investigations.

Those are the actual facts as they are being reported. What would a MAGA loyalist add? I can tell you. They would defend Gaetz as the victim of a witch hunt who was targeted by the Dems and his old nemesis, the former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. They will claim that Gaetz is qualified for the job based on his years of his service in Congress, and that it doesn’t matter why Trump wants Gaetz in the job; it’s the right of every President to pick whomever they chose for which position they desire.

Would that viewpoint produce better news coverage or would it only serve to legitimize a pick that even many Republican Senators believe is historically awful? What would dispassionate coverage about Gaetz’s nomination even look like:

“Today, President-elect selected former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General. A former lawyer, Mr. Gaetz served four terms in the House before resigning last Wednesday. Many Senators expressed surprise at the pick, given Mr. Gaetz’s relative inexperience and past controversial statements.”

That tells you everything without telling you a goddamned thing. It doesn’t even mention the weird amount of Botox and eyebrow sculpting the man undergoes. Consider this tidbit from a BBC article about the nomination in their coverage of the pick:

“In 2018, he brought a right-wing Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.”

None of that is in question, but if a MAGA supporter were on the air when that sentence was read, they would want to pick apart the “Holocaust denier” element, for example, or quibble with the categorization of his actions regarding the gun control fathers.

(The Holocaust denier, by the way, was Charles Johnson, who had this to say about the Holocaust: “I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a ware crime. I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”)

Would having a Trump supporter on set during an analysis of Gaetz bring more or less clarification to the story? I would argue less because the MAGA media playbook is that of Trump himself: attack, attack, attack, deny, deny, deny.

I don’t know how to save legacy media platforms but I know making them more MAGA isn’t the answer. Nor do I know how to cover the next administration objectively, given that we are almost certainly in for four years of malfeasance, corruption, and extra-Constitutional nonsense. Yes, the news network freak-outs and teary encomiums to our republic are gross, but they’re also not inappropriate given the radical policy program of vengeance and omnipotent executive power Trump appears to be pursuing.

While it’s certainly not the job of news people to tell us what to think, I don’t see how to report the current news without some apparent bias creeping in. How does one cover the story of a Fox News host being elevated to head one of the largest federal bureaucracies in the world without a lil’ side eye? How does one cover a vaccine skeptic/bear crime scene stager with no medical background being appointed to head the National Institute of Health without a lil’ “WTF” thrown in? What purpose does it serve to normalize the freak show?