Putting Down the Watchdog

The penalty for truth-telling is steep. The price of pandering is steeper.

Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN’s Reliable Sources.

A nerdy CNN host named Brian Stelter, whose show Reliable Sources reliably called out Trump’s assaults on truth and decency, had its final broadcast Sunday. The ratings were flagging, but in the ghetto of the Sunday cable-news schedule, the baseline is itself structurally pitiful. The presumption is that CNN’s highly-conservative new ownership killed the show as its first move — with more promised — in ridding the channel of its liberal stench.

In this case, “liberal” means “reporting on outrageous liars caught in the act of shitting on democracy.”

I will attempt here to get to the heart of what this episode portends, why it was inevitable and even what it means. Permit me, though, to begin with a bit of personal history.

Back in the day — when conservatism’s holy prophet Ronald Reagan was busy dismantling the society’s immune system to make corruption and treachery easier for fat cats (and even skinny cats, as long as they were white) — I had an interesting exchange with my former college roommate, Steve. I had a side hustle with CBS News at the time, and, in a catch-up call with Steve, I mentioned that I’d taken my daughter with me to New York where I was doing a segment with Connie Chung. The kid got to hang out on the main news set for an hour, and — as I boasted to Steve — even sat in Dan Rather’s chair.

“Oh, really?” he said. “Did it tilt to the left?”

All right. Three things about that:

1. You think Trump and Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are some sort of new beast? You think White House “Enemies of the People” tirades against the press are some novel slur? Thirty-five years ago, the nascent Great Rightwing Conspiracy was already flogging the narrative that the news media were rife with partisan bias, an accusation propounded in those analog days of yore mainly through populist politicians, talk radio, direct mail and bumper stickers.

2. The meme wasn’t even new then. In the late 60s, Richard Nixon and vice president Spiro Agnew pandered to the white working class and the rest of middle America with talk of their Silent Majority, who embraced the (falsely) patriotic ideology “My country, right or wrong.” They weren’t like Walter Cronkite and the liberal loudmouths at The New York Times; they quietly-but-steadfastly supported the Vietnam War, racist “law and order” policies and the rejection of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which was an ambitious attempt to lift millions of Americans from poverty and offer a foothold on social welfare and justice. Nixon campaigned against the Great Society, and spent five years trying to unwind it. And the press, who documented the hard right turn? They were, as Agnew put it, nattering nabobs of negativism. “A spirit of national masochism prevails,” declaimed the eventually disgraced, tax-evading vice president, “encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Take that, Don Junior. Turns out the Culture Wars are really the Forever War. And even the Nixon Era was better than the 50s, when anyone who criticized the government was branded a Communist and faced personal ruin.

3. “Did it tilt to the left?” Pretty good line, Steve. Props for that.

Now, Reagan was an ideologue with an abiding (I’d say pathological) hatred of the very federal government he presided over. By the time he left office, the nanny of the “nanny state” was buried by the side of the Beltway in a shallow grave. Reagan had surrounded himself with the likes of Interior Secretary James Watt, who was supposed to be the chief steward of our natural resources, but instead gutted his own agency and gave out oil leases like they were Hershey’s Kisses, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who presided over the Iran-Contra scandal. (You remember: the scheme to secretly and illegally sell arms to Iran and funnel the proceeds to right-wing Nicaraguan paramilitaries trying to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government.) There was also Attorney General Edwin Meese, who’s biggest achievement apart from agitating against the Miranda Warning for criminal suspects was damage control over Iran-Contra — although, in the end, 11 administration co-conspirators (including Weinberger and Col. Oliver North) were found guilty of crimes.

Nixon, of course, as his own Oval Office tapes revealed, was a racist and anti-Semitic crook who solicited illegal campaign contributions and sicced the IRS on perceived political enemies. He had a list of those enemies, which he cleverly dubbed his “Enemies List.” Oh, and he ordered the Watergate cover-up and funded it with cash for the Committee to Re-elect the President, headed by his Attorney General, John Mitchell — another chief law enforcement official striving mightily to take the justice out of the Justice Department.

Each of these administrations was corrupt and unlawful, and each defined itself in opposition to the prevailing global trend toward human rights and the other blessings of liberal democracy. Throughout, per its constitutionally guaranteed role, the press distinguished itself in shining the bright light of journalism into the shadowy caves of political wrongdoing. Watergate and the Pentagon Papers were historic press achievements, to cite but two. As the Washington Post sloganizes, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The consequence: The GOP has been running against the media ever since. You'll recall George W. Bush standing at a lectern bragging about using the new-fangled internet to speak directly to his base, unmediated by the “media filter.” Through such direct propagandizing — and by hoodwinking those liberal loudmouths at The New York Times — he invented a ruinous war whose death toll grows still today.

Yet, for all those years of right-wing scheming and malfeasance, here’s what didn't happen: The mainstream national media did not fixate on scandal, hypocrisy and presidential lies nearly to the exclusion of everything else in the nation or in the world.  Not until the Trump horror show had there been such singular focus on (and fascination and revulsion over) the presidency. Why?

There are three reasons. First, by 2015, the advertising economy had been decimated by the internet and the news industry was already in an advanced collapse. National news stories, especially ones rich with scandal, drama and outrage, expanded to fill the vacuum left by vanishing coverage in most other categories. And the same internet that destroyed traditional media’s business model created a means to proliferate and amplify lies, conspiracy theories and vile propaganda. Trumpism grew wildly in that ecosystem, like mushrooms cultivated in shit.

Secondly, Trump is the most pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, emotionally stunted, reckless, vindictive, transgressive, anti-democratic, delusional and brazenly self-dealing political figure in American history. A cartoon racketeer was our president, and an entire political party — not to mention 73 million voters — became co-conspirators. In the Watergate hearings 50 years ago, White House Counsel John Dean testified about “a cancer on the presidency.” Trumpism is a cancer on American society.

Third, his MAGA cult following coalesced just as the Christian Nationalists’ coalition with Big Energy was putting the finishing touches on a half-century-in-the-making electoral takeover of statehouses, governorships, the courts and next the House of Representatives — cementing what may be a permanent minority government. Reactionary, Bible-thumping crazies are running for office and they are winning. In the next Congress, the Freedom Caucus could well be calling all the shots, talking about Christ’s dominion and keeping mum on the Establishment Clause. If you like the Islamic Republic of Iran, you’ll love Koch-funded American theocracy.

The convergence of these factors means that our society is on the brink. The Constitution, rule of law, social and economic equity, even the right to vote are all up for grabs — and grabbing with particular zeal is a constituency of zealots and ignoramuses who among them own 350 million guns. You think it can’t happen here? It is happening now. Jan. 6 was our Bierhall Putsch. Theofascism is upon us.

So before it all goes up in flames, what should the press do to not only fulfill its constitutional role, but to warn the audience of the approaching wildfires? As we shall see, it’s actually not all that simple a question. But my vote has long ago been cast; I’ve been sounding the alarm against Trump and Trumpism since halfway into his first campaign for the presidency. Among my shrillest — when I watched in amazement as the mainstream media squandered time and space on the demagogue’s “policy positions” — was a May 2016 screed raging at my colleagues for normalizing a sociopath.

Every interview with Donald Trump, every single one, should hold him accountable for bigotry, incitement, juvenile conduct and blithe contempt for the Constitution. The voters will do what the voters will do, but it must not be, cannot be, because the press did not do enough.

This behavior didn’t come from nowhere. The press didn’t know what to do with Trump. Journalism, unfortunately, is attracted to conflict like a moth to a burning cross. Trump was a conflict engine. During the first campaign, two of my friends (one from CBS News, the other from The New York Times), told me covering Trump was a hoot. “You never know what he’ll say,” observed the CBSer, “but you know it will be something outrageous. It’s fun.”

Yeah. Fun. Pity they couldn’t have been in Munich in 1923. That must have been a laff riot. But Trump chaos created huge ratings spikes. In March 2016, CBS CEO Les Moonves infamously told investors, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

But back to “didn't know what to do with.” The profit and fun motives were in direct conflict with another journalistic impulse: objectivity, the word often incorrectly used to mean neutrality. Report disinterestedly. Don’t contaminate facts with opinion. Don’t take sides. At all costs, do not project the appearance of bias, lest you be accused of rank partisanship. Now this is in itself complicated. First of all, reporting on documentable facts is not an act of partisanship. Fixating on Trump’s “perfect” extortion attempt on Ukraine’s president was no more partisan than covering the convictions of Democratic Congressmen William Jefferson (La.), James Traficant (Ill.), Mel Reynolds (Oh.), Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.) Albert Bustamante (Tex.), Mario Biaggi (N.Y.), Harrison Williams (N.J.), John Jenrette (S.C.), Ozzy (“Money talks and bullshit walks”) Myers (Pa.) and many, many others. Was covering Three Mile Island and Chernobyl anti-nuclear energy? Is covering the National League East anti-Washington Nationals? Of course not, no matter what shame or opprobrium it heaps on the subjects of the reporting.

Yet for decades, whenever one of its members is in the hot seat (i.e., always), the GOP claims partisan bias. Oh, really? Who are the Birthers? Who are the climate deniers? Who are the Covid deniers? Who are the election deniers? Who are the insurrectionists? Who are the conspiracy lunatics? Who are the Trump cultists? Who had Putin’s help getting elected? It isn't the Green Party. Own it, motherfuckers.

Dude, fire engines race to wherever flames are shooting out of the roof. They are biased against conflagration, not against the house.

So, yes, unlike the olden days, when the Democrats’ political machines spawned all manner of corruption and abuse of office, for the past 50 years the Republicans have become the political center of depravity. So the very fact of reporting transgressions can make the media seem partisan. Complicating problems, journalism and progessive politics share certain values: societal reform, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, speaking truth to power. This is in no way a political agenda, yet there are undeniably shared worldviews — which is why, as surveys consistently show, the vast majority of mainstream journalists self-identify as liberals. Which for some time has been the opposite of “Republican.”

Now it is well understood that it’s psychologically foolhardy to submit to bullies. They  don’t ease up; they double down. But for decades the press has done just that, bending so far backwards to appease the political right that they can count their own hemorrhoids — which is why they contorted themselves to cover Trump as if he were a normal political figure. My 2016 rant was obviously righteous, and obviously prophetic. In time, many in the media embraced its urgency — Brian Stelter among them. But not without a cost. The first, once again, was a further loss in the already precipitously declining trust in the press. By simply fulfilling our sacred duty to democracy, we seemed to validate the decades of slanders against us. It’s a perpetual motion machine. Trump does something heinous (the “perfect call,” pussy grabbing, lying about election fraud), we report it, the GOP shouts “Aha! The smoking gun of bias!”

The lesser risk of shaming the usual suspects is that it gets boring. I myself stopped reading certain publications that dependably served up outstanding journalism about the daily assaults on truth, justice and the American way. Not because I stopped caring, but because I knew what they would say. Forgone conclusion. Just an endless muted trombone, like the adults in a Peanuts TV special. If your goal is to speak truth to power, what happens when you have lost the audience to hear the conversation? “Johnny One-Note” is not a compliment.

Between these two effects of truth-telling lies the reason Brian Stelter got fired. And why CNN as a whole will be filed down to a soft, rounded edge. Jim Acosta, Briana Keilar and Don Lemon, get your resumes out.

But what is a truth-teller to do? Back when I was racing around on my figurative steed, shouting “The Red States are coming! The Red states are coming!,” I had a colleague who believed in toning down the alarm. Her thought was to reserve Defcon 1 for outrageous Trump acts, versus mere outrageous Trump statements. My view is that they were indistinguishable, that the rhetoric was itself an attack on democracy, not to mention a foreshadowing of more awful things to come. Complacency, I believed, was suicide. It all reminded me of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel about variously marginalized Germans steaming back toward Hamburg in 1933 with high hopes for a normal life. I said so on the air:

Me: “What I most hope … is that we are not all passengers on the Ship of Fools.”

Colleague: “What the fuck does that mean?”

Well, we have learned what it means. The hard way. And, as such, the journalistic choice may be complicated, but not unclear. “My country, right or wrong” has mutated to “My country, white and wrong.” We are veering ever more in Iran’s direction, in the thrall of despots and religious lunatics. Racist, misogynistic, authoritarian and unbelievably stupid.

This is not a time to wring our hands, or to timidly toe a phony “neutrality” line. That would be the very essence of fake news. It is a time for damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead — come what may. Stelter, in his final comments on Sunday, said it best.

“Here’s what I do now. I know it’s not partisan to stand up for decency, and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces. … The free world needs a reliable source.”