Wednesday's postcard, and the paper trail behind a runaway truck of lies

February 15, 2023

Male Hooded Merganser on the wing above Latah Creek

Runaway Truck

I’m reluctant to admit I’ve been laughing at each cauldron bubble in the George Anthony Devolder Santos meltdown. Sometimes it’s a full-blown cackle; sometimes it’s more like a jaded guffaw.

In case you’ve been hyper-isolating or in a coma for the past month, Santos (or whatever his real name is) is a newly-elected Republican Congressman from Long Island who, to win his seat, lied prolifically—about his education, his athletic prowess, his mother’s death, his business experience, etc. Then, when (finally) caught in the national media headlights—he tut-tutted that we all embellish our resumés and he’s just a regular guy who made a few ordinary mistakes.

Perhaps it’s unseemly to laugh and gawk. It’s just hard not to listen and watch as the vortex of Santos’s lies bounces along, like a tornado through the political culture and party that enabled him.

Santos’s confidence that he could pull this off is explicable given how morally unhinged his party has become. I’m referring, of course, to Republican subservience to the culture of fabrication culminating in Donald Trump’s “Big Lie”— the gobsmacking claim that Trump’s defeat in 2020 was due to massive voter fraud. In case you missed it, or chose to look away in disgust, this is something even Trump’s once-loyal attorney general has flatly declared to be “bullshit.”

Santos is not Trump. But he is Trumpian with a twist of lime, with a flair for the absurd that brings to mind Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” character.

There is a long paper trail for this and I was reminded of it while listening to a recent podcast hosted by journalist Ezra Klein. Klein was interviewing Nicole Hemmer, an academic at Vanderbilt who studies and writes about right-wing media and its effect on society.

The program’s topic? How Right-Wing media ate the Republican Party.

The title is a succinct description of how a rising tide of populist grievance—purposefully stoked by right-wing broadcasters—overwhelmed the patrician, conservative policy class of the Republican Party.

While the trend goes back a half century or so, Hemmer makes the case that it burst into flames, post-Watergate, with the rise of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s. She underscores Limbaugh’s success building a loyal, and outlandishly profitable audience for his bellicose brew of right-wing grievance that ultimately fed into the Tea Party movement of 2009 which, in turn, opened the door wide for Trump and his MAGA movement.

Historian Jill Lepore also wrote about this juncture in her 2018 American history book, These Truths. Lepore noted that Limbaugh’s partner in the growth of his show and his “Rush is Right” audience was none other than Richard Nixon’s former media advisor Roger Ailes. It was Ailes to whom Australian tabloid tycoon Rupert Murdoch turned in 1996 to start Fox News.

“Many found Ailes’s venture surprising,” Lepore wrote, “since he had no background in journalism and frequently said he did not respect journalists. A news organization run by a political operative—a Republican kingmaker—would seem to violate basic standards of journalism, and yet Ailes insisted that Fox News aimed to rescue journalism.”

Journalism may eventually recover from the damage caused by Fox News and its imitators, but the damage being inflicted on our society, as a whole, is horrific.

As Hemmer noted, a key advantage for Fox and other media pouring gasoline on right-wing rage is they simply choose to opt out of the century-old ethical framework that is supposed to guide conduct and standards in news coverage. A right-wing media outlet can dress itself—as Fox News does—just like a traditional TV news operation with conventional sets and neckties. But while traditional news outlets aspire to promote balance and accuracy, Hemmer notes that these values have never been a part of the formula for right-wing media.

This starting point is more important than most people realize, or are even aware. A political operation disguised as a news outlet does not begin its day by asking what’s good for the public to know. Rather, it starts with the implicit question of what views and information are useful to promote political or social outcomes backed by the network, its bosses, and favored politicians.

That is the key difference. Mainstream media is by no means immune from criticism. It’s an imperfect system where bias and manipulation will sometimes prevail. But the norm of mainstream journalism is to independently report the news, not to purposefully distort it; not to deliberately mislead the public.

When the House of Representatives’ January 6th committee obtained emails (from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows) exchanged with Fox News personalities before, during and after the 2021 insurrection, the emails unmasked the very nature of Fox News. The electronic traffic showed, on its face, that the network’s on-air personalities, including its prime-time star Sean Hannity, were much more interested in advising Trump and his aides rather than actually reporting what was happening.

This ethical breach was all too consistent with Hannity’s earlier conduct as a partisan actor, including his warming up the crowd and introducing Trump at a 2018 campaign rally, something that would be a firing offense at other networks.

There was more to come. In the aftermath of the election Fox, like other right-wing networks, gave ample time to Trump lawyers and loyalists who repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the election was rigged. A main target of election deniers was Dominion Voting Systems which provided voting machines and software in 28 states. In March of 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox.

A major thread in Dominion’s suit is that Hannity—who at the time hosted the most popular show on cable news—willingly provided a platform to attorney Sidney Powell. Powell spewed baseless charges that Dominion rigged its machines to fraudulently assist Joe Biden at the expense of Donald Trump. Along with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Guiliani, Powell presented at a now infamous, post-election press conference to assert, without evidence, that there had been “centralized” voter fraud in the election. The event is best remembered by the fitting image of black hair dye streaming down Giuliani’s face under the bright lights of the cameras.

Ten days later, Powell appeared both on Hannity’s radio show and his prime time Fox News show where she repeated her bogus claims to Hannity’s audiences. During a seven-hour deposition by Dominion’s lawyers last December, Hannity admitted he “did not believe it [Powell’s accusation] for one second,” even as he gave her free rein to make those accusations on his and Fox’s air.

The darkly cynical formula for all of this had been reported by author Michael Lewis who, in 2018, quoted Trump’s confidant and one-time campaign director Steve Bannon thusly: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Bannon’s prescription was just a pithy way to express the intentional anarchy of Trump’s rise to power. It rides on the belief that ethics simply don’t matter in politics, that you just do whatever you need to do to win. It is no coincidence that when all hell broke loose for George Santos in wake of a New York Times exposé in mid-December that it was Vish Burra—a former drug dealer and protegé of Bannon’s—who quickly showed up at Santos’s side as the embattled Congressman’s director of operations.

One of the results of this cynically integrated political/media strategy is that it has begun to curve back on itself in ways that surely delight Bannon and Trump. The audience for the lies has come to rely upon the alternative reality as a consumer product to which they are now somehow entitled.

That may sound far-fetched. But that was part of the testimony former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt provided the Jan. 6 Committee when he testified last summer. Note the word “former.”

At Fox News, the problem for Stirewalt was that he had done his job too well. He may have been in charge of the last editorial department at Fox News that was working on the level. Like the other major networks and news services, the Fox News Decision Desk was competing to deliver timely, accurate projections on election night. As a result of their work Fox was the first to “call” Arizona—a state Trump expected and badly needed to win—for Joe Biden.

Of course Team Trump went ballistic and tried to get Rupert Murdoch himself to intervene to reverse the call. To no avail. Trump enthusiasts took it as a slap, leading to “Fox Sucks!” chants from supporters gathering that night in Arizona.

The irony of that wasn’t lost on Stirewalt, who was dismissed by Fox News shortly after the election. He was unabashedly proud of the work at the Fox decision desk on election night. The backlash from Fox viewers was overwhelming though. Stirewalt later told NPR:, “it showed..me how much television — the perceptions of events, of television as entertainment, news as entertainment and treating it like a sport — had really damaged the capacity of Americans to be good citizens in a republic because they confused the TV show with the real thing.”

The progression of this phenomenon—the creation or expectation of alternate fictions to supplant what’s objectively real—may be the gravest threat the country faces in that it creates ruptures and distortions that affect every level of civic discourse and decision-making. As both Chris Stirewalt’s experience and Liz Cheney’s experience show, it punishes those who speak truth, and encourages those who won’t and don’t.

Taking political and professional revenge on the truth-tellers and the stark abandonment of ethics in right-wing media are symptoms of the same disease. To purposely discourage, suppress and distort the truth is an invitation to havoc. It’s like loosening the brakes on a runaway truck that’s headed downhill, on icy pavement.

It’s how we got to Donald Trump, and George Santos.

—tjc