Journalism and the New World: An Insoluble Problem?
What is going on? Well, according to The Times,
“Even by the standards of a head-spinning presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump’s campaign over the past two weeks has been tumultuous.”
And not to be outdone, a columnist in WAPO describes the past week (now more than one week) as “turbulent.”
Really? I remember: “What an incredible tumult! The War is over! Millions crowd Times Square, cheering and crying, sailors in uniform embrace strange women. At last deep into the morning, all depart, the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart…: “Wow!
And yet, look to the West: “For the first time in a dozen years, Ohio State has won the Old Oaken bucket by defeating Michigan, 14–12. Buckeye graduates pour out onto the streets of Columbus, turning over cars, breaking windows, policemen nowhere to be seen. And meanwhile, almost simultaneously, Auburn has defeated Alabama, a new Number One going to the Rose Bowl, to meet the Webfoots of Oregon State–never before invited there. The boards in Las Vegas are going crazy, the most turbulent week in College football history! Everything turned outside down!”
What tumult! What turbulence! What cowardly bullshit!
Can we be a little more precise?
There is a War going on: a vicious War against the Other, unrelenting in its depravity: what can only be described, apologetically coming from an atheist such as myself, as sheer, unmitigated, unrelenting evil. No other word will do. As to time, place, and brutality, we have to go back to Hitler to find an equivalent avatar; and above all, to find a moment when, as now, as David French put it, ”the very concept of Decency is counter-cultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.” As indeed it is. What can we say?
We might think that Putin could stand in for Hitler, but not really: he’s essentially an opportunist who will do anything to achieve his Greater Russia objective, but that’s nothing new; not the paranoia of Stalin, the Culture War of Mao. But for rather an all-out ideologue of hatred, we have to go back to Hitler. Not to belabor the point any further, but there’s a problem.
I’ve made references to Naziism, and to Hitler in particular, many times before–those are almost commonplace by now. But while so doing I always carefully distanced myself by acknowledging that Trump, after all, has not promoted the Holocaust that distinguishes Hitler’s from all other nationalist genocides, in its insistence on the destruction of all Jewry as the essence of the German Nations very survival.
But Oh, Oh, Oh! That time is past. What Trump and his scum-sucking veep are finally promoting, out in the open, with Springfield Ohio as their spring-board, is indeed a Holocaust: the “deportation of millions” (fourteen at last count) by the military forces of the nation, with concentration camps for those awaiting their turn in front of the gun barrels.
There is no way this can be done, if all “the vermin, the rats, the rapiststs”, etc., etc., are to be finally stopped from their poisoning of the national bloodstream, without a massive concentration of fire-power and unstoppable loss of life. You have to back to Mein Kampf to find a language that matches up to that of Trump and his boot-licker while their Party looks on–I can’t think of an appropriate adverb here.
But I’ll add this: When Hitler ran for Chancellor in 1933, he never ranted about Jews: he was running in the midst of a true recession in Germany, and that’s what he talked about, and mostly attacking the Communist Party–which everyone in European politics did. What he did not do was talk about the “Final Solution.” Only in 1942, at the Wannsee Conference (see the terrifying film of that name) was that officially discussed, and ratified.
Trump is not waiting nearly that long. Euphemisms, yes; the man is an insane psychopath and not totally stupid: but he knows what he means and gets as close as you can to saying it right out loud: “millions.”
Against his barrage of hatred-based lies, most mainstream journalist is helpless–useless. Take Springfield: As Josh Marshall points out on “Talking Points Memo:”
“ a lot of the non-far-right coverage has operated on the assumption that either the federal government or some outside entity has essentially resettled a large community of refugees in this one city. But that’s not really what happened here at all. The influx of immigrants into the city is actually a direct result of economic redevelopment plans devised by local leaders, most of whom are Republicans.”
In short, as John Ford put in the mouth of Maxwell Scott, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Or worse yet, of course, the lie. Behind every sentence Trump utters, the Big Lie stands uncorrected in print, or on TV, or on the Internet, until some intrepid truth-teller — such as, hopefully, Kamala Harris, or at least MSNBC–puts it under the hammer. And even then, what? To tell the truth is to violate, wholesale, with every breath, the evanescent concept of “objectivity,” as in “Okay, Mr. Hitler, you’ve had your say about Jews; now let’s hear the other side…”
Or, more mundanely, that “Crime has gone way up under Biden,’ when in fact, according to the FBI report, it’s gone down. Or to prefer Trump on immigration, when the truth, only available to people who pay attention, is that Trump killed a bipartisan bill that both Democrats and Republicans had agreed on as the best that been proposed for decades. Having succeeded in that wrecking action, he is free now to lie about the actual conditions and possibilities at the Border–without correction.
So what,, let’s print it! What Trump says is News.
Recently, the German newspaper Der Spiegel asked its in-house critic, one Bernhard Poerksen, to evaluate its coverage of our Election campaign. He began with the following story:
“After Trump was grazed by a bullet, the photographer Evan Vucci immediately rushed over and photographed him from below, such that his raised fist could be seen jutting into the sky, the flag behind him. It was, according to the immediate consensus, an iconic image. And it immediately shifted the narrative. The man suddenly became a hero.”
And he goes on to add: “The scene is a symptom of a disturbing symbiosis of a kind that has never been seen before in media history. It is a symbiosis between a fascist entertainer and a fanatically fast-paced journalism himself a product of our global entertainment culture, he has now become its program director. When he goes on air, ratings shoot up…. it is important to ask: How should such a man be dealt with?”
To go on with his summary about the coverage of Trump’s trial in New York:
“ there is a huge number of photos showing Trump in the middle of an excited crowd of supporters, exuding triumphalism and fist raised. What it shows is something I will call the visualization paradox of serious journalism: Attempts at demystification through written language, yet paired with simultaneous heroization and monumentalization on the visual level.”
Or, as Steve Bannon described it in an interview, to flood the media “with shit” in order to dull the collective sense of “truth.” And that is exactly what has happened.
Poerksen concludes that, “In 2016, with Trump having just been elected to the White House, the New York Times published a spectacular self-critical essay by David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg. The narrative of decline, the focus on pathologies, the concentration on crises and catastrophes — all of that, they wrote, is a covert program for boosting Trumpian populism.”
And it has succeeded. The real success stories of immigration, in the medical sector, in construction, in services, in child care: no news there. Every now and again, one appears in the midst of Trump’s dystopianism. But too rarely. Dystopia rules the day. And a multifold sexual predator and his world-class misogynist front-man get reported on as though they were normal men.
Oh yes: The Times yesterday had an op-ed piece by two reporters who counted the lies or distortions in recent stump speeches by Trump and Harris. The score: Trump won 64–6, hers being mostly “distortions” or “exaggerations.” His are mostly “lies.” 64–6. Good for it, and them.
Is anybody listening?
