The Media Memory Hole

By Christine Rosen

Sunday, August 18, 2024

 

On July 15, 2024, something odd happened, now forgotten amid the summer’s frenetic news cycle. But it was an event that might well be seen, years from now, as a symptom of larger problems in mainstream-media coverage of American politics. Corporate executives at MSNBC pulled the network’s most popular and lucrative show, Morning Joe, off the air for the day.

 

The reason? The day before, former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, and according to “a person familiar with the matter” at MSNBC who spoke to CNN, “the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” In other words, the people who run a news network feared that the people whom they pay to appear on-air to inform viewers about politics might not behave in a professional and appropriate manner. Indeed, they might say something so vituperative that it might appall even their left-leaning (and Trump-despising) audience.

 

This is not only a problem for MSNBC. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., network-news reporters managed to relay crucial, if incomplete, information to viewers without anyone worrying that they might, for example, blame the president for getting himself shot because of his own rhetoric—which is exactly what ABC News’s Martha Raddatz did regarding Trump. Although many of the initial televised reports were incorrect about the seriousness of Reagan’s injuries and had to be corrected on-air later, as far as we know no network executives feared a news anchor would wish death on the president, or imply that he deserved the assassin’s bullet, or that he hadn’t even been shot but rather grazed by broken glass from a teleprompter.

 

How times have changed. The Morning Joe kerfuffle is only one damning example of the Newspeak into which modern mainstream media have descended.

 

Consider the question of President Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive fitness. For more than a year, voters told pollsters they thought he was too old to run for reelection; nevertheless, he insisted, and the press corps fell into line like good soldiers. Reporters and pundits declared any concerns raised about Biden’s obvious decline just so much right-wing agitprop, and few if any reporters bothered to question why Biden had not held a meeting of his cabinet since last fall, or why he had spent a significant portion of his presidency sequestered at his beach house in Delaware, or why he had seemed disoriented and inattentive at many public events.

 

Instead, Biden’s press secretary told a compliant press that video footage of Biden shuffling away from group photos during international meetings and looking confused at fundraising events were “cheap fakes”—defined by the New York Times as “bad-faith efforts to mislead.” Other outlets, such as Politico, ludicrously blamed Republicans for “weaponizing Biden’s age against him.”

 

But in late June, Biden appeared on a debate stage with Trump, and the narrative collapsed. Biden was clearly not up to the task of four more years as president. Like colony-collapse disorder in bees, however, while his supporters fled, Biden remained in charge and was still running for reelection, tended to by an ever-smaller circle of loyalists, namely, First Lady Jill Biden, her staff, and Biden’s son Hunter. The media, given an opportunity to fully report on what they had previously willfully ignored, instead accused the White House of orchestrating a “cover-up” about Biden’s condition, and they largely refrained from any examination of their own complicity in hiding his condition from the public.

 

A few weeks later, Trump was shot during a rally in Pennsylvania. Captured on video and shared widely on social media, the assassination attempt showed Trump hit, then quickly brought to the ground by Secret Service officers. He then rose and, in an iconic moment, blood streaming from his right ear, raised his fist and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

 

The mainstream media responded in an assortment of appalling ways. CNN’s Jamie Gangel said of Trump’s response: “That’s not the message we want to be sending right now. We want to tamp it down.” A photo editor at a major news outlet told Axios that using the image taken of a bloodied Trump, with fist raised and the American flag flying in the background, was irresponsible because it was “free PR for Trump” and thus “dangerous for media organizations to keep sharing” as it would make Trump a “martyr.”

 

Other outlets simply avoided using words like “assassination” or “shot” at all. The Washington Post led with “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally,” while CNN opted for “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.” NBC News reported, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after popping noises heard at his Pennsylvania rally.” ABC News online added, “Donald Trump escorted off stage by Secret Service during rally after loud noises ring out in crowd.” NPR sought to downplay the entire incident with its headline: “Trump is fine after apparent gunshots fired at his rally,” failing to note that the gunshots fired were aimed at his head and one scored a hit. Most egregious was the Denver Post, whose above-the-fold all-caps headline over the image of a bloodied Trump, read, “Gunman Dies in Attack.” In very small print it noted, “Trump says he was shot in ear.” Newsweek trained its reportorial eye not on the person who tried to kill the former president, but on Trump supporters: “MAGA responds with outrage after Donald Trump injured at Pennsylvania rally.”

 

Less than a week later, President Biden announced, via a post on X, his decision not to run for reelection. This came after weeks of Democratic Party leaders urging him to withdraw from the race and his stubborn refusal to do so. For a moment, the mainstream media adopted a more adversarial stance toward a Democratic president, eagerly reporting leaks from top Democrats about their wish to see Biden gone, noting the effects his age was having on his ability to run a vigorous campaign and grousing about his unwillingness to grapple with the very real possibility that he might lose to Trump.

 

Once Biden agreed to exit, however, he went from pariah to political hero in the snap of a finger, with the press offering encomia more suitable for an abdicating monarch or North Korean dictator than the elected president of a democracy. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called Biden “an actual hero,” while CNN contributor Norm Eisen said Biden’s withdrawal from the ticket was “one of the most stunning acts of patriotism of my lifetime.” Former Obama speechwriter and podcaster Jon Favreau, who had been tweeting about Biden in the most obnoxious and disrespectful ways in the preceding weeks, said the withdrawal was “a courageous and selfless decision,” while Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin went one further by comparing Biden to George Washington. Nancy Pelosi, by all accounts one of the people most eager to put a shiv in Biden’s reelection hopes, declared that Biden belonged on Mount Rushmore.

 

If the media executed a neat about-face regarding Biden, its treatment of his vice president and new presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has been more akin to a severe case of whiplash. It was not that long ago that even the New York Times Magazine was publishing profiles of Harris with observations like “she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and noting that she had “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such polling began, in 1989. She had also been the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, to the left of even socialist Bernie Sanders.

 

And yet, once she was the Democratic Party’s new hope, the wagons circled. Right out of the gate, New York Times reporter Reid Epstein claimed that “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.” These “old” videos include clips of Harris from that long-ago time in 2019 when she told a CNN town hall of voters, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” a position she has not officially disavowed.

 

Other reporters simply lapsed into the comfortable role of admiring scribes awaiting an inevitable coronation, fangirling the new candidate’s wardrobe and food choices. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere posted the following scoop on social media: “Through all her calls at the Naval Observatory, Harris wore a hooded Howard University sweatshirt, workout sweats and sneakers. They got pizza and salad for dinner. She went with her favorite topping: anchovies.” Others explained not the intricacies of Harris’s foreign-policy positions but rather how exciting it was that musician Charli XCX said that Harris was “brat.” As it turns out, Charli offers a more honest description of Harris’s record than most reporters. As she described on social media, brat means “You’re just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes…. Like, does, like, dumb things. But, like, it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”

 

The mainstream media, however, are intent on making sure some of those dumb things aren’t highlighted as part of Harris’s record now that she’s running for president. Consider her role as Biden’s “border czar,” an ignominious distinction given how little the administration has done to prevent millions of people from coming into the country illegally, which most Americans believe is a serious crisis.

 

Media outlets have been scrambling to rewrite history by claiming that Harris was never really in charge of the border, or a border czar. Axios had published a story in 2021 stating that Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar.” Another Axios article bore the title “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.” Today? The publication now claims it called her a czar “incorrectly” and tsk-tsks “the Trump campaign and Republicans,” who “have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title—which she never actually had.” Yet Biden himself had said he was putting Harris in charge of “stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”

 

CNN’s resident “fact-checker” Daniel Dale did his part for the cause of rehabbing Harris’s image by claiming that the many articles published calling her the border czar “were wrong” because she had been tasked instead “to lead a so-called root causes diplomatic effort.” Left unmentioned was Harris’s support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and her 2018 comparison of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to the Ku Klux Klan.

 

In the next few months, there will be many more examples of the mainstream media aiding and abetting the Democratic Party’s effort to elect Harris president of the United States. As her previous performance in the 2019 Democratic primaries attests, she has spent her entire political career opportunistically using identity politics to launder her inauthenticity and lack of firm convictions, and so she needs all the help she can get. But the media’s situational ethics tips into outright propaganda when they attempt to send easily verifiable facts about Harris down the memory hole. Their efforts might help win Harris the election this time, but this could be the final tipping point into irrelevancy for an industry whose own corporate leaders can’t trust their “talent” not to blame an assassin’s target for his own brush with death.