What Will It Take for You To Stop Interviewing Lindsey Graham?
The insatiable needs of 24/7 news coverage will burn down democracy
Why (oh, why) is the press still interviewing Lindsey Graham?
You know, the once-moderate senator from South Carolina who, after Trump sent his supporters, many armed with real and makeshift weapons, to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, declared that he was done with Donald Trump (“Count me out. Enough is enough,” also pointing out the lack of any evidence of voting fraud) and then who, quicker than most people can figure the spelling of sycophant became a golfing partner and one of his most reliable and eager lapdogs?
Oh, yeah, they’ve fussed of late about the economy and the attack on Iran, but that all seems a bit of playacting and just part of dominating the media with their patented flood-the-zone-with-shit methodology.
And I use Senator Graham merely as an example. I could pick scores of other Trump enablers from the former Grand Old Party.
Did the press of the northern states regularly get the thoughts of politicians of the Confederacy because they wanted to be “balanced” in their coverage of the Civil War? Imagine General Stonewall Jackson being invited to justify his views on “Meet the Press” and Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Did the press of 1930s Germany regularly sanitize the Nazi movement by ringing up Joseph Goebbels or Hermann Göring for their hot takes on how their Führer was merely working to return Germany to greatness while dehumanizing people to consolidate his dictatorial power?
As Andi Zeisler recently noted in Salon, with the New York Times ever trying to be “fair and balanced” by platforming conservative opinion voices, liberal and moderate Americans have increasingly turned to the often brilliant satirical perspectives of The Onion (I would add the reliably funny The Borowitz Report) as expressing far more clearly than most in the mainstream media the truths about the fascist state that is being installed before our eyes.
Zeisler also praises the hosts of late-night talk shows, who seem to be the only people telling us the truth in these depraved, embarrassing, dispiriting Trumpian times:
“In recent years of flourishing disinformation ecosystems and broken social contracts, satirical journalism has taken up more than a bit of the work abdicated by legitimate outlets. After the 2016 election, taking an overtly apolitical stance in their craft was no longer good for business, both ethically and materially. The president was leading a culture war more than he was a country, and consumers wanted to know where the entertainers they loved stood and what they would stand up for.”
Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Jon Stewart along with his fellow comedians working “The Daily Show,” have for more than a decade bravely resisted the Trumpian movement to destroy political norms and untether our democracy from the rule of law and the Constitutional protections we took for granted.
The Murdochs have dedicated their office lives to killing our democracy (and ruining family and other personal relationships) with the propaganda machine that is Fox News, while actual journalists must follow the norms of journalism and are often editorially under the thumb of corporate overlords — one truthful expression of opinion can get them cancelled. But comic minds are, to their credit (and no doubt often to their pain), always homed in on the truth. Right-wing comics cannot be funny because they recoil from the plain truth like, well, vaccinations.
My little joke about the press interviewing Stonewall Jackson during the Civil War could very well have appeared in The Onion at some point. (I’m not even going to look it up; okay, I just did.) But recent Onion headlines like “Bezos Wedding Guests Given Monogrammed Plastic Water Bottles To Urinate Into During Ceremony” and “Texas Doctor Tapes Pregnancy Pamphlet To Comatose Woman’s Forehead” get directly to savage truths about what is happening to our country and our culture in a shorthand that standard journalism simply cannot match.
Individual citizens can also be truth tellers beyond the sane-washing of things Trump and his reality TV cast of Cabinet Misfits say that we so often get in the daily news. The creative, often quite funny protest signs carried by the millions of patriotic Americans during the “No Kings” march, held in more than 2,000 locations across the country the day Trump celebrated his birthday with an expensive, but deflating, military parade, also stand as examples of a punchy bluntness that the mainstream press cannot seem to often rise to even in commentary, signs like “Parade Like It’s 1939,” “America Will Be Trump’s 7th Bankruptcy,” and the popular “Curb Your DOGE.”
Mainstream journalism naturally struggles to call a lie a lie when the lies are ceaseless.
But even if mainstream journalism struggles to call a lie a lie when the lies are ceaseless (How many years did it take for the New York Times to use that blunt, accurate word, lie, reminding us of the saying “A Lie can run halfway around the world before the Truth gets its boots on”?), we can rely on the journalists and other writers working for magazines like The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Mother Jones. They deserve our support. As do the journalists of plucky independents like Salon and a slew of independent writers, such as the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, publishing via Substack.
As part of our protest against Trumpism, we’ve subscribed to far too many magazines than we can possibly keep up with. But they need our support.
In truth, there’s no shortage of journalists, historians, and writers with expertise in government telling it like it is about Trumpworld and the shaky state of our democracy. Professor, lawyer, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has been steadfast, as has journalist Dan Rather and his Steady team. To be fair, the editorial board of the New York Times has been very clear on the dangers Trump inflicts on our democracy, on the economy, and our way of life, including his penchant for encouraging violence.
Yes, of course, he’s a duly elected senator with access to Trump. So, for the foreseeable future, members of the mainstream press will find themselves scratching their heads while yet again interviewing the likes of Lindsey Graham, as if he had anything useful to tell us from his entirely discredited position.
