We had a demonstration on Saturday that the Republican Party runs on lies, more lies, damned lies, and nothing but lies. The entire defense of Trump was based on falsehoods, misstatements, mischaracterizations, denial… It was beamed in from an alternate fact-free universe which is where the GOP has been living for years. Shamelessness is their superpower.
Nothing more exemplifies the Orwellian doublespeak at work than Mitch McConnell’s scathing denunciation of Donald Trump coupled with his ‘regret’ that he was unable to vote to convict Trump — because his own unacknowledged actions made it “unconstitutional.”
McConnell is now getting widespread condemnation for his industrial strength hypocrisy — but it has been his modus operandi for years. Only now is the press taking official notice?
Eric Boehlert at Press Run Media has made it the focus of his reporting/commentary on how they get away with it. Essentially, it is the fecklessness of the mainstream press that enables it, along with a right wing media ecosystem that has a business model based on anti-journalism. (But that’s a story for another day.)
There are acronyms for it: IOKIYAR and IACIYAD*. False equivalence, bothsideism, etc. has been a problem for years, but the Trump years reached new depths.
* IOKIYAR and IACIYAD are taken from a 2007!!! comment by Paul Krugman — read the whole thing. The last two paragraphs are a stunning warning of how long this has been a problem — and how long warnings have been ignored.
“...This stuff is truly scary; it’s the sort of thing you didn’t think could happen in America. But it has been happening; one shudders to think where we’d be if the political tide hadn’t turned against the Bushies.
Or as a constitutional lawyer once said to me, “If Bush wasn’t such a screwup, the Republic would already be over.”“
And here we are. We really have to stop trusting in GOP incompetence — or the press as a bulwark of democracy.
[EDIT: By popular demand (and because some are blocked by the Times Pay wall):
For years, progressives have responded to news of GOP scandals unpunished, abuses of power unchecked, and outrageous remarks ignored by the media with the acronym IOKIYAR– It’s OK if you’re a Republican.
But I think we need a complementary acronym: IACIYAD– it’s a crime if you’re a Democrat.
IACIYAD is a sort of double-entendre: it could mean that the same action that draws no punishment if you’re a Republican is a crime if a Democrat does it — in fact, the informant who provoked the charges against Siegelman also implicated Republicans, but they were never investigated. Or it could mean that just being a Democrat is a crime — and it’s clear that some people in the GOP would like that to be the case.]
Watch for lots of IACIYAD from the press now that Democrats control Congress (barely) and hold the White House. If the press is afraid of the GOP, they are also afraid of being accused of not beating up on liberals enough.
Boehlert has an intense jeremiad on retiring Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s belated mea culpa. I am taking the liberty of excerpting it from his larger post because it gets right to the heart of the failure of so much of the media during the Trump presidency.
Washington Post editor finally admits Trump should've been called a "liar"
Better late than never? At this point it's hard to tell.
For four years news outlets helped normalize Trump's mendacious behavior by refusing to hold the commander-in-chief accountable with clear language that called his lies for what they were. Afraid that calling Trump a "liar" in straight news coverage would anger him and spark cries of "liberal media bias," the press capitulated. In the process, they helped turn lying into an unequivocal hallmark of the Republican Party — as witnessed during the recent impeachment trial, where Trump's lawyers lied repeatedly and without concern to Senate jurors.
Now that Trump is out of office, some news executives are having second thoughts.
From a lengthy interview retiring Washington Post editor Marty Baron recently gave to the Germany's Der Spiegel:
We had to be much more forthright about Trump’s mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration. We needed to call them that from the very beginning. We were very much operating on good principle; and let’s be fair, he was president, he was duly elected. But he was exploiting that. He was exploiting our principles. That said, I don’t think it would have made any great difference.
There's a lot there, and unfortunately much of it cannot be defended. What's most exasperating is that Baron, who's one of the best in the business, waits until Trump is out of office to make this sweeping concession about the central error that the media made covering the congenital liar. "We had to be much more forthright about Trump's mendacity, his lies," stressed Baron, which raises the obvious question: What was stopping him and the Post from doing that?
Baron has been executive editor for one of the most influential news outlets in America, so why did the paper fail to be "more forthright" about Trump's lies? Why did the Post on the one hand employ an aggressive team of fact-checkers to document the thousands of Trump lies, but then refuse to call them "lies"? That's not journalism. It's some kind of weird hybrid where the Post and others created a safe place where they could claim they were holding Trump accountable without being honest and accurate in the process.
What Baron is conceding is the Post knew it should've been calling Trump a liar instead of hiding behind a carousel of euphemisms —"falsehoods,""false claims,""inaccurate claims,""alternative facts,""alternative reality,""erroneous description."But the Post, like its competitors, did not want to fight that "liar" fight with Trump, the White House, the GOP, and Fox News. So the Post kept its head down and shelved the discussion until February 2021.
Asked earlier in the interview about general failures the press may have made in the Trump era, Baron suggested events moved so fast with the churning chaos at the White House that it was sometimes difficult to take stock. "We’re making decisions in real time, we’re moving quickly, we don’t have time to sit back and think about a lot of the implications of what we do. We should do more of that. But things move at a very fast pace," he said.
But again, the collective decision news outlets made to not call Trump a liar in headlines and in news coverage, despite the fact he is a pathological liar, and despite the fact that every reporter, editor, and producer working in the Beltway press knew that, was a decision the press made over a four-year period. It wasn't a one-time call made at midnight on a tight deadline.
Editors like Baron could have reassessed their misguided approach in 2018 or 2019 or 2020 and decided artificial newsroom barriers that had been constructed around "lies" weren't working. But Baron did not. It was only until the very end of Trump's presidency, and most often when he was literally trying to overturn an election, that some news outlets ventured out, on rare occasions, and called him a "liar."
But when Trump lied without pause during his presidential debates with Joe Biden last year? It was crickets. When Trump spent most of 2020 lying about every conceivable aspect of a raging public health crisis, I never saw a single"Trump Lies About Pandemic" news headline for a major news organization.
Another key point Baron made was that journalists had their hands tied because Trump was President of the United States and certain deference had to be paid. "We were very much operating on good principle; and let’s be fair, he was president, he was duly elected," said the editor. "But he was exploiting that. He was exploiting our principles."
Trump exploited the fact that the press in the past did not call the President of the United States a liar, simply because the U.S. had never before elected a pathological liar to be commander-in-chief. There’s no reason the press couldn't have realized years ago that Trump was exploiting that tradition and changed its coverage. At first, the thin excuse from editors for banning “liar” and “lies” was nobody knew if Trump was telling untruths intentionally. (Maybe he’s just misinformed!) But there are some lies Trump has told more than 150 times in public, which demolishes that weak newsroom defense.
Lastly, Baron, like so many others who have been pressed on the "lies" issue, ultimately insists that it wouldn't have mattered if the Post had called out Trump’s mendacity. The standard media defense goes like this: Labeling Trump a liar wouldn't have changed his behavior, so what's the big deal? i.e. This is all just an irrelevant semantics debate.
Let’s flip that weak defense around: If calling Trump a liar were not a big deal, than why didn't everybody do it? Answer: Because they were bullied and they invented new guidelines just for him, but they didn't want to admit that publicly.
Today, as Trump hibernates in Florida, Baron at the Posts admits what was so obvious for so long — Trump should've been called a liar.
If you are not subscribing to Press Run Media, why not? You get what you are willing to pay for. That includes news that gets short shrift from the mainstream press, like: Biden has 98% approval rating from Democrats — where's the avalanche of media coverage? and Biden's already "uniting" the country — his agenda is wildly popular.
Boehlert also includes a bit of good stuff and fun stuff with every post, so it’s not all doom and gloom, like:
GOOD STUFF:
It's confirmed: You'll never have to read a new Trump tweet, ever.
From CNN's "Twitter CFO Says Trump's Ban is Permanent, Even If He Runs for Office Again":
"The way our policies work, when you're removed from the platform, you're removed from the platform," he said, "whether you're a commentator, you're a CFO, or you are a former or current public official. Remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence, and if anybody does that, we have to remove them from the service and our policies don't allow people to come back."
I don't see how Trump ever runs for office again without the aid of a Twitter outlet.
That news alone is worth the price of subscription.