Why (oh, why) is the press still interviewing Lindsey Graham?
You know, the once-supposedly-moderate Republican senator from South Carolina who, after Donald Trump sent his supporters, many armed with real and makeshift weapons, to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, declared that he was done (“Count me out. Enough is enough,” he said, also pointing out the lack of any evidence of voting fraud) and then who, quicker than most people can figure out the spelling of “sycophant,” became a Trump golf 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-s**t methodology.
And I use 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 probe the thoughts of Confederate politicians because they wanted to be balanced in their coverage of the Civil War? Imagine 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 Hitler was merely working to return Germany to greatness, while the Führer was 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 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 being installed before our eyes.
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Zeisler also praised the late-night talk show hosts 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 the 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.
Recent Onion headlines get directly to savage truths about what is happening to our country and our culture in a shorthand that standard journalism simply cannot match.
The Murdochs have dedicated their careers to killing off our democracy (and ruining family and other personal relationships) with the propaganda machine of Fox News, while actual journalists must follow the norms of journalism, while often editorially under the thumb of corporate overlords — one truthful expression of opinion can get them canceled. But comedic 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; except that I did.) But recent Onion headlines — “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 are too often spoon-fed in the daily news. The creative and often funny protest signs carried by millions of patriotic Americans during the “No Kings” marches, held in more than 2,000 locations across the country on the same day Trump tried to celebrate his birthday with an expensive, damp and but deflating military parade, offer examples of a punchy bluntness the mainstream press can rarely rise to even in commentary: “Parade Like It’s 1939,” “America Will Be Trump’s 7th Bankruptcy,” and the popular “Curb Your DOGE.”
But even if mainstream journalism struggles to call a lie a lie, even when the lies are ceaseless (how many years did it take for the New York Times to use that blunt and accurate word, reminding us of the truism that “A Lie can run halfway around the world before the Truth gets its boots on”) we can rely on reporters and columnists at magazines like The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Mother Jones. (Along with this online publication, I hasten to add.) They deserve our support, as do a slew of writers, such as the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who publish via Substack.
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As part of my family’s protest against Trumpism, we’ve subscribed to far too many magazines to possibly keep up with. But they need our support.
In truth, there’s no shortage of journalists, historians and writers with expertise in government who are telling it like it is about Trumpworld and the shaky state of our democracy. Professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been steadfast, as have veteran TV journalist Dan Rather and his Steady team. The editorial board of the New York Times, to be entirely fair, has become much clearer about the dangers Trump is inflicting on our democracy, the economy and our way of life, including his penchant for encouraging violence.
As for Lindsey Graham, yes, he’s a duly elected United States senator with personal access to Trump. So for the foreseeable future, members of the mainstream press will chase him eagerly down the corridors of the U.S. Capitol, hoping against hope that he may have something useful to tell us from his discredited position. He does not, but they’ll keep trying.
