A profile in courage the Republican party is not. Since Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party there are almost daily stories about GOPers who eventually bowed down to Trump or stifled their public criticism of him. Now the big story is what Fox News bigwigs said in private versus what they said on the air about Trump. In reality, they were (and are) terrified of their own viewers and the forces Trump stirred up.
The Washington Posts’ Paul Waldman nails it:
On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.
They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful.
McCarthy has sought to appease the beast by granting exclusive access to 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But with each capitulation, McCarthy and Fox News only make the monster stronger.
And:
Carlson’s producers will comb through endless pixels to find images with which to mislead viewers: to convince them that the riot wasn’t so bad or that Trump’s supporters weren’t to blame or that the whole thing was a setup.
That will only further convince Carlson’s audience to deny the truth about Jan. 6, and punish any Republican officeholder who disagrees. As for McCarthy, will this exercise help him by making it more likely that Republicans will reinforce his thin House majority in the next election — or take the Senate or the White House?
Quite the opposite. It only makes it more likely that voters will view his party as extremists and loons who are far more interested in the obsessions of a spectacularly unpopular ex-president than in the genuine problems the country faces.
Like the trembling dissemblers of Fox News, McCarthy must feel that he has no choice: Feed the beast or be eaten by it. Winning the future is an idea they cannot latch on to because they are so frantic to survive one more day.
In our 21st century politics we aren’t only in an era where some believe truth–like incest–is relative. If the 20th century produced many political and media giants, we’re now in an era with many political and media pygmies.
But, unlike in the movie Frankenstein, the mob isn’t heading to the castle to torch it and kill the monster.
It’s heading to the castle to support, nurture and strengthen the monster.
So how are we trending in the 21st century?
It’s a monstrous thought.
By Universal Studios; Realart re-release – https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/227080006181823774/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75290328
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.