CHOICES: A DAUGHTER'S DILEMMA . . . AND OURS

We do not live in a world where there are two sides to any story. 

We have never lived in that world.  

Reality is multifaceted.  

There are probably a dozen sides to any one story, conflict or argument.  

When I was in college in the mid to late '70s and very interested in journalism, I wrote a senior thesis entitled "Routines and Objectivity in the News Media -- A Functional Perspective".  I argued that the professional journalistic canon in favor of objectivity in fact just described a set of practices designed to get work done in a limited amount of time.  There was an edition to publish, a newscast to broadcast.  Reporters, instead of recounting all sides to a story, a task probably impossible in any world and absolutely impossible in the one they actually lived in with deadlines, decided the "sides" had to be reduced.

So, abjuring the impossible task of reporting all sides . . .

They decided to report both sides.

In other words . . .

Two.

Republicans attacked this claim.  

For the wrong reason.

By then, the GOP had internalized former Vice President Spiro Agnew's broadside in 1969 against both the Nixon administration's critics at large -- the public and the  Congressional Democrats who opposed his Vietnam War policy -- and the media.  Weaponizing speech writer William Safire's alliterative attacks, Agnew characterized Nixon's war critics as "nattering nabobs of negativism" who "formed their own 4-H club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history". As for the media reporting that criticism, they were a "tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men" in New York's television studios exercising "a profound influence over public opinion" with their "vast" unchecked "power".  In his and Nixon's view, their "side" of the story was not being told.

I thought Agnew's critique wrong.

Even "profoundly" wrong.

As in radically unempirical.

I had worked as a reporter-intern for National Public Radio in the spring of 1976.  I had  read scores of academic studies, insider accounts and personal biographies  on the media and its critical actors.  I also came from a family of journalists.  My father and grandfather had collectively worked for decades at New York's Daily News, and following the 114-day New York City newspaper strike in the winter of 1962-63, my father began a twenty-five year career as an editor and producer at NBC News.  The many reporters I knew and met were not political partisans or advocates.  At worst, they were cynics; at best, harried narrators attempting to print or broadcast the who, what, when, where and how of life on a daily deadline.  

The problem with journalism was not its inherent bias against any one political party.

The problem was its love affair with the number two.

In the twenty years beginning in 1990, technology wrought revolutionary changes in the media's structural universe. Initially, multiple cable news outlets joined the fray to compete with the three networks (NBC, ABC and CBS),  public television and radio, and thereafter, with the growth of the internet in the first decade of this century, that universe expanded by orders of magnitude to include social media platforms, blogs, podcasts and all manner of alternative outlets for the dissemination of information over the digital air waves.

Unfortunately, however, technology made things worse.  

Instead of using it to open the aperture and capture more than just two sides, conservatives turned it into a megaphone.  Put differently, their half-century reaction to Agnew's false claim was to create a false solution.  They embraced technology to ensure the networks no longer had a monopoly but then used that technology merely to make their side louder. The result is today's media eco-system: a mainstream media still hell-bent on reporting "both sides" alongside a conservative media -- FOX, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart and a host of their print compatriots -- reporting the conservative side on steroids.  

In this environment, the liberals (MSNBC) and centrists (CNN) have tried to play catch-up.  In doing so, however, they have been hamstrung. Unlike the far right, the center and moderate left still believe in facts and analysis.  This does not mean they do not have a point of view.   They do.   They want to tackle climate change without immediately putting the oil and gas industry (or West Virginia and Wyoming) entirely out of business; hold police Constitutionally accountable without defunding police departments; support democracy (in Ukraine for example) but not engage in fruitless, military-based exercises in nation-building (in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example); and redistribute some wealth without overtaxing the middle class. They also want to count votes and peacefully transfer power once the count is done.

In taking these positions, they eschew false claims or "alternative" facts.

They make arguments.

In contrast, the Trumpists in the Republican Party and his media echo chamber are allergic to facts.  They either deny them, make you afraid of them, or invent them.  About 80% of the primary candidates Trump has endorsed have actually won and will be on the ballot in November.  They are all election deniers, preaching the lie that Trump won in 2020.  Of late, they have also preached the lie that the Justice Department's effort to retrieve classified and other top-secret documents illegally taken to Mar El Lago was a political hit rather than an effort to enforce the law.  And as with their 2020 election claims, they have either endorsed or winked at violence as a proper response.

These are not arguments.

They are attacks on the Constitutional order and the rule of law.

And the call to or wink at violence is right out of the fascist playbook from the 1920s,30s and 40s.

Last week, Liz Cheney lost her primary election in Wyoming and will no longer be a Congresswoman come next January.  As she pointed out in her concession, she won that same primary two years ago with over 70% of the vote and could have easily done so again.  All she had to do was ignore Trump's attempted coup on January 6,  2021, play along with his election lie, and imitate the dozens of fellow Republican office holders more than willing to do so in order to retain their positions.  This, however, is precisley what she would not do.

Over the past year, Cheney has been praised by people like me for her courage.  The JFK Presidential Library even gave her its Profile in Courage award.  She understands that Trump and his attempted coup on January 6 is a line America cannot cross if it is to retain its character as a democratic republic.  She also understands that there is a difference between truth and lies and that too many among her party's elected officials and actual members have embraced the latter. She stands alongside only a few similarly principled fellow Republicans -- her nine fellow House Republicans and seven Republican Senators who voted to impeach and convict Trump in 2021. 

She deserves all this praise and then some.

Some, however, are pushing back.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has just published a book entitled The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party.  In it, Milbank argues that Donald Trump is just a symptom of  that crack-up, and that one of its central participants was Liz Cheney's dad.  Milbank's argument is compelling.  From claims that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to birtherism and Obama, the GOP has routinely embraced fact-free claims and outright lies in an effort to plug the holes in its increasingly leaky electoral boat. It literally has lost the popular vote for president in every election but one since 1992 and its Congressional majorities have been narrow and, by historic standards, short-lived and map dependent. And, because of its allergy to truth, those majorities have also been peopled with more than a smattering of the unhinged -- Gingrich and Delay and Dan Burton (who wouldn't eat soup in a restaurant for fear of catching AIDS)  early on; Taylor Greene and Boebert and Graetz today. 

From back then until now, there are many straight lines. The right-wing donor, Richard Mellon Scaife, and journalist, Christopher Ruddy,  who together funded and broadcast the Foster murder myth in the '90s, formed Newsmax and later helped fund and broadcast Trump's lies.  The right-wing and foul-mouthed Rush Limbaugh, who called Barney Frank  "Barney Fag" in the '90s, was given a presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump in 2020.  In his post-Watergate, post-prison gig as a talk radio host, G. Gordon Liddy told those angry at the ATF in 1994 to "kill the sons of bitches",  and twenty-six years later GOP insurrectionists stormed the Capitol  yelling "Hang Mike Pence".  

From Timothy McVeigh to January 6, apocalypse then has just become apocalypse now.

So, should Liz Cheney be sidelined for the sins of her father, which were considerable?

I think not.

Dick Cheney, as Vice-President, was instrumental in getting America into a war on the basis of half-truths that had the potential for becoming full-truths but never made it.  Saddam previously had WMD and wanted nukes but possessed neither in 2003 and was not likely to get the latter anytime soon.  Al-Qaeda personnel had been to Iraq but had no operational capacity there.  Milbank calls Cheney a "master prevaricator" and given the stakes at the time  -- the possibility of dead soldiers in an endless war -- this is fair.

But the daughter is not the father.

In fact, the difference is instructive.  

The vast majority of Republican officials who have survived Trump while disliking (or even despising) him have done so via recourse to the kind of obfuscation Dick Cheney embraced in 2003.  He exaggerrated potential threats and pretended what was possible was in fact actual.  Those who wink and nod at Trump while refusing to take him on discount election denial by pretending it is just a complaint about early voting or drop boxes.  Or they discount January 6 by falsely turning the Black Lives Matter protests into liberalism's version of the same. Armed with this jiu jitsu, they silently root for Trump's GOP critics while remaining public cowards.

If Liz were Dick, she could be doing  the same.

But she isn't.

On Trump . . .  and January 6 . . . and election denialism . . .

She is about choices.

Right versus wrong.

Fact versus  fiction.

Truth versus lies.

Her father should be proud . . .

And embarrassed.