In the Age of Trump, the tidal wave of major news stories is often overwhelming, sometimes drowning even the most informed in a state of cognitive shutdown. Occasionally, though, even seemingly unrelated revelations tell a larger tale whose lessons shouldn’t go unnoticed.
So it was this week. As John McCain was laid to rest, news articles and op-ed pieces propagated throughout the U.S. media announced that “end-of-life decisions are now out in the open” and warned Americans that to prevent pointless and even painful medical treatment in the face of death, “families should talk with loved ones early.” Even as those commonsense words of advice were still fresh, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appointed McCain’s former Senate Republican colleague Jon Kyl to fill his seat for the duration of its term. Meanwhile, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd let loose a battle cry of sorts, urging his fellow journalists to “start fighting back” against Fox News and to “speak up for their own work.”
All of which comes as too little, too late. After all, back in 2009, Republicans branded such end-of-life counseling Obamacare “death panels,” a grotesque lie Senator Jon Kyl helped perpetrate. And when it mattered most, Chuck Todd told the American people that debunking this and other GOP frauds was not the media’s job.
Consider the new-found consensus that America’s seniors and their families should turn to their physicians for advice in understanding the options available to them as they make decisions about their-end-of-life health care. In May, The Oklahoman editorial board hoped McCain’s failing health and the passing of Barbara Bush would “encourage others to think about their choices, talk about their choices, document their choices and have those choices honored.” The American Medical Association, CNN reported in late August, urges doctors to “have conversations with patients and their families about quality of life using various treatments and should be truthful about if there are no treatment options left.” Adding the late Charles Krauthammer to the list of those who recently chosen when and whether to continue to receive treatment, conservative columnist Andrew Malcolm applauded the examples of these high-profile passings:
There is sympathy and sadness, of course, for anyone enduring such painful situations. But did you notice, no controversies? No one launched a legal fight against them signing their own death warrants.
No politicians demanded legislation, crying out that only God can end a life. It’s McCain’s life and his death. Same for Mrs. Bush and Krauthammer.
Luckily for 50 million elderly Americans and their loved ones, Medicare pays for the cost ($86) of those end-of-life counseling appointments. You don’t have to be rich and famous to get the kind of expert medical advice from which the conservatives’ honored dead benefitted. But it wasn’t always this way. It was only as of January 1, 2016 that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly began funding this essential care for America’s seniors. Before that, Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin and had different names for these consultations: “pulling the plug on grandma” and “death panels.”
Yes, it was Sarah Palin, aided and abetted by long-time Republican health care fabulist Betsy McCaughey who spread the panic about mythical “death panels” in what would become Obamacare. As Palin put her version of the slander on August 7, 2009:
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
Such a system would be downright evil—if Palin’s fabrication was true. But it wasn’t, which is why PolitiFact awarded “Death Panels” with its 2009 Lie of the Year. Nevertheless, Sarah Palin had plenty of company among the GOP’s best and brightest—and not best and brightest—in trying scare America’s elderly to death.
Among those GOP luminaries was once and future Arizona Republican Senator, Jon Kyl. As The Hill reported on August 18, 2009, Senate Minority Whip Kyl was at the forefront of the opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its supposed “death panels.” Senator Kyl wasn’t content to denounce the ACA as “government-run health care in the country,” which would later be crowned PolitiFact’s 2010 Lie of the Year.
A House bill calls for voluntary consultations between a doctor and a family, although Kyl said the payment is compulsory if a doctor reports the counseling session.
“Because of public opposition to that provision, I think there's no question that it's going to be dropped,” he said. “I totally reject the notion that the only reason the American people oppose this is because somebody on the Republican side has deliberately spread misinformation about the plan.”
Now, if anyone knows about deliberately spreading disinformation, it’s Jon Kyl. After all, Kyl famously claimed I April 2011 that abortion services represent “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” After getting pilloried by Stephen Colbert over his 30-fold error, Senator Kyl’s office then issued what very well could be deemed the definitive description of that past generation of Republican politics:
“His remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”
As it turns out, Jon Kyl is quite experienced at regurgitating talking points not intended to be factual statements. Take, for example, the Ur myth of all Republican sound bite scams that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” The defining fraud of the Republican Party, in 2010 Kyl repackaged Arthur Laffer’s supply-side snake oil by declaring, “You should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” Then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rushed to Kyl’s defense, announcing that his fiscal fraud was in fact now Republican orthodoxy:
"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."
Kyl may have been expressing the view of virtually every Republican on that subject, but that didn’t make him right. The history of the Reagan and Bush tax cuts is that federal tax revenue was much lower than would have been the case without the tax cuts. Far from generating a whirlwind of new economic activity that would fuel substantial new tax receipts, the GOP tax cuts as predicted by Democrats (and most economists) produced oceans of red ink. It’s no wonder that Keith Hall, the GOP’s hand-picked director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CB0), added his name in 2015 to the long list of sentient creatures demolishing the Republicans’ tax cut mythology:
"No, the evidence is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. And our models that we're doing, our macroeconomic effects, show that."
Now, when Jon Kyl wasn’t lying about Planned Parenthood, Obamacare and tax cuts, he was crusading for an up-or-down vote for the President’s judicial nominees. Unless, that is, the President was a Democrat.
As you may recall, during George W. Bush’s tenure, Democrats blocked a handful of his picks for the federal bench. (Among them was a choice from the Bush Solicitor General’s office, Miguel Estrada, a candidate who came “with a scant paper trail but a reputation for taking extreme positions on important legal questions.) Back in 2005, Kyl was at the forefront of then-majority Senate Republicans threatening Democrats with the "nuclear option" rule change to bar future judicial filibusters of Bush appointees. At a November 28, 2005 campaign event for Kyl, President Bush praised his ally's fight to block the filibuster:
"I can't thank Jon Kyl enough for making sure the judges I nominate get a fair hearing and an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate."
When now-Justice Samuel Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, Kyl as usual parroted the trusted GOP sound bite:
"I look forward to a dignified hearing followed by a fair up-or-down vote on the Senate floor."
Jon Kyl remained an unmovable supporter of up-or-down votes on the Senate floor—until Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States in November 2008. Within in days of the vote, Kyl had learned to love the judicial filibuster:
Kyl, Arizona's junior senator, expects Obama to appoint judges in the mold of U.S Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Those justices take a liberal view on cases related to social, law and order and business issues, Kyl said.
"He believes in justices that have empathy," said Kyl, speaking at a Federalist Society meeting in Phoenix. The attorneys group promotes conservative legal principles.
Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.
On that, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate was true to his word. Kyl’s Republicans not only blocked Obama’s judicial picks at a record rate, but in an unprecedented move even refused to give Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing. It’s no wonder Donald Trump inherited double the number of vacancies on the nation’s district and appellate courts than Barack Obama found 8 years earlier.
Now, Jon Kyl is back to help Donald Trump ram his agenda of more tax cuts, Obamacare repeal and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court through a compliant, complicit GOP Congress. And just what has Arizona’s new junior Senator been doing since his departure in 2013? Why, working with Facebook to lead its quest for mythical bias against conservatives and lobbying for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.
All these developments must be hard to swallow for a truth-loving reporter like Chuck Todd. Last Monday, the Washington Post updated its on-going tally of Donald Trump’s lies to a total of 4,713 in 592 days. (By the New York Times’ count, “In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.”) That, combined with Trump’s threats to the media he claims is an “enemy of the people” and the on-going Fox News campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the press, apparently fueled Chuck Todd’s clarion call in the pages of The Atlantic. “A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets,” Todd warned, “Now, journalists need to speak up for their work.”
Instead of attacking rivals, or assailing critics—going negative, in the parlance of political campaigns—reporters need to showcase and defend our reporting. Every day, we need to do our job, check our facts, strive to be transparent, and say what we’re seeing. That’s what I’ve tried to do here. I’ve seen a nearly 50-year campaign to delegitimize the press, and I’m saying so. For years, I didn’t say a word about this publicly, and at times I even caught myself drawing false equivalencies because I was afraid of being labeled as biased. I know that stating the obvious will draw attacks, but I’ve also learned that the louder critics bark, the more they care about what’s being reported.
I’m not advocating for a more activist press in the political sense, but for a more aggressive one. That means having a lower tolerance for talking points, and a greater willingness to speak plain truths. It means not allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them. Access isn’t journalism’s holy grail—facts are. [Emphasis mine.]
Facts are indeed journalism’s holy grail. It’s just too bad Chuck Todd only had that epiphany in 2018 and not years earlier when it might have made a difference.
You only have to think back to the GOP’s days of rage in the summer of 2009 and its landslide in the 2010 midterms to see the triumph of delusion. None of the Republicans’ key talking points—"death panels”, “government takeover of health care”, “tax enough already,” “sticking it to seniors on Medicare”, “an $800 bill raid on Medicare”, “Obama made the economy worse”—was true. It wasn’t simply, as the New York Times asked in advance of the vote, “What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?” Indeed, what if the House GOP budget plan used the same $760 billion in Medicare savings from Obamacare to give tax breaks to the rich and the Republicans then campaigned by saying Democrats would kill the Medicare program the GOP itself intended to privatize? What if everything Republican voters said they knew about the Affordable Care Act was wrong? As NBC reported in August 2009:
In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.
The answer to all of those “what if” scenarios was the biggest midterm rout since Republicans whited out LBJ’s Great Society majority in 1966. And after seizing the House majority in 2012, the GOP wanted the Senate and the White House, too.
All of this transpired in large part precisely because, to repurpose Chuck Todd’s words, the political press had a very high tolerance for talking points and utterly lacked a willingness to speak plain truths. Todd and many of his media colleagues allowed themselves to be spun and gave guests and sources a platform to spin their readers and viewers. Stenography, after all, is easier than journalism. Presenting conflict is more entertaining than reporting the truth.
In September 2013, Chuck Todd himself provided a textbook case of the kind of media failure he now laments. When former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell lamented that Americans were misinformed about Obamacare, Todd protested:
"But more importantly, it's stuff that Republicans successfully messaged against it and they wouldn't have heard … they don't repeat other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say 'it's your fault in the media.' No, it's the President of the United States' fault for not selling it."
That same day, Todd took to Twitter to repeat his point:
Somebody decided to troll w/mislding headline: point I actually made was folks shouldn't expect media to do job WH has FAILED to do re: ACA
But after eight hours of absorbing a pounding online, he returned to Twitter to clarify his clarification:
I was NOT saying it isn't job of journos to call out lies, I said it was not job of media to sell WH's health care message, it is WH's job.
Of course, then as now there are three rules journalists should live by:
- Reporting objective truth IS THE JOB.
- That often means there are NOT TWO SIDES to a story.
- Reporters must stand firm on 1 and 2, regardless of the furious feedback (usually from raging right-wingers)
To put it another way, a politician’s message or claim isn’t the story; the lie is the story. And better late than never, even Chuck Todd has belatedly internalized this mission statement. Hosting Trump lackey Kellyanne Conway on January 22, 2017, Todd proclaimed, “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.” But that was true 10 or 20 years ago. It was true before Donald Trump ran for President of the United States and before CNN started adding fact-checking to its chyrons. Alternatives facts were falsehoods when Republicans were lying about “death panels” and Jon Kyl was lying about pretty much everything. It shouldn’t have taken Donald Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office for journalists to know job number one is to correct claims not intended to be factual statements. If they had “engaged” with the truth years ago, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be there now.