Why Should Republicans Have All The Fun?
Last Sunday, Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet The Press was called out and soundly criticized for rehashing a rather flawed analysis that he expressed several times during Barack Obama’s presidency and presented as a major theme of his 2014 book about the nation’s first black president, curiously titled The Stranger. Namely, that the beloved president “promised to bring the country together” and he failed. Apparently, Todd just can’t seem to let this go. He seems to frame this as a personal betrayal. However, then and now he ignores reality and this caused a firestorm of criticism:
Shashana tweeted:
Beto O’Rourke provided a little history while Sarah Reese Jones set the record straight:
And Karen Bethany made it plain:
Todd is not new to being soundly criticized for making what many perceive as troublesome comments. In late September 2013, he made a controversial statement that appeared to betray the true resolve of America’s corporate news cartels, during a deplorable year when legacy media seemed to abandon its duty to factually inform the public and simply catered to whatever false narrative was neatly packaged and ready to go. Todd, was called out for repeating, but never vetting, outrageous Republican talking points about the Affordable Care Act ---- when clearly, he knew better. His response was priceless:
What I always love is when people say, ‘Well, it’s you folks’ fault in the media for putting this stuff (fake news) out.” ---- No! he said, It’s the President of the United States fault for not selling it.
This created an ethical firestorm and even provoked a petition launched against him online. In The Daily Kos Martian Expatriate called him out:
[You] view your role as to be a sort of carnival barker, inviting various idiots to say whatever form of crazy they like…
Nevertheless, the veteran White House correspondent handled it all with his own unique sense of style ---- he said nothing. Of course, this type of arrogance from a major newsmaker (producers and anchors, along with pundits and commentators who generally play along) is not new, nor is it rare. Still, in 2013 arrogance and fake news reigned supreme and Todd’s behavior made it quite clear that he was unperturbed by public scrutiny. It was as if he was arrogantly asserting to the nation at large:
We are the newsmakers.
We process and manufacture “the news”.
We are the supreme arbiters of what is to be considered “newsworthy”.
We do not exist as the honorable fourth estate.
We are gamemakers in an arena designed for the production of entertainment and nothing more.
In other words, Todd was saying:
“Welcome to the Hunger Games.
And, may the odds be ever in your favor!”
With the memory of this vaudevillian era of news-making fresh in mind, it is not hard to imagine how Donald Trump would try to take advantage of lingering public sentiment in order to label any coverage about him that he does not like “fake news”
Years later, in a rare moment of candor as a guest host on Meet The Press, Todd returned to the same grievance and let his true feelings be known. He attacked President Obama by pulling out an all too common cowardly Straw-Man argument, rhetorically stomping his feet like a juvenile, while trying to put the president in a box, once again accusing him of not ---- “bringing the county together and changing Washington ---- as he promised!” Even as he had first-hand knowledge of how the president’s detractors continued spitting out a cesspool of blatant racism and rejection no matter the overture or how often the president tried to engage them. Todd spoke as if in true emotional distress over the president. He seemed completely tone deaf to the enormous political backlash that had gripped the nation in the wake of the election of a black man to the Presidency of the United States. While no longer concerned with journalistic ethics, he was ready to play the role of poster child for the Angry White Male. All of a sudden, the collective childishness of Obama’s detractors rushed to the surface and was embodied in the person of a veteran reporter ---- somehow blaming the victim for the crime.
Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones called out the GOP:
Republicans greeted Obama's inauguration with an active plan of maximal obstruction of everything he did, regardless of what it was or how necessary it might be in the face of an epic economic collapse. No other party in recent history has done that. It's a new thing under the sun.
Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone called them out as well:
This president has had to take so much gruff from the right wing – which has ludicrously painted him as a foreign-born Marxist and deemed him responsible for everything from McKinney to Sandy Hook to Ebola to the Baltimore riots to the (now sooner than expected) Rapture – that the press never got to scratch the Henry V myth making itch with his administration.
Todd was engaging in ‘bass-akward’ thinking to say the least. By ignoring the journalistic tenets of his job ---- indeed by re-defining it towards the black president, Todd placed himself in the role of a political operative with no sure ties in a presidential campaign that for him never ended. We were watching the Hunger Games and he was Seneca Crane, the Gamemaker. One year later, Todd became the twelfth permanent host of NBC’s 67-year-old starship Sunday morning program Meet The Press.
It is an ominous sign of journalistic decay when the show best known for communicating rigorous journalism on Sunday Morning, falls into the hands of a person that sees himself as little more than the Gamemaker of a vaudevillian opera. NBC had traded down from rigorous journalism to magic walls where Todd could decipher the latest polls back of a “way-cool” James Bond-like score. The gamemakers had taken over the newsroom ---- journalism be damned! And this led to what remained throughout Obama’s presidency as a relentless retinue of deceitful rhetoric that was simply designed to scramble the president’s words, however real or imagined and put them back into his mouth so that someone else ---- probably on Fox News, could move his lips for him. In other words, as Claude McKay writes in his 1922 poem To Make A Poet Black, it became an endless campaign …. “to make a poet black and bid him sing!” The proliferation of this kind of fake news, which largely went unchecked during Obama’s presidency, earned it the nickname, ‘Todd-speak!’
During the second Iraq war, Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011), following in the footsteps off his father, Bush the Younger took rhetorical tricknology to another level with Bush-speak. With Bush-speak you simply say anything you want over and over again and somehow it is supposed to magically become real. Of course, Donald Trump engages in Bush-speak all the time (“There was no collusion” ---- “There was no collusion” ---- “There was no collusion”). However, Trump is a master of mis-direction (Bob Muller was not charged with finding collusion because collusion has no legal definition) and he is adept at something that is perhaps even more sinister, gaslighting. In fact, more than anything else gaslighting appears to be at the heart of the Trump Doctrine.
Nevertheless, Todd-speak is Bush-speak on steroids, because it is primarily newsmaker duplicity. Here a dramatic controversy is created out of thin air and then a rhetorical base is developed around it, which like Bush-speak, is repeated over and over and over again. While Trump’s gaslighting tries to convince you not to believe your lying eyes, Todd-speak is the creation of a lie out of thin air. It is what David Boorstin was referring to more than fifty years ago when he ominously predicted that mass media would ultimately create pseudo-events. As long as the vast majority of gamemakers in the newsroom quietly agree not to challenge its veracity, processed as Bush-speak, it will be rehashed by anchors and pundits over and over again. And, this is what makes is so dangerous. When journalism dies and silence breeds complicity, what we are left with is ‘Todd-speak’.
One day in November of 2015, Chuck Todd’s brand of journalism without journalism was put on remarkable display. On his new now daily Meet The Press program a bizarre example of willful blindness occurred. It went something like this: First, in one segment Todd showed a montage of President Obama at a recent press conference spelling out his strategy in Syria to a press pool over and over to the point of exasperation, which drove the message home that the president did indeed have a concrete strategy in Syria. Then, in the next segment, Todd interviewed Senator Inhofe (R-OK) who told him, “The President does not have a strategy. If he does have a strategy he has not shared it with us!” For a moment, it seemed as if the MSNBC Political Director might do the journalistic thing and simply ask Inhofe “Uh, excuse me sir, did you not see the last segment?” as the senator’s response seemed totally oblivious to what had just preceded him on the program. But, Todd asked him instead. “You don’t know what his strategy is?” “No, Inhofe said, I don’t know”. “So, he hasn’t talked about his strategy?” Todd concluded. When it came to President Obama, Todd often appeared disinterested in real journalism.
Todd-speak is powerful. It spreads throughout the airwaves like a malicious virus. And if Democrats are to be successful in the coming campaign, Todd-speak must be confronted and destroyed wherever it rears its ugly head.
Today the most glaring example of Todd-speak in action can be found in the portrayal of the nation’s economy, not just by Trump and the Trump Administration, but by newsmakers as well. Two things are commonly true about how newsmakers portray the economy. The first is that no matter what has come before him, a president is said to “own” the national economy from the moment they take the oath of office (which is unrealistic) until the end of their administration. The other is that consumer confidence is reflected to a large extent by how the economic outlook is processed and portrayed in the news.
After the failed presidency of Bush the Younger, who had been left with a great economy, only to explode the deficit (as did Reagan), turn a multi-billion-dollar surplus into a three trillion-dollar debt and crash the economy, by the time Donald Trump took office President Obama had already led the nation out of the worst recession (which was actually a depression) since the Great Depression. He cut the deficit by almost three-fourths of what it was when he took office. He saved the auto industry, created a new green economy and cured America’s addiction to foreign oil. Obama brought America to full employment during an unprecedented 79 months of uninterrupted growth, cutting unemployment from a high of 10.1% to 4.9% before Donald Trump took office. This was in spite of the fact that Republicans, who had just crashed the economy, refused to help him fix it and in fact took extraordinary steps to impede its recovery.
Nonetheless, even as he was exploding the deficit that his predecessor had painstakingly lowered and increasing the debt by two trillion dollars within his first two years in office, Donald Trump was cleaver enough to claim Obama’s economic success as his own. Within six months, he was claiming that he had brought black unemployment to its “lowest point in history”. It is a mantra repeated throughout his administration over and over again.
In May of 2018 Trump responded to Jay Z’s criticism of his presidency by claiming responsibly for single-handedly bringing black unemployment to its “lowest rate in history” after little more than a year in office. Trump posted on Twitter:
Of course, this is preposterous. But, in an age when the newsroom is little more than a vaudevillian stage and the gamemakers have taken over the anchor chair, nonsense has agency. The chart below from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the historic reality:
As you can see, the black unemployment rate had fallen under Obama from a high of 16.5% in January of 2010 at the height of the Great Recession to its current low of 6.8%. Trump is responsible for a less than 1% drop in the black unemployment rate, which is a product of the continued momentum of the Obama recovery. Still however, the black unemployment rate remains as it has historically been, nearly twice the rate of white unemployment and this is the real issue. Progress in lowering the rate of black unemployment lies in closing that gap. It lies in closing the gap in wage growth and it lies in closing the gap in workforce participation. These facts are almost universally ignored in the news coverage. They are seldom part of the conversation. Todd-speak is the sin of omission.