"The strategy is obvious for anyone watching," tweeted Joe Lockhart, former press secretary in the Bill Clinton White House. "Trump and his enablers will manufacture conspiracy theories and lie from now until the end. We know they are, the press knows they are and, and this is the sad part, it has a reasonable chance of succeeding. Something wrong w/system."
Indeed, there's no mystery about what's going on here. The hand Giuliani's playing in the Ukraine scandal is extremely weak, and everyone at the table knows it. He's practically waving his awful cards around in the air. And yet he's ushered into virtually every television news studio in the country, which is bad for news consumers. (On ABC's This Week, Giuliani claimed that George Soros and Hillary Clinton colluded with Ukraine’s government to try to steal the 2016 election … or something.)
"You can try to make things clear for viewers and inform the public. Or you can interview Giuliani. You cannot do both," noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. "Everyone in TV news knows this. And they choose. The confusion he spreads is strategic for him and a defeat for them, for it is impossible to resolve on air."
This is all part of the larger challenge that the Beltway press has been facing—and failing at—for the past two years: How do you deal with a president, an administration, and a Republican Party that now lie about everything? They don't spin. Instead, they lie without pause and without apology. Up until the moment Trump appeared on the political scene in the summer of 2015, the press' response to wholesale lying from politicians was obvious and straightforward: The lies got called out, without fear or favor. But for Trump, the press decided to pull its punches.
Nervous about allegations of "liberal media bias" and afraid of being the target of Trump's media-hating wrath, journalists pretend they can't tell if Trump is lying. And then when he obviously is, the press flips through the thesaurus in hopes of not having to call Trump's lies "lies." (So many "falsehoods" … ) Time and again, reporters and their editors, opting for clunky euphemisms, have failed to summon the nerve required to accurately label Trump’s lies as what they are.
And that leads us to the Giuliani dilemma. To borrow the famous Mary McCarthy quote, everything Giuliani says is a lie, including "and" and "the." There's simply no standard for truth in journalism that Giuliani meets.
Keep in mind, Giuliani made his fact-free Sunday television appearances regarding Biden and Ukraine the same day that the Los Angeles Times became the latest news organization to torpedo the corruption claims against Biden. "Ukraine’s former top law enforcement official says he repeatedly rebuffed President Trump’s personal lawyer’s demands to investigate Joe Biden and his son, insisting he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that he could pursue despite Trump’s allegations," the paper reported.
Think about it. Why are news organizations that have already thoroughly debunked the Biden/Ukraine smear hosting Republicans like Giuliani and letting them disseminate the Biden/Ukraine smear? Do you think back in 2001 and 2002, if some Democratic members of Congress had pushed the outrageous conspiracy theory that President George W. Bush had known about the 9/11 terror attacks ahead of time and had refused to stop them, that those members would be ushered onto Meet the Press and Face the Nation? Me neither.
It's time for the press to fix its Rudy problem.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
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