Media critic Eric Boehlert has a new newsletter that everyone should sign up for right away. It’s called Pressrun and it’s very good.
This piece takes on the press for its reaction to the DOJ scandal, which really should be a turning point in the coverage of the Trump administration. We’re in J. Edgar Hoover territory.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. I’ll just excerpt this:
The sub-headline for a New York Times article on the Vindman controversy announced that Trump’s move represented, “one sign of how determined the president is to even the scales after his impeachment.” Even the scales, what?? That suggests the “scales” were ever tipped against him. The Nation’s Joan Walsh suggested a more accurate headline for the Times story: “Trump’s reign of lawlessness enters new stage.”
But that exactly the type of bold, factual language the Beltway press doesn’t use in its news coverage of Trump, and specifically the context about authoritarian lawlessness. Indeed, most American journalists have no experience covering creeping authoritarianism.
We have a POTUS dictating sentencing recommendations in regards to a jury trial that involved his political ally convicted on charges of obstructing justice, making false statements and witness tampering in a case connected to the president’s election, and we’re going with “unusual” and “suspicious? (Dan Froomkin rounded up some examples of more admirable, forceful coverage this week, here.)
Keep in mind that this is the same press corps that treated as a Very Big Deal when Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch exchanged greetings on an airport tarmac during the 2016 campaign. The media claimed it all looked bad considering the DOJ was investigated Hillary Clinton’s emails at the time. Today, Trump basically ordered the DOJ to help protect his felonious associate and the news media reaches for “unusual.”
The media is covering this. But there is a sense that it’s just “business as usual for the Trump administration” which isn’t the case. Barr’s behavior is actually a dramatic escalation which is so egregious that it’s actually making the GOP legal community queasy. And that’s not easy.
Update:
By the way, in case you thought the House Democrats were going to help the press frame this by holding hearings, I wouldn’t count on it. They are making it clear that they have done their duty and now they’re going to finally be able to do what they have always wanted to do which is campaign against him as a regular, middle of the road Republican on the economy and health care.
I don’t know if they’ve read the latest polling on the economy but it might not be the magic bullet they think it is:
Health care may be their only hope — if the Democrats can stop themselves from ripping each other to shreds before November.