Steve Bannon, talking to Michael Lewis (Bloomberg opinion February 9, 2018), “The Democrats don’t matter,” he had said to me over our lunch. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
The following twitter thread aptly points out why the obsessively negative coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal feels so relentless and overwhelming. It’s because they are focused on it almost exclusively and we’re not used to it. And that’s in spite of the fact that there is a boatload of huge news out there from COVID and school opening, Hurricane Ida and the raging wildfire about to swallow Lake Tahoe in California among a dozen other important stories.
But none of those stories speak to a Biden screw up which is their current orientation so none of it is getting even a small portion of the coverage that the Afghanistan story is getting. And it would probably even be understandable if the coverage was at all meaningful but it isn’t. It’s mostly just pointing and screaming, ‘Look!!!” over and over again.
Thinking about this thread compared to what the last 10 days of coverage has looked like for Biden.
If you need any evidence that the Steve Bannon flood the zone method was pretty effective at distracting from Trump’s most egregious failures, the coverage of his betrayal of the Kurds is a good case study.
The US had been in Iraq and Syria almost as long as it was in Afghanistan. But the press viewed the abrupt pull out from Syria as just another story, despite the cynical betrayal of the Kurdish allies and the geopolitical consequences of the odd relationship between Trump and Turkish president Erdogan that precipitated it. It was just one of many stories about Trump’s incompetence. “Flooding the zone” worked quite well for Trump. There was so much wrong that he got away with all of it.