Sliding into the 1930s
The Silent Generation generally avoided speaking directly about anything deemed uncomfortable in polite society. TV’s Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds, fergawdsakes. It was a thing when Lucille Ball was “expecting” (never pregnant) and they wrote it into the series. One of my old roommates had been a junkie as a teen before I knew him in college. My My Silent Generation mother was distressed that I seemed to know people with “problems.”
It’s like a throwback to the 1950s that today the news media has a problem openly discussing “problems.”
Digby on Sunday referenced the Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn dealing plainly with uncomfortable truths about the immediate past president. Jay Rosen took note as well.
Rosen has been particularly vocal about reporting that dances around the objective facts.
Michael Tomasky takes on the double standard the news uses in covering the immediate past president, citing the response to Trump posting an image of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck:
The Biden campaign issued a denunciation, and Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, always handy with hall-of-mirrors projection, snapped back: “Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
Take note of two points. First, the way Cheung equates “Democrats and crazed lunatics” with Trump; that is, if it’s okay for “crazed lunatics” to post irresponsible things about Trump, then it’s fine for Trump himself—the standard bearer of the Republican Party to hold the most powerful office in the world—to post irresponsible things about Biden.
Bothsidesism normalizes MAGA deviancy:
This is a long-standing right-wing sleight of hand—to take things said by random angry liberals on social media and prattle on as if “the Democrat Party” said them. When Barack Obama was president, we endured years of Republicans—in Congress and state legislatures, along with numerous state party officials—making watermelon jokes and being slippery about whether Obama was born in America. It happened incessantly. And then, every so often, a few online liberals would get some nasty and perhaps tasteless meme about Mitch McConnell trending, which would give Republicans the excuse to say, “Aha, see? Both sides do it!”
Republicans have gotten away with this for ages. The mainstream media has come to expect and tolerate this state of affairs for two reasons. It’s simple human nature: If a parent has a well-behaved kid and an unruly kid, the parent naturally over time expects more of the former and lowers the bar for the latter. And once something has happened a thousand times, it isn’t really news anymore.
But there’s more to this than bothsidesism and capitalist news enterprises soft-peddling MAGA deviancy to keep from losing readership.
The water in this pot is getting hotter while the press ignores it. Anat Shenker-Osorio remarked on NBC’s Kristin Welker’s euphemistically chalking up Trump attacking a judge’s family to us being a “deeply divided nation.”
“We aren’t merely unwitting frogs in the boiling water, the forecasters keep assuring us it’s merely a pleasant little hot tub,” Shenker-Osorio tweets.
“This whole, the news is what the public thinks the news is, isn’t merely an abdication of responsibility. It’s a pre-capitulation to fascism,” she continues.
I told my roommate about my mother generically referring to uncomfortable topics as problems. He smiled, grew animated, and spoke wildly with his hands.
“Problems? Problems? The guy’s a junkie! He has a two-bag-a-day habit! You could say he has problems!”
Our problem is a mainstream press that treats budding fascism as the 1950s treated Lucy’s pregnancy.
Quinn wrote:
Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s. Maybe the collapse of government in the hands of a madman is inevitable, given how the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans, as it was in 1930s Germany.
I hope not.
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