The MSM belatedly discovers their own role in the right-wing political propaganda machine
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd is going to do a show about GOP disinformation. Seriously
He gave an interview with Rolling Stone in which he admitted to being “naive” because he didn’t really understand until recently that they were doing this.
Welcome to reality, better late than never, I guess. And it is very, very late.
Todd spent years appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s show and recommended him for a perch on MSNBC as late as 2016 and Hewitt has always been a right wing propagandist. Anyone who listened should have been able to see that. But like so many in the political media establishment seemingly did not recognize that Hewitt was a political operative not an honest broker. He always was. And by appearing with him and promoting him Todd was helping Hewitt pass along disinformation. It wasn’t just Todd, of course. There was a time not too long ago when Rush Limbaugh himself was touted as an honest political commentator not part of a political communications operation.
Anyway, Jay Rosen had some thoughts on this. Here’s an excerpt:
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.
Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)
You cannot call that an oversight. It’s a strategic blindness that he superintended. By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.
In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.
That’s malpractice. Chuck Todd called it naiveté in order to minimize the error. This we cannot allow.
If you click over to Rosen’s piece, you’ll see that he takes Todd to task for each of his statements in the interview and shows why and how he missed all the signs. It’s not a pretty picture.
I’m reluctant to be too hard on Todd because baby steps are important. If he has belatedly recognized that he’s been played for years and years by a professional political operation that traffics in lies, disinformation and propaganda, that’s to the good. It’s an important step.
The question, of course, is if he and others are able to break out of the “both sides” “fair and balanced” pattern that has misled the public for years and brought us to this place.
The evidence is in that famous word cloud at the top of the page.
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