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And So it Begins: Normalizing the Election
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Posted on Nov 27, 2016
By Neal Gabler / Moyers & Co.
(http://billmoyers.com/story/media-normalizing-election/)
Surian Soosay (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ssoosay/) / CC-BY-2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
It didn't take a clairvoyant to predict that President-elect Donald Trump
would be almost instantly normalized by the press since he had already been
normalized by them when he was a candidate. After a 60 Minutes interview,
Lesley Stahl declared him "more subdued and serious." NBC's Andrea Mitchell
reported approvingly upon the transition as if proposed White House
counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men
with racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments. Mitchell's colleague
at NBC, Chuck Todd, chastised Sen. Harry Reid, after his eloquent and
impassioned attack on Trump, for being "too harsh." And so the media fell
into line. To which we can only invoke John Oliver's emphatic post-election
pronouncement: "THIS IS NOT NORMAL."
That, however, is only one of the media's derelictions. Far more serious is
their normalization not of Trump but of his voters. The former is typical
cowardice under threat of reactionary populism. The latter is an endorsement
of reactionary populism that may have far-reaching consequences for whether
the country can ever be reunited after having been torn asunder.
First Trump. The media impulse to render Trump ordinary, and their sudden
disinclination to criticize him is natural reflex. The press needs him as it
needs all presidents because the press need access. Trump was fairly
brilliant in branding the mainstream media as his opponents and, worse, a
group of snotty elitists who disdained not only him but also his supporters.
The general public doesn't much like the press to begin with and Trump
ramped up the hatred, so that, according to some reports
(http://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/watch-trump-fans-shout-nazi-era-lying-press
-insult-at-media-during-rally/) , a cluster of his supporters began using
the term "luginpresse," or "lying press," which is how the Nazis
characterized those organs that opposed Hitler. More, they began to
intimidate the press, verbally and even physically.
Under normal circumstances a candidate who incited his supporters to attack
the press might raise First Amendment issues. But these are not normal
circumstances, so Trump can target the press with impunity. Their only
recourse is to make peace, which is what they seemed to be doing when they
met with Trump this weekend, and peace means less rigorous coverage. The
meeting, according to accounts, didn't go well, but it didn't have to. Trump
bullied the press, and they stewed. We all know how this turns out. No
matter how much the media may protest
(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-personally-blasts-the-
press) and show false bravado, he will thrash them into submission. Always
remember: The news media are in the eyeball business, not the information
business. And Trump gets eyeballs.
Then there is the "Theodore H. White" syndrome. White was the longtime
journalist-cum-novelist who came up with the idea of "cinematizing" the 1960
election campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, going behind
the scenes, showing the candidates up close and personal, and driving the
electoral drama. He became the ultimate insider before there were insiders.
But with The Making of the President 1960, both a best-seller and a Pulitzer
Prize-winner, White not only changed the temper and tone of political
coverage; he created a quadrennial fairy tale
(http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/teddy-white-political-journa
lism-117090) . In White's telling, as reported in that first volume and
subsequent volumes, the American people somehow manage to make the right
decisions, choose the right men, which made the democratic process
infallible, even magical.
White would later express misgivings about what he had wrought, turning the
election into a soap opera. He seemed to have fewer misgivings about the
fairy tale aspect, but that has had as much influence. To decry Trump's
election now is not just to decry Trump. It is to question the wisdom of the
American people. And that, not many journalists - certainly no journalist
who is dependent upon the American people for his living - dare do. Trump is
ours, whether many of us like it or not. And he is the media's.
But while it is one thing to normalize Trump, it is quite another to
normalize the election that brought him to the presidency. Ordinarily, media
autopsies concentrate on what the losing candidate did wrong, and we
certainly got our share of those, even though this time, with a switch of a
few hundred thousand votes - a mere drop in the bucket - they would have
been talking about how Trump blew it and Hillary nailed it. However, the
incredible shock of Trump's election among the chattering classes led almost
instantly to mea culpas. The press had never understood flyover America.
They didn't feel the grievances of the white working class. They assumed
that the demographic trends would overwhelm the diminishing white vote. And
so on. Ron Brownstein had long ago written about two competing coalitions:
the restoration coalition of white rural America and the transformation
coalition of young and minority urban and suburban America. No one in the
press expected a restoration, which is what they got.
But notice the tone of the post-mortems. It isn't just that the media missed
the magnitude of the seething rage. It is that the seething rage was now
entirely justified. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is no apologist for the
right wing, God knows, but his analysis could have been written - and was
written - by dozens of surprised and chastened journalists. Taibbi,
rightfully in my estimation, chastised the mainstream media for its
insularity and condescension. They only spoke to one another, and they felt
vastly superior to the hoi polloi. As Taibbi and others have cast it, the
election was the hoi polloi's revenge against this elitism
(http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president-trump-how-america-g
ot-it-so-wrong-w449783) :
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we
could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That's as
opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for
our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get
driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
And:
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia
that has always run through American society. But his coalition also took
aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate
with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain
red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted
all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians,
Beltway activists, academics and especially media figures.
What Taibbi and others discovered is that the east coast and west coast
media elites should have known what was brewing. They should have known
about the festering resentments. They were so cocksure of themselves that
they wound up missing the big story.
All too true. But in saying that, the media also let the Trump supporters
off the hook. It wasn't their fault that they bought Trump's vicious
bigotry. It was Clinton's fault and the Democrats' fault and the
Republicans' fault and the media's fault and everybody else's fault. Give
the American people a break. That, in a nutshell, is the new conventional
wisdom.
You hear that wisdom everywhere now. I revere Jon Stewart, but in his brief
post-election reaction to Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning, he said two
things I think are demonstrably wrong. First: "I don't believe we are
fundamentally a different country today than we were two weeks ago or than
we were a month ago," and he cited anti-Semitic remarks by Nixon and LBJ to
make the point that anti-Semitism was alive and well in the White House long
before Trump. But the point - the fundamental difference - is that Nixon and
LBJ made those remarks closeted in the White House. They didn't make them
publicly to rouse the latent hatred in their fellow Americans. Trump has.
Second: "There is now this idea that anyone who voted for him [Trump] has to
be defined by the worst of his rhetoric." And he went on to say how he
"loved" some Trump supporters he knew, who weren't really racists. They were
just angry about their rising insurance premiums.
I doubt it. Unless you hold the terribly condescending view that Trump
voters - "low-information" voters, as they were sneeringly called - had no
idea what he actually said, they were not voting against insurance premiums
or other economic difficulties. They were voting against a world, including
one with rising insurance premiums, that they didn't want, didn't understand
and above all, didn't control. He is right in this: They were not all
reprehensible, any more than Clinton voters were all godly. Many of Trump's
folks just wanted to blow up the system and then see what happens. But, yes,
most of them were voting for racial and religious hegemony too. Let's not
pretend otherwise.
Similarly, when Tom Hanks recently pronounced that we Americans have
suffered through worse times than these, he wasn't acknowledging that, the
Civil War aside, which truly was the worst period in American history, our
other calamities were things that happened to us: war, natural disaster,
economic collapse. Trump is something we did to ourselves. He is a cancer
inside the body politic - a force that turned the body against the body. And
this time there is no single immunity system to save us.
We know where Stewart and Hanks are coming from, and it is a place paved
with good intentions. We are told that it does progressives no service to
demonize Trump voters. I whole-heartedly agree, just as it does
conservatives no service to demonize Obama and Clinton voters. But those are
political propositions - ways to build coalitions. Democrats won't win
elections unless they attempt to understand Trump voters' grievances and
unless they frame policies to address them. This is precisely what political
activists must do in the years ahead.
But the media are not in the politics business, and they are not activists.
They are supposedly in the information business, though many of us would say
they are really in the entertainment business. And I would suggest that
having foresworn it for far too long, they should now also be in the
morality business. That's because alongside but separate from the political
proposition, there is also a moral proposition for both the public and the
press. As a moral proposition, you can't get all teary-eyed over Trump
voters who feel disrespected. You can't excuse the racism, misogyny,
nativism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because we think these all-white
voters have legitimate gripes against elites or because they haven't enjoyed
the economic success they feel they deserve. With apologies to Jon Stewart,
these do not justify the worst effusions of human nature. Every fascist and
proto-fascist movement arose from disgruntled citizens who felt
dispossessed, disillusioned and disrespected. You can read Daniel
Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html) for evidence. Of
course, the media must attempt to understand and explain. That is part of
their job. But they must not legitimize the cruelty, and they must not
normalize this election, which is precisely what they are doing. They must
treat it as the aberration it is: an unprecedented and, one hopes, singular
moment when angry white Americans loosed their ugliness and turned on their
fellow Americans.
And so the real question for the media as Trump assumes the presidency is
this: Can the media grow a conscience? Or: Can the media be our conscience?
This is not a role they have played or appear to feel comfortable playing.
They don't take sides; they work in equivalencies. But the media owe it to
America to hold Trump, the Republicans the Democrats, and the rest of us to
the highest moral standards. They owe it to the country to call out the
bigotry. This is not strictly speaking politics, and it isn't sociology. It
is something much more, and, I think, much more valuable. It is morality,
and it isn't as complicated as some would have you believe. Just this:
Always report the truth. Promote the good. Condemn the bad. And don't ever
normalize or excuse the worst in us.
This is not normal.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at The
Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is
currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
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