If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.
Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial next week, and we’ll be reminded once again of the profoundly destructive lies that the network’s carnival barkers sold. Hour after hour, night after night, they peddled Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. And they knew or at least suspected that they were wrong, to go by documents already released during the legal proceedings.
In this much, however, Fox’s fabulists were right: If they didn’t hawk Trump’s hooey, many of their viewers would just move on to a circus that did. The documents also show that they genuinely believed that. It’s no justification for their laundering of his conspiracy theories — they surely wouldn’t have lost all their audience, and they could have tried to chip away at the dangerous delusions of the many viewers who remained. That they chose differently is a betrayal of journalistic principle and a damning indictment of them. But it says something troubling about the rest of us, too.
Thanks to the sprawling real estate of cable television and the infinite expanse of the internet, we live in an age of so many information options, so many “news” purveyors, that we have an unprecedented ability to search out the one or ones that tell us precisely what we want to hear, for whatever reason we want to hear it. We needn’t reckon with the truth. We can shop for it instead.
And many of us — maybe even most of us — do. That’s one of the morals of Dominion’s suit, correctly called “seismic” by my Times colleague Jim Rutenberg in his excellent and essential recent article about Fox News’s descent down the rabbit hole. Rutenberg tells the tale of that network’s spectacularly cynical dealings with its particular audience. But a larger story hovers over it, one about every audience’s relationship with reality today.
The unscrupulous behavior of Tucker Carlson and his fellow entertainers (let’s call them what they really are) at Fox Phantasmagoria (let’s call it what it really is) reflects the strange new wonderland we inhabit, in which diverging continents of facts — or of recklessly harvested factoids and fictions — leave us without the common ground we need for a sane and civil society.
Rutenberg chronicles the concern of senior Fox officials — and of Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corporation — not to alienate their audience, even if that meant diluting or disregarding an accurate version of events. Following Election Day 2020, Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, grew worried about competing outlets that wholly bought into Trump’s bogus claims. “One of them, Newsmax, was moving up in the ratings while refusing to call Biden the winner,” Rutenberg writes, adding that when The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch owns, reported that allies of Trump’s might invest in Newsmax to help it pull closer to Fox, “Murdoch alerted Scott to the piece. Fox would have to play this just right, he said in an email.” He warned that it was important not to inflame Trump.
Carlson wrote to a colleague: “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
So Carlson played along with Trump, even while admitting in a text message to an acquaintance “I hate him passionately” and privately expressing disgust and disbelief — “It’s insane,” he texted Laura Ingraham — about the fantastical accusations coming from Team Trump.
Carlson sought to undermine those on the network who didn’t fall in line. After the reporter Jacqui Heinrich cast doubt on what Trump and his enablers were saying, Carlson texted Ingraham and Sean Hannity: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of viewers who relied on Carlson & Co. labeled themselves Republicans or said they leaned that way. That lopsidedness isn’t unique: The same survey found that 95 percent of viewers who relied on MSNBC belonged to or sympathized with the Democratic camp. While there’s absolutely no equivalence between the two networks, there’s also no doubt that both consider the interests and inclinations of their loyalists when they’re appointing their hosts, inviting their guests, choosing their stories, calibrating their tones. They are, to varying degrees, giving people what they want. They’re businesses, after all. So is The Times, whose readers are hardly a perfectly heterogeneous snapshot of America.
And that compels customers who care about getting a full and nuanced picture not to buy from just one merchant, not in the media marketplace of this moment. We can’t change or redeem the Murdochs and the Carlsons of the world — such perversions of ambition, greed and vanity will always be with us. But we can be better, smarter, more keen-eyed and more open-minded ourselves. We can refuse to confirm and reward their assessments of us.
Words Worth Sidelining
Perhaps no subspecies of journalist gravitates toward jargon with the frequency and zest of the political journalist, who can’t resist cant. I noted as much in a newsletter last October, when I pleaded for the retirement of “deep dive,” “wake-up call” and “under the bus,” among other annoyances, and said that I’d probably produce at least one follow-up glossary of similarly exhausted phrases. So here’s another batch. May we please, please say goodbye to:
Clown car. That’s the favored term for any campaign or political operation of transcendent incompetence or inanity — which is to say, many campaigns and political operations. I smiled the first time I spotted this reference. And the hundredth. No more. I just did a “Donald Trump” “clown car” search on Google, which returned more than 45,000 results. That’s appropriate for the bozo in question but a failure of originality nonetheless.
Dumpster fire. A clown car in flames — or any political debacle. At this point, so many developments have been deemed dumpster fires that the designation has burned itself out. It’s an ember of its former blaze.
Walk and chew gum at the same time. Pundits love, love, love this expression to convey how easy it should be for a politician to accomplish two goals at once. Mid-perambulation mastication is indeed multitasking at its most mundane; the metaphor was surely as invigorating as a just-unwrapped stick of wintergreen Trident once upon a toothy time. But it lacks all flavor now. Time to spit it out.
Drank the Kool-Aid. How this reference to the mass suicide of hundreds of Jim Jones’s followers became an all-purpose knock on what any excessively credulous politician or overly obedient voter has done is beyond me.
That dog won’t hunt. Because it’s a Shih Tzu? A bichon frise?
Put on your big-boy pants. Pundits tell timid, oversensitive politicians to do this and then wonder why so many Americans find us snotty. That’s the epitome of immaturity.
Thanks to Karen Simonsen of Sisters, Ore., Sheri Sidwell of Alton, Ill., and Bill Blackburn of Austin, Tex., among others, for suggesting one or more of the above. “Words Worth Sidelining” is a recurring newsletter feature.
For the Love of Sentences
The Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus was pithy and pointed in her take on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lavish maritime getaways with a billionaire Republican donor: “Beware new friends bearing yachts.” (Thanks to Tom Morman of Leipsic, Ohio, and Bonnie Ross of Sarasota, Fla., for nominating this.)
Also in The Post, Ron Charles examined an alliteratively named publisher of “pro-God” children’s stories: “The Brave Books website says, ‘It take courage to stand up for the truth.’ It take grammar, too, but God works in mysterious ways.” (Pam Gates, Rockville, Md., and Cynthia Bazinet, Upper Port La Tour, Nova Scotia)
And David Von Drehle took issue with a right-wing Texas jurist’s ruling to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone, asserting that unelected judges “should be as modest and unassuming as a crossing guard in a Mennonite village where all the horses are old and footsore.” (Richard Rampell, Palm Beach, Fla., and Bobbie Steinhart, Berkeley, Calif., among others)
In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Tex., rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.” (Karen Hughes, Tumwater, Wash., and Colleen Kelly, Manhattan)
In The New York Times, Jesse Green had advice for theatergoers filing into a new Broadway production: “Bring earplugs. Not just because the songs in ‘Bad Cinderella,’ the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility. For that matter, bring eye plugs: The sets and costumes are as loud as the songs. If there were such a thing as soul plugs, I’d recommend them as well.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
Also in The Times, John McWhorter noted the existence, in the dictionary, of fussy and archaic terms that have fallen far from use and survive “more as puckish abstractions than actual words. They remind me of the 32-inch-waist herringbone pants from the 1980s that I have never been able to bring myself to get rid of, along with my compass and my protractor.” (Fred Jacobs, Queens, N.Y.)
And James Poniewozik described the look and feel of the Manhattan courthouse in which Trump was arraigned: “The scene was gray, humdrum, municipal, more ‘Night Court’ than Supreme Court. You could practically smell the vending-machine coffee.” (Gil Ghitelman, Westport, Conn., and Adam Eisenstat, Pittsburgh)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Reading and Doing
Gretchen Rubin’s new book begins with a scene that had special resonance for me: She visits the eye doctor, who gives her a bit of troubling news that prompts her to take a fresh, different look at the world around her. “In an instant,” she writes, “all my senses seemed to sharpen. It was as if every knob in my brain had suddenly been dialed to its maximum setting of awareness.” Her story from that point on is much different from mine, but it’s characterized by a similar impulse to summon wonder and gratitude, and it showcases her trademark wisdom about making the most of our days. The book, “Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World,” will be available Tuesday.
My Times colleague Kate Zernike’s new book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” is a perfect marriage of compelling material and formidable journalist. In a review in The Times, the “Lessons in Chemistry” author Bonnie Garmus called “The Exceptions,” which was published in late February, “excellent and infuriating,” the latter adjective referring to the injustices Kate chronicles.
I’m a big admirer of the writing that Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last do for The Bulwark, so when they asked me to join them last week on their podcast, “The Next Level,” I was delighted. (Sarah Longwell is their partner in the podcast but wasn’t around for our conversation.) We talked about politics, higher education and aging. Also, I guess, personal hygiene and self-indulgence? They titled the episode “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths,” an intriguing allusion to some bit of banter that escapes my memory. You can find “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths” (I just had to repeat it) here.
On a Personal Note
I relished many of the smart, witty articles about Gwyneth Paltrow’s days in court, but I can’t say whether the authors’ descriptions of her couture and her hauteur jibed with my impressions. I never watched so much as a minute of the proceedings.
I saw precisely one short snippet of Alex Murdaugh’s testimony en route to his murder conviction, but that was that. I otherwise sated myself with written accounts of his trial.
And while I use links in online articles and on social media to sample politicians’ speeches and public appearances, I don’t see nearly as much of Ron DeSantis or Kyrsten Sinema as a newscast or political talk show would air. That’s because there are few newscasts and political talk shows in my life.
Am I guilty of grave professional dereliction? I wonder. I worry. Can I (or anyone else) read the culture intelligently without closely monitoring television, which is an important portal into it, a principal mirror of it and the medium that influences many Americans’ thinking and behavior like no other? Quite possibly not.
But I’d like to believe that less television can equal more insight. That pulling back and tuning out — to a degree — are constructive.
I’m singling out television, but I’m really speaking about something broader. I’m referring to a kind of indiscriminately rapt, instantly reactive attention to the scandal of the week, the melodrama of the day, the fascination of the hour. Many of those developments and details are ephemeral, disposable — and that’s not clear if you’re twitchily tracking them in real time. The ones with real consequences reach us in ways beyond the breathless exclamations on air. They also reach us multiple times, their repetition and endurance a measure of their import.
Besides, is hyper-vigilance any way to live? Is it sustainable? Not for me, not as I get older, not in this addled era of ours.
To examine the hurly-burly of our current world from a certain distance, with a certain detachment, is to see things in more accurate proportion, with better perspective — or at least I can make that argument. I think I buy it.
But I acknowledge another possibility: I’m just doing what I must to stay several steps ahead of utter exhaustion and thorough disillusionment. That’s reason enough.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
