CHALLENGED: Are we the people up to the challenge?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

Democracy dies in these ways:  Labor Day has come and gone. In this election year, we the people now face a major challenge—a major challenge we'll continue to face going forward, in the years ahead.

Our major party nominees also face challenges as the election approaches. Beyond that, challenges now confront an array of our major news orgs.

Such challenges confront the Fox News Channel, but also the New York Times. But most of all, the challenges confront the people—us.

Let's steal a page from Theodore White by adapting the way he opens his famous book, The Making of the President 1960. Let's take a look at some of the ways our nation's public discourse was functioning as the Labor Day weekend proceeded.

We'll start with this past weekend's edition of Fox News Sunday. The weekly program is one of several on the Fox News Channel which do, in fact, approximate "fairness and balance."

As always, Shannon Bream sat in the anchor chair—and she isn't a propagandist. In the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, this was the composition of her Sunday panel:

Fox News Sunday, Sunday panel, 9/1/24
Matt Gorman: Former senior adviser to Senator Tim Scott
Marie Harf: Former State Department spokesperson (Obama administration, 2013-2015)
Jeff Mason: White House correspondent, Reuters
Roger Zakheim: Director, The Ronald Reagan Institute

Two Republicans and one Democrat, along with one mainstream journalist. Under current arrangements, that counts as basically fair. 

Bream conducted a sane if anodyne discussion of the upcoming election. So it went this past weekend on Fox News Sunday, with Labor Day coming up fast. 

On NBC's Meet the Press, the corresponding panel also featured commentators from both major political tribes. Elsewhere, journalistic procedures were perhaps somewhat different. 

On Saturday and Sunday nights, the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin devoted his regular hour-long program to an extended interview with one lone guest—with Candidate Donald J. Trump. 

Each of the programs ran a full hour. But was Levin really conducting an "interview" as he spoke with Trump?

Plainly, Levin is an undisguised conservative, as is his perfect right. That said, he has also sometimes been described as "The Man Who Screams."

Levin may not always be "fair and balanced" on his Fox News Channel program. Fairly or otherwise, his Wikipedia profile says such things as this:

Mark Levin

Mark Reed Levin is an American broadcast news analyst, columnist, lawyer, political commentator, radio personality, and writer. He is the host of syndicated radio show The Mark Levin Show, as well as Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News....Since 2015, Levin has been editor-in-chief of the Conservative Review and is known for his incendiary commentary.

He has been described as "right-wing" by The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and Politico. He is known for his strident criticisms of Democrats and encouragement of primary challenges to congressional Republicans that he considers to be "Republican In Name Only" (RINO). He endorsed Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries and declared himself "Never Trump," but reluctantly endorsed Donald Trump after he won the Republican nomination. Since the start of the Trump presidency, Levin's commentary has become pro-Trump.

[...]

A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of "outrage." The study looked at 10 prominent radio and television programs known for incendiary discourse on political matters, and scored content on the basis of whether it used "emotional display," "misrepresentative exaggeration," "mockery," "conflagration," "slippery slope," "insulting" or "obscene language" and other factors, finding that Levin was the radio host who engaged in the most outrage. 

The study found that he utilized "outrage speech or behavior at a rate of more than one instance per minute." In How Democracies Die, Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write that Mark Levin was among the popular right-wing talk radio hosts who "helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse" in American politics and contribute to the erosion of democratic norms. According to Politico, Levin has a "penchant for hysteria."

In all candor, there is no "objective" or "scientific" way to determine which talk radio/TV host "engages in the most outrage." Also, the claim that some commentator "has a penchant for hysteria" will always, in the end, be a subjective assessment.

That said, Levin is plainly "pro-Trump" at this time, as is his perfect right. For better or worse, this penchant helped produce a slightly unusual type of interview on these successive nights.

Consider what happened on Saturday night's edition of Life, Liberty & Levin:

As the program began, Levin praised "a fantastic new book" by his guest—a book which will be released next week. 

This is fairly standard fare on TV interview programs. But two minutes into the program, after brief pleasantries had been exchanged, this was the first "question" Levin directed at Trump:

LEVIN (8/31/24): ...Your book is heavy with firefighters, police officers, coal miners, people who drill for oil, truckers—common people. So let me ask you this:

You spent most of your life around these people. You were a developer. You were a builder. Electricians, plumbers, construction workers of every kind. You created thousands and thousands of middle-class jobs with pensions, medical insurance and so forth and so on. 

Why do you think your opponents get away with claiming to represent the little guy, the middle class, the blue collar worker, when they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with them? And you've spent your entire life around them?

Technically, that qualifies as a question. In response to that first question, Trump spoke, without interruption, for the next eight minutes.

Trump's presentation featured a wide array of apparent errors of fact, but also an array of wild speculations. Nothing he said was directly connected to the question he had been asked.

He trafficked in the usual nicknames, denouncing "Comrade Kamala" as "a radical left Marxist" who is "much higher on the [Marxist] scale than Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren." Also, "They call her the greatest flip-flopper," the candidate said at one point.

None of the candidate' factual claims were ever challenged or questioned. Instead, eleven minutes into the program, Levin offered his second question.

He framed it as a type of "follow-up" question. That question went like this:

LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.

You spent a lot of time on the border. You spent a lot of time working on the border, thinking about the border. Litigating to get the money to build the wall on the border. Opposition from people like Kamala Harris. 

She says if this so-called "bipartisan border bill" hits her desk, she will sign it. Not a single Republican in the House supported it. Three Republicans in the Senate—it was negotiated in secret. 

She never tells us what's in the bill. "Catch and release"—you put an end to that. That's in the bill. It would be a statute.

Work permits for illegal aliens. You said, "No way." Taxpayer-funded lawyers for illegal aliens—in the bill! Five thousand illegal aliens a day, 1.8 million a year. In four years time, that's a lot of illegal aliens 

TRUMP: And it would be much higher than that.

LEVIN: And it would be higher because of all the got-aways. Billions to sanctuary cities. Billions to pro-illegal alien NGOs. And Senator Chris Murphy and others said, "Don't worry, the border's not going to be closed."

So she runs around—this is a bigger issue.  You say "flip-flop." If you're a flip-flopper, you're a liar. You either lied before, or you're lying now. 

She's hiding out from the press.  Is she a liar? Is that why she's hiding out from the press—she doesn't want to tell the American people just how radical she actually is?

Technically, that was a question—though it could perhaps be viewed as a leading question. 

As with Trump's initial eight-minute ramble, this second "question" contained quite a few claims which called for basic fact-checking. But so it went atter eight minutes, as Levin "followed up."

In response to that second question, Trump talked until the first commercial break, fourteen minutes into the program. When the program returned from that break, Levin posed this third question:

LEVIN (holding up Trump's book): It's a fantastic book. [At] 45books.com, you can order it directly. I'm going to tell you, there's so many—I can't possibly cover it all.

TRUMP: No, I know. 

LEVIN: But you loved being president. You can see it. You were excited about it. You were engaged about it. 

Eighteen minutes into the program, that was the complete text of Levin's third "question" for Candidate Trump! 

"Well, I loved doing a great job for the country," Trump now said as he started to speak—and he continued to speak, without interruption, until the end of the program's second segment, a full eight minutes later. And so it went, for the full two hours, on Saturday and Sunday's editions of Life, Liberty & Levin.

Is there something "wrong" with conducting an "interview" in this particular manner? That would be a matter of judgment. But this clearly wasn't the kind of "serious journalistic interview" Candidate Harris has been criticized for avoiding.

Last Thursday night, Candidate Harris did in fact sit for her first network interview since becoming the Democratic Party's nominee for president. In our view, her performance was less than fully impressive, as was that of her running mate. She's likely to face several different types of challenges in the two months ahead.

We'll start to discuss those apparent challenges in the course of this week. We'll also start to discuss some of the challenges facing our nation's major news orgs—news orgs like the Fox News Channel, news orgs like the New York Times.

Many people and entities are facing serious challenges as November's election approaches. But we the people are facing the largest challenge of all. 

That challenge goes something like this:

For all our high-fallutin' talk—for all the praise we tend to bestow on ourselves—are we the people really up to the challenge of conducting a sensible public discourse? As a nation, are we Americans up to the challenge of conducting an intelligent White House campaign?

The so-called "democratization of media" has placed a major strain on our various political and journalistic systems. Given these circumstances, are we the people up to the challenge of conducting a sane public discourse? Are we capable of behaving like the "rational animals" it has long been said that we are?

A sensible person might imaginably regard Levin's interview with Candidate Trump as perhaps a bit of a journalistic aberration—as an imitation of serious journalistic life. Quite a bit of the conduct on Fox News Channel programs flies in the face of serious journalistic practice. Indeed, much of the conduct on this "cable news" channel flies in the face of basic Enlightenment values.

Alas! The so-called "democratization of media" has turned our struggling nation's discourse into a type of Babel. Major elements of this societal problem are on display among some of the voters of Red America, and among the organizations which serve or pretend to serve them. 

At this time, it isn't necessarily all that great over in Red America. That said, those of us in Blue America also may have—or so it says here—a whole lot of splainin' to do.

Tomorrow: Challenges facing Candidate Harris