FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2024
Or a journalist like Levin: As a nation, we've come a very long way, baby, from the journalistic landscape described by Theodore White.
His iconic book bears a famous title: The Making of The President 1960. Key point:
In effect, White was reporting from an earlier, vastly different nation as he described the "forty or fifty men, all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling," who could be seen "rocking groggily off a plane at between one and two in the morning" as they followed Candidates Kennedy and Nixon around the country during that year's campaign.
White's assessment of those campaign reporters was clear. "The men assigned to cover a Presidential campaign are, normally, the finest in the profession of American journalism," he wrote. In White's view, the journalists assigned to cover Candidates Kennedy and Nixon were "men of seniority and experience, some of them men of deep scholarship and wisdom."
They were the brightest and the best. Even when these proud men encountered the undisguised disdain of Candidate Nixon and his staff, White offered this slightly pockmarked account of their professional attitude:
"Predominantly Democratic in orientation, the reporters who followed Nixon were, nonetheless, for the sake of their own careers, anxious to write as well, as vividly, as substantively as possible about him."
So the writer wrote. On the other hand, White also said that all the reporting from the two planes was "colored" by the divergent attitudes of those reporters toward the two candidates—and he described a type of astounding misbehavior on the Kennedy plane:
"By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps—they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier."
The writer also wrote that! In doing so, White helped establish a certain picture—a picture which has never gone away—in which the establishment press aggressively favors the Democratic candidate.
White's portrait helped establish that powerful storyline. That said, he had almost surely never seen a journalistic performance in the course of a White House campaign like the performance which occurred on the Fox News Channel last weekend.
As we noted yesterday, White was writing, in effect, a version of The Little Presidential Campaign in The Big Woods. There was no cable news at that time. There wasn't even a CNN, let alone a Fox News Channel or an MSNBC.
Social media didn't exist; neither did the Internet. To all intents and purposes, there was no national "talk radio" of the kind Rush Limbaugh brought in several decades later.
Walter Cronkite hadn't yet become the anchor of CBS News! Nor was there anything like a Candidate Trump, or anything like the Fox News Channel's Life, Liberty and Levin.
Last Saturday and Sunday nights, Candidate Trump's Labor Day weekend was marked by a pair of hourlong appearances on that primetime cable news program. There's no reason why the candidate shouldn't have appeared on that program, but the journalism offered there represents a major challenge to the American system—to the American way of life, imperfect as it has been.
In our view, White described astounding misconduct taking place on the Kennedy plane. He said that all the reporting from that plane was "colored by" the correspondents' attitudes toward the candidate on that plane.
Sixty-four years later, White's portrait should be sobering. But he described nothing resembling the journalistic behavior which met a statement like the one shown below—a statement made by Candidate Trump early in Saturday evening's program, starting at 8:05 p.m. Eastern.
In this passage, the candidate is midway along in the first "answer" he gave to Levin's initial "question." As he starts, he's speaking about Candidate Harris, who he has already described as "Comrade Kamala."
As the statement shown below begins, the candidate is several minutes into his first "answer" of the night. His stream of frequently false or unfounded assertions continues along from there:
TRUMP (8/31/24): I saw today she wants to build a wall. She fought me, for years, on the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall, but she was one of the people that fought me—one of the Democrats, but one of the people. And you look at how she's changed, and it's so phony, because—
And all of this stuff— You know, with politics, it's usually their first thought, that's where they are. And her first thought is Marxism.
She's not going to have a wall. She's going to have people—we'll have a hundred million people in this country within four years if she gets elected—a hundred million. They've already allowed twenty million in—we think. I think it's a lot higher than that.
And Mark, they come from prisons and jails—there's a slight difference. And they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they come also, as terrorists, at a level that we've never seen before. And they're pouring into the country—we have millions of people coming in, but hundreds of thousands of those people are criminals from Venezuela.
They take them off the streets of Caracas and bring them into our country and then they announce their crime rate is way down. You know, that's what they've done—their crime rate is way down now. But they come from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and from South America. And they are destroying our country.
Then you watch her, like at the convention, "Oh, everything is just peachy dory." But migrant crime is turning out to be a disaster. Many, many people are killed and raped and mugged and everything else—these are tough people. But they let them out of jails
You take Venezuela. Their crime rate is down at a number they've never had before. They're taking all of their criminals and busing them into the United States of America and dropping them and saying, "If you come back, we will kill you." And then I'm supposed to sit and debate this person, and she'll say, "Oh no, it's wonderful, it's wonderful," and now she's going around saying we had the weakest border in history.
She was the border czar. She was put in charge of the border...
It was now 8:07 on the clock, but the candidate's ramble continued on from here. The second question from Levin wouldn't come until 8:11. When that "question" finally came, that question looked like this:
LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.
[...]
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.
[...]
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?
The candidate's long and rambling initial answer had led to a long and rambling "follow-up question." We're showing you the end of that rambling question, where the rubber, such as it was, melted into the road.
As any sane person can plainly see, this second "question" wasn't a question at all. It was instead an overtly partisan statement. At this point, we'll make the following guess:
As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen an example of "campaign journalism" which resembled Levin's performance last weekend in even the slightest way.
Was something "wrong" with Levin's performance on this year's Labor Day weekend? Inevitably, that's a matter of judgment. Before we address that question, let's make a quick observation about what the candidate himself had said:
In that rambling presentation, the candidate was touching on a campaign issue which does present a serious challenge to his Democratic opponent.
For whatever reason, President Biden never attempted to explain the shambolic border policies which led to large increases in "undocumented" or "illegal" border crossings during the first three years of his term. In our view, this was a major abdication of duty on President Biden's part.
There is, of course, no way of knowing what Vice President Harris may have thought, or may have advised, about the administration's border policies. But in the impoverished intellectual landscape of the American political discourse, it has always been assumed that vice presidents agree with the policies of the administration within which they serve.
When sitting vice presidents have run for higher office, they have routinely been saddled by that lapse in logic. In the current case, performers on the Fox News Channel have been asserting, for the past five weeks, that Candidate Harris had in fact been "the border czar"—improbably, that she had in fact been "put in charge of the border" during the Biden years.
As of last weekend, each of those familiar claims had been widely challenged—but after making those claims, Candidate Trump droned on. He had already made an array of unsupported claims about the prisons and jails of Venezuela, along with that nation's "mental institutions and insane asylums."
He had made an array of unsupported claims about the "hundreds of thousands" of criminals from Venezuela who were, in some way which went undescribed, allegedly being bused into this country by some unnamed entity, and who were then being told, by unnamed persons, "If you come back [to Venezuela], we will kill you."
In fairness, the candidate's reference to the busing of "hundreds of thousands" of such criminals was a step back from his earlier claims, in which he said that millions of criminals from Venezuela were being bused into this country by some unnamed entity or persons.
That said, a wide array of the candidate's statements in the passage we have posted have been challenged, again and again, by reputable fact-checkers. But as the candidate made these fuzzy, inflammatory claims, the journalist from the Fox News Channel simply sat and stared.
The journalist asked for no clarifications. The journalist asked for no evidence in support of these widely challenged claims.
Who was busing these hundreds of thousands of criminals into the United States? Where were these buses entering the country? Why weren't these buses being stopped?
Also, who was telling these criminals that they would be killed if they returned to their country of origin? These are blindingly obvious questions, but none of these questions were asked.
In fact, the journalist from the Fox News Channel never asked any such questions during this pair of hour-long programs. Looking back to that earlier age, we think it's fair to make this assumption:
As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen an example of campaign journalism which resembled what happened on these Fox News Channel programs. Imperfect though they may have been, no one on those campaign planes would have dreamed of behaving in the way Levin did all through the course of last weekend's programs.
In our view, it's also fair to make this assumption:
This new kind of campaign journalism presents a challenge to this nation's most basic political and governmental systems. In our view, this kind of journalism presents a fairly obvious challenge to this nation's way of life.
There's a great deal more which could be said about what happened on last weekend's hourlong programs. For the record, we think it's also fair to make this assumption:
As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen a presidential nominee who trafficked in false or unsupported claims in the way this candidate does.
It isn't just the journalism which Theodore White had never seen. Almost surely, he'd never seen a nominee like Donald J. Trump—though he'd also never seen a campaign journalist like the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin.
He'd never seen anything like what transpired, for two solid hours, on last weekend's "cable news" programs. That said, also this:
It's possible that White had never seen anything like the refusal of the New York Times to report on, and to discuss, what happened on those TV programs, but also on the Fox News Channel on a regular basis. It's possible that White had never seen such an avoidance of high-end journalistic duty.
In our view, what has happened on MSNBC has been bad enough. What has happened on the Fox News Channel represents an existential challenge to the American system, imperfect as it has been.
Presumably, there was no perfect journalism during the 1960 campaign. That said:
Theodore White had never seen anything like what was broadcast last weekend. Nor had he ever seen anything like the garbage can the Fox News Channel opens at 10 p.m. each weekday night—or anything like the imitations of journalism which precede that clownlike "cable news" program.
Beyond that, he'd never seen anything like the refusal to report which has been practiced by the modern-day New York Times—but also by the cable news stars on MSNBC, Blue America's "cable news" counterpart.
In effect, White was living in the Big Woods when he wrote his famous book. There was no Mark Levin in those woods. There was no Jesse Watters and there was no Greg Gutfeld. There were no D-list comedians and no former professional wrestler churning out corporate dogma as they pretended to discuss the nation's news.
What happened on Fox last weekend represents a major challenge to us the people—to the American system. For the record, we know of no evidence to suggest that we will be able to meet this challenge in the years ahead.
Next week: Debates
