We're All Fox Viewers Now

The good news? It’s everywhere. Indictments or not, Donald Trump is prepping for a new TV season and broadcast and cable ratings already are perking up. Fueling his coming controversies, Elon Musk is proclaiming Twitter will go mano-a-mano with the New York Times and the Washington Post, publishing instant news, not edited mainstream media pablum, from its intrepid tweeters on the scene. And don’t forget the country’s political industry. The cost of the 2024 presidential race could hit $20 billion, the biggest share going to ads on screen.

The attention paid by 60 Minutes to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump and radical right wing cheerleader, shows that broadcast news producers are already gearing up for the showtime to come. Despite her wacko conspiracy theories and non-stop nonsense, MTG has vaulted from the House bleachers to its box seats. From scenes pumping iron in tank top and tights to a Scarlett O’Hara-like stroll around her north Georgia version of Tara, her 13 minutes on 60 Minutes were a GOP publicist’s dream.

The coverage, of course, has had its share of critics. The massive lies that underpin Greene’s notoriety barely took a glancing blow. Indeed, the bottle blonde with buffed up biceps had Leslie Stahl, the CBS veteran correspondent who apparently drew the short straw, by, well, her shorter hairs. One interview doesn’t make a season. Nor is the issue Stahl’s weak response to MTG’s evasions when asked to explain herself. The issue is lies and what the news needs to do about them. It’s at the heart of the country’s problems, and not just for the next two years.

Take Greene’s job as Trump’s traveling warm-up act, a schtick she’s used to spread his falsehoods about the last election coast-to-coast. Her unremitting mendacity wasn’t a secret. But neither 60 Minutes' voiced-over video nor Stahl’s interview deviated from the politest of journalistic protocols in confronting her blatant lies. In fact, down home southern scenery and gauzy lighting substituted for the camera close-up, bare bulb, Gestapo interrogation-like format that once made invited guests squirm and arguably, 60 Minutes great.

The 60 Minutes segment, however, represents more than an embarrassing performance for CBS. It’s the latest evidence broadcast and cable news are struggling to cover Trump and his like. Unfortunately, for the electronic media as well as the rest of the journalism world, the challenge will only get worse. For political analysts, the single-digit opinion poll ratings for virtually all the Republican Party’s would-be presidential nominees are the two-by-four in the wind. Multiple indictments or not, Trump TV will define the GOP contest, guaranteeing a festival of lies from beginning to end.

"The content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense," Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, his 1985 treatise on television and its corrosive effects. Postman was ahead of his time. Indeed, "nonsense" doesn’t come close to describing the GOP’s complicity in Trump's prevarication. Consider the fact Republicans have had virtually nothing coherent to say about any of the major issues facing the country for years. They didn't even bother to come up with a party platform in 2020. Expect the same in 2024 as they proselytize Trump's growing miasma of lies.

How broadcast and cable news respond to Trump's rejection of fact as well as his degradation of truth amounts to more than a test of their correspondents' cojones and the networks' credibility. That Trump and his bald-faced lies are destined to shape the GOP’s coming presidential election campaign matters. Trump and the Republicans have made his lies part of the American political canon, as today their House leadership is seeking to do in rewriting the history of January 6^th according to his script. Striking at the lies will be an uphill fight.

For the executives who run the entertainment giants that own the news, it may well not be a priority. After all, along with sitcoms, sports, streaming, theme parks and licensing deals for their big stars' bobble-head dolls, the news, as Michael Corleone put it in The Godfather, is just business. Trump is a money machine. Viewership soared with his indictment. Take the leading news network. As the upcoming courtroom shaming of Fox News appears likely to show, Rupert Murdoch and his minions built a business model on Trump's mendacity and its purveyors. Ratings rise when reporting lies. What's not to like?

If the news is supposed to inform -- to provide the who, what, when, where and the why -- what does Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 13 minutes on 60 Minutes tell us? To be sure, her success in her constituency says something about her voters' views. But her record and how it was treated on air also speaks to the challenge facing the media and the country.

Forty years ago, Neil Postman foresaw the effects of television, an entertainment medium, on serious political discourse. "When serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk; when, in short, people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk." Lies are no small part of that danger.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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