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On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, Ben Smith published a story in Politico that started out like this:
Hillary Clinton reigns over a vast realm of staff, patronage-seekers and supporters hoping for White House jobs. But nobody needs her more than Gregg Birnbaum.
Birnbaum is the political editor of the New York Post and the creator of JustHillary.com, an independent Web site with the motto: “It’s all about her.”
“The site is, and I am, obsessed with Hillary,” he said over a bagel in a hotel near the Post’s midtown Manhattan office one recent morning. “To the degree that people would say I’m a stalker, I’m obsessed, I’d say there are a whole heck of a lot of journalists who are just like me.”
Birnbaum embodies Clinton’s unique relationship with the media, to whom she is a diva and a cipher, as well as a candidate for president….
“The media needs her too much,” said Michael Tomasky, the editor-at-large of the American Prospect who wrote a book about Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign. He said Clinton turned the media obsession to her advantage in that race. “Because she needs them less, she can speak the voters’ language a little more, without caring so much how the media’s going to cover it.”
A few media types have developed boutique practices in Hillary coverage -- Birnbaum, the Clinton apostate Dick Morris and a half dozen or so reporters. For the rest of the political and celebrity press, she’s a major, steady product line. And while Clinton’s aides have learned to use the obsession to her advantage, easily making headlines whenever she criticizes President Bush, for example, they still sometimes find it disturbing.
Two things about this archive story that are germane to the current news cycle and the current state of news — and to Donald Trump’s future, and to our shared future:
1. Although Mr. Smith was no doubt exactly right at the time, Donald Trump’s hold over the media is incalculably larger than Hillary Clinton’s ever was.
2. Trump finds all of this obsessive coverage intoxicating, exhilarating, rather than “disturbing.”
It is often said that the Dominant Media is addicted to covering Trump, can’t quit him, because he drives audience size more than any single other figure (political or otherwise).
There is another component, of course, which is the Dominant Media has felt for at least five years that it has an obligation to stop Trump from regaining power (and to help put him in prison), because they see him as evil – and because they feel more than a tad guilty for not stopping him from winning in 2016. (They care little or nothing about why his supporters support him still — and never have.)
In between those two reasons for all the Trump coverage, and driven by both those reasons and more, is the understanding that if you produce content about Trump, it will get you the best placement, the most eyeballs and ears, and the best chance at significant career advancement.
So it is that Tuesday’s primaries, especially that of the doomed Liz Cheney in Wyoming, are seen exclusively through the prism of Trump Trump Trump, as in (one of 10,000 examples I could cite) this quote from an Associated Press dispatch:
“I’m still hopeful that the polling numbers are wrong,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative and vocal Cheney ally. “It’ll be a crying shame really if she does lose. It shows just how much of a stranglehold that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party.”
At one point this morning, 10 of the 17 most prominent stories on the Politico website were about Matters Trump (including one about how he might take a golfing trip to the U.K.)
The first five articles on the New York Times website – Trump.
Every article in the Washington Post website’s “politics” section – Trump.
And it isn’t just the Dominant Media. Social media, blogs, everything – it’s all about him.
Check out the blog of the incomparable Marcy Wheeler and you will read a LOT about Trump, including her definitive coverage of the ontological meaning of the return of his passports by the Justice Department.
Although Trump and the Dominant Media are now on the same side regarding the issue of the moment (both calling for unsealing of the FBI affidavit that set the search of Mar-a-Lago in motion), their codependency is not a sign of synchronicity.
For example: What would the Dominant Media say if Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions authorized an unannounced search of Hillary Clinton’s private home by the FBI and then green-lit an indictment of Clinton as she was poised to run against Trump in a re-match for the White House, all while declining to recuse himself from a case in which his boss – the incumbent president – had a clear vested interest?
To ask the question is to answer it.
And it is germane because Rich Lowry argues persuasively that Merrick Garland is on the path to an (ill-advised, in his view) indictment.
Remember a million years ago (a/k/a a few weeks ago) when scathing editorials in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal about Trump were seen by the Dominant Media as hugely meaningful signs that Rupert Murdoch and the entire conservative movement were finally, belatedly, and fully moving against Trump and towards sanity?
Behold today’s New York Post, with an op-ed piece and editorial making the exact same point about the Dominant Media’s latest attempt to get Trump back in the Oval Office:
It feels like old times. In the wake of the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, the mainstream media are in a feeding frenzy the likes of which we haven’t seen since he exited the White House. The usual suspects, like The New York Times and Washington Post, which spent the four years of Trump’s presidency consistently and spectacularly beclowning themselves, are at it again.
Dare we say that it has “all the hallmarks” of media incompetence?...
we watched these selfsame media treat the farcical Steele dossier like it was the fifth gospel and spend years clinging to the Russian-collusion hoax. We watched them not only bury the Hunter Biden laptop story just days before the 2020 election but smear the journalists who broke that very real story as dupes promoting Russian disinformation….
For seven years every story, big and small, has been treated like it might be the one that finally breaks the dam, that makes Republicans far and wide denounce Trump, makes his voters feel pangs of shame and maybe even leads to the perp-walk fantasy that never seems to die….
Our news media have gotten so much so fabulously wrong so fantastically often that one might expect a dollop or two of self-examination from them. But as the stampede of half-baked, shaky stories about the Trump raid rain down on us, it is perfectly clear that the liberal media have learned nothing.
If it turns out the “nuclear documents” are low-level discussions about common knowledge or are obviously inconsequential whatever their “classification,” all the Post has done is turn Trump into a martyr — by, again, quoting anonymous sources with a political agenda.
They damage themselves. They damage the country. The only winner is Trump, again. Will they ever learn?
The Dominant Media has been asking for years WTF is wrong with Rob Portman and every other elected Republican who won’t go all Liz Cheney on Trump.
Vitally important question, to be sure.
But it isn’t the only question to ask.
Trump of course deserves scrutiny galore. And accountability.
But, my dear Pogos, it is not all about him.
At least it shouldn’t be.
I believe that what I’ve written here today is unassailable. And/but I’m sure I will be assailed by some of you for it.
I warned in 2015-2016 that Trump could win, in part because I’d been following his rhetoric and the mood of the nation by talking to voters across the country for years. And in part because of the bizarro relationship the Dominant Media had with the man and his prospects.
What’s happening now, right before our eyes, is a twist on the Marx quote:
History repeats itself, but with Trump it was farce first, tragedy second.
Let’s not let it be tragedy third.
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Two important roundball items:
