There’s Only One Reason We Got Here and You Already Know It

We are still in a grieving process and we’re going to have to go through it in order to get to a healing process and then be well. This is all much easier said than done. What happened Tuesday night was blunt trauma, a sudden occurring event which is difficult to endure and which has life changing elements attached to it. Blunt trauma is no fun. Most of us have had the experience of a friend or loved one’s sudden and unexpected death. In this case the loved one is democracy and there are disagreements about whether she has breathed her last or is on life support, or is hiding out somewhere for a while with the intention of coming back stronger than ever.

We don’t have those answers now. The answers that we do have are how we got here. There is only one reason and when I tell you, you will say, “Yes. That’s it. I more or less knew that.” Michael Tomasky articulates it better than anything I’ve seen so far.

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

This is it in a nutshell. It’s not illegal to lie on the public airwaves. And it became very clear in 2016 that having two narratives of reality, which then got dubbed “alternative facts” by Kellyanne Conway, is what was crippling America. We can’t live in separate information silos, having duplicate sets of facts about the same event.

But right-wing media makes life in this country precisely that. What happened on any given day, or what it means, is dependent upon who is reporting the event. And right-wing media does indeed set the news agenda.

Going along with this, the GOP has had rapid response on social media for some time now. That was always a disadvantage that the Democrats suffered, that an accusation would fly out from the Republicans and then because the Democrats said nothing, the accusation stuck. Silence was deemed acceptance and acquiescence to what had just been said. That situation got somewhat modified in the past two years with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris instituting rapid response on Twitter/X. That was a step but not a big enough one.

Fox News simply morphed the information ecosystem into what it is today. And then other people followed and we literally have a Tower Of Babel, where the truth isn’t reported in different tongues, rather different truths are reported in the same tongue.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails). But in the late 1990s, and after the internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well, along with the internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting websites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, V.C.-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

And wait for the mainstream media to stay the volleyball, while right-wing media turns into a jumbo beach ball. (They can get up to 9 feet in diameter, if you haven’t seen one of these things.)

And get the reality of the situation firmly in mind: if you’re on this blog and reading these words, you are a political junkie. You are somebody that knows civics, government, who is who in the political sphere, and what’s what. The average American simply doesn’t take the time to learn about any of this and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we got the result at the polls that we got. The majority of Americans made a decision based upon skewed and biased notions of what is real, not reality itself.

Reality is one thing. The PERCEPTION of reality is quite another. We have seen America act on its perception of what is going on in the political sphere. And that is nothing short of tragic. In an earlier day and age there were no media outlets saying that it was *lawfare* to report that Richard Nixon had people break into the Watergate Hotel.

I vividly remember all that. I was in college at the time. But I wonder how that entire debacle would have played out with Fox News spinning God knows what conspiracy theory about what took place? Or if there was a Mike Lindell character, claiming that Nixon was blameless but the break in of the DNC was due to instructions sent via Italian satellites and bounced off the moon to the Deep State?

Think about it. We might have even had a different version of WWII if right-wing media had been in existence and *reporting* the event. There was indeed Toyko Rose, the Rush Limbaugh of her era.

Disinformation is a pernicious and deadly thing. This we have seen. That’s why we are where we are.

Nobody at this point can predict how bad things will get, just like nobody could predict COVID until it happened. We’re going to have to go incident by incident here. But we can absolutely predict in this time and place that whatever happens, there will be the plain truth and then there will be the mind churning, self-serving spin that right-wing media will deliver.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015–16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

That’s the long and short of it. Right-wing media got us here. If we can find a way in this country to have truthful media be taken as seriously, then we will have a way out of the darkness, because truth is the most important thing and surrendering to evil is unthinkable.

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