RIGHT WING CONTROL OF THE MEDIA
MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
One truth that the first few weeks of the Trump presidency have driven home to me more than any other is what an enormous influence this Republican-conservative solidarity has on the very way our political discourse is shaped.
Take as an example of a big matter the botched raid against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on January 29 in Yemen. In the first twenty-four hours, the White House managed to spin it as a success, as it took out fourteen suspected AQAPoperatives. But it also killed two dozen civilians, including nine children. And it resulted in the death of one American Navy SEAL team member. Withering post-operation reports appeared in The New York Times, Reuters, and elsewhere; on background, military officials criticized the raid and even Trump himself. The next week, Yemen withdrew permission for further US-led anti-terror strikes.
After a month of mostly silence and shirking responsibility, Trump defended the raid in his joint-session speech. He introduced from the gallery Carryn Weigand Owens, the widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the attack. What appeared to be her heavenward prayers to her husband made for effective television—most TVcommentators gushed, even as a number of military people observed on Twitter that they found the moment grotesquely manipulative. In any case, many questions about the raid remain unanswered—and with Republicans running Congress, they will remain so. Whereas we can be certain that if President Hillary Clinton had ordered exactly the same raid with exactly the same results, House Republicans would have started issuing subpoenas in mid-February.
It’s that way on smaller matters, too. You may recall that the Trump White House took some criticism for failing to mention Jews in its official Holocaust Remembrance Day statement. But now imagine that the Obama White House had done that. It would have been a major three-day story, and the odor of it would have lingered around Obama forever—two years later, news reports would have included sentences like “Prime Minister Netanyahu, still smarting from that Holocaust Day slight…”
Democrats and the “liberal” media simply do not have the power to shape the terms of discourse in the same way that the congeries of talk-radio hosts, websites, blogs, and social media outlets of the right do. They don’t even attempt to. Hardly a day goes by without the Trump White House doing something that makes me wonder about an “imagine if Obama had…” scenario.