Is the Republican Party running against the press?

“Discussion of current events with Jay Rosen of NYU and Dave Winer.”

Dave and Jay discuss their belief that the Republican party is running against the press, rather than the Democratic party or President Obama. They argue that the Republican strategy is to confuse and deceive the public, knowing that by the time the truth is uncovered, the election will be over. They suggest the press needs to be more aggressive in calling out lies and holding the Republican campaign accountable, rather than simply reporting on the deception. They believe this “post-truth” approach from the Republicans signals a broader attempt to govern based on dismissing facts and reality, which poses a serious threat to democracy.

Okay, we’re live. Hi, this is Dave Winer. I’m here with Jay Resin. Jay, you want to say hi? Hi, everybody.
Hey, so we’re going to do a little podcast this morning. It ’s Sunday, and I think we’ve both just listened to at least some of the Sunday talk shows.
I’m going to talk for a couple of minutes, and just sort of I have an idea. I want to pass by Jay, and then if he wants to respond, that’s cool. If he wants to talk about something else, that’s cool to me.
I sort of had what I think is kind of an epiphany this morning, and it goes like this.
I don’t think the Republicans are running against Obama or the Democrats. I think they’re running against the press. And what led me to this was Carly Fiorina was on this week with George Stephanopoulos, and the very first thing she said was the Democrats are running scared they’re freaking out, they don ’t know what to make of it, and the evidence that she cited were three columns in the New York Times, which were written by journalists, not by anybody. I’m sure the New York Times and the individual journalists would object to being labeled as the Democrats. The three were Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman.
But then I started thinking, and all of the three of them, especially Frank Rich, I thought it, and Frank Rich wrote a stunning piece today. I had to stop everything I was doing and reconsider my view of the entire world. And it was very depressing, but still, these are interesting times. I think the Republicans, the way they work is their goal is to confuse everybody and do something clever. And by the time we figure out what they’ve done, we’ve all voted, and they’ve won, and they’ve got another four years in office. So assuming, I just have a couple more things, just assuming that the thesis is correct, that they’re running against the press, then I think the press needs to start taking a tougher line towards them. So why does the press care what McCain and the Republicans think of them? This is a new idea that McCain’s have said, basically, we don’t care what you think. Number two, why won’t the press use the word lie? I mean, they have been, they do occasionally say that was a lie, but they more often than not say somebody has gone negative or their questionable truth, or there’s not much truth in what they said. And the more accurate term would be , they just lied. I don’t know why they won’t say it. And I think if they’re going to be working, running against the Republicans, I think they need to start getting tough. And the main point, or another point, is that I think Obama needs to become press, and needs to think, they need to think of themselves as covering themselves so that this way they can be sure that their message actually has a chance of getting out without running through the filters, which is something I think McCain has figured out.
I go back to my first realization of this was in the Dean campaign. I think the Dean campaign could have accurately in reflection could have accurately decided that they were running against the press, and it was the press that defeated them. And they had audio in house at the time that indicated the screen was anything but crazy or ridiculous and they wouldn’t run it. I think that was their mistake.
So that’s it, Jay. Okay. Well, let me respond to some of that.
I wrote in my blog on September 3rd, the night before Sarah Palin’s address to the Republican convention that they were following a culture war strategy. And it does involve the press as a kind of hate target. But I think we have to broaden the lens beyond that because, and it was reflected for me today in the Sunday talk show. Bob Woodward was on talking about his book, which is not about the campaign and not about McCain. It’s about Bush and the war. And what Wood ward is finally coming around to seeing is that Bush was not only insulated from reality, but in a sense has conducted the war as a war against reality. And the connection that we’re not making yet is that the McCain campaign is signaling to us not only that it will use any tactics required to win the election, it is also signaling that the kind of politics Bush practiced in which you profit politically from your detachment from the real is going to be how he’s going to run his White House as well. And so this is what’s at stake. It’s not only the election itself and the verdict in November. It ’s the continuation of a government in which not only did facts on the ground not matter, but the government itself has tried to make itself more opaque and to increase confusion about itself and its aims. Now going back to what you said, I wrote in my post on September 3rd that one of the most important techniques they were using was to continually conflate and confuse three groups, freewhe eling bloggers and activists on the net like people at Daily Coast, the traditional media like the New York Times and the Democratic Party. And it is a specific technique to equate the three of them, to put the words of one in the mouths of the other, to mix them up, to make it seem like they’re all part of the same thing, whether it’s called the angry left or just the left or liberals or Democrats or the other side. Or the elite, right ? Or the elite. Or you don’t come from where we come from. Right.
And that’s a culture war strategy. And what I have also observed is that this other issue of calling out lies of basically saying in as direct term as possible, this is bullshit. This doesn’t stand up. This is not true. This is against the factual record. That’s been building for a long time in the press. And people in the political press are well aware of the critiques of people like myself and you and others that they’ve kind of been evading and avoiding the difficulty here. One of the consequences of running a specifically anti- press campaign may be that they finally start to take a cue from some of their more courageous members and begin to address lies as lies. And we are seeing some evidence of that when the McClatchy Washington Bureau starts running a series that says time out out of bounds. That is not fair. Five yards against the McCain campaign.
Ten yard penalty against the McCain campaign. But it’s powerless, Jay. It accomplishes absolutely nothing. And it’s two or three steps behind where the Republicans are. That would have been effective five steps ago. Yeah.
I didn’t say it was going to be effective. I said it’s a sign of change within the press that they’re at least willing to do that. There’s no doubt that there are signs of change in the press towards the better.
They are growing a pair, as they said on Saturday Night Live, as the Hillary Clinton character said. But I don’t think we can afford to wait for them to figure it out and to grow that pair that they need to go up against the Republicans. I don ’t think it’s time for that. No, I don’t think there’s time for that. I think they’re counting on them.
Yeah, they are. And there was something really chilling that Frank Rich pointed out in the Sarah Palin speech at the Republican convention that she chose, or they chose, whoever it is that’s running this.
Because there’s some invisible hand behind this. Randy Schneur man or the Schmidt guy.
I don’t know who it is, or whoever they take orders from.
I mean, these were all paranoid theories of our youth, right? That there’s some invisible hand behind it. But we’re now actually, they’re coming out. I mean, that invisible hand is actually kind of visible right now. I don’t think it’s an invisible hand. I don’t think it’s a secret conspiracy.
But what they’re doing is very in the open. They said Frank Rich did point out that there is somebody behind there writing that speech that we don ’t know who it is. And they use Truman as the example. And that ’s chilling. If I were John McCain, I’d be paying careful attention to that one, because they talked about Truman’s path to the White House, which involved Franklin Roosevelt dying. And it’s like they criticize, quote unquote, Democrats, which sometimes it isn’t, as you say, one of other two groups for talking about McCain ’s fragile health. But they seem to have based their whole campaign around it. That this is the supposedly paranoid theory that Sarah Palin might someday become president is far from paranoid. No, I think that ’s a very real possibility.
It is more than a real possibility. You should might as well accept it as fact. That if they do give a White House here, that that is what you’re dealing with.
Well, what’s been extraordinary to me, Dave, is that traditionally one of the concerns that the vice president has and that the people who pick her have is that a vice president should never outshine the candidate. And one thing that tells us there’s something new afoot is that they don’t care about that at all. And they seem to want that to occur.
And it’s part of the culture war strategy because she is the culture war figure. But I want everybody to understand the connection between trying to win through lies and deception and culture war and this much larger thing of running the government on a basis that simply dispenses with facts on the ground, that dispenses with the realist tradition and foreign policy, that overr ides all fact checks, not just the press but Congress, agencies and everyone else. And Bush has pioneered this form of government. It was a disaster for us and even for a lot of people who care about things he represented. But McCain is signaling to us that the eclipse of reality is going to be not only his election gamut but his governing philosophy as well. And that is something that people have to oppose.
Yeah. But there’s, I don’t know whether you would agree with this. I have been listening to Woodward, too. He’s been making the rounds. He did a full hour with Terry Griss on Fresh Air last week and I listened to that as well. And what he makes clear is that it isn’t Bush.
That Bush doesn’t know the details and important details that Commander-in-Chief you would think would know. Like how is the decision made to determine how many battalions would make up the surge? He didn’t know.
He didn’t participate in the decision. He didn’t know how the decision was made. Well, the President’s insulation from the realities of his own policy is part of this. This is important because when you talk about Bush and McCain, all you really are talking about are symbols that they put out for us to look at. That’s what we’re supposed to believe the presidency is, but it isn’t. Yes. Because there is a continuity there and they’re honing their process.
There’s all kinds of details which came out during the Bush administration. Like Carl Rove, if he would actually show up to testify, might go to jail because of what he did in Alabama with the governor.
The governor of Alabama went to jail or the person who was running for governor of Alabama, I believe. I don’t remember all the details, but it was heavy duty stuff these guys were doing. And the name of the president is not the president. These are figure heads. Well, I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way and I know where you’re coming from, but here’s the way I would say it.
We have always known that there were what the political pros call low information voters and high information voters.
But what we’re seeing now is an attempt to actually create a presidency for the low information voters and another one for the high information voters.
And what the McCain campaign is saying when they say we don’t care for fact check is we don’t care if what we claim fails completely with high information voters. We don’t care because we have this other campaign going for low information voters and you can just watch how it works. And in a sense, they’re splitting the polity, not in a traditional way that you went due to win elections, but on the plane of facts and information itself.
And it’s an amazing gambit. And right now it’s working. It certainly requires running over the press, but it’s really a lot more than that. The knowledgeable elites within the Republican coalition themselves, they will become targets soon at this very practice.
Well, they’ve got to be shaking their head right now. The establishment, the elders of the Republican Party, and the cracks just started to show . I mean, Orrin Hatch had something to say about all this a couple of days ago after he had a meeting with Ted Kennedy and he issued a press statement that said this is all nonsense.
It’s got to stop. But you’re right. Eventually, I’m sure they don’t waste a lot of time worrying about them either because if it looks like they’re going to win the White House, the Republican Party is not going to step in. And Jay, I really believe that unless we connect, and we who are high information voters, unless we really connect with each other in some very, very meaningful way, we ’re not going to win this one. And the meaningful way means we have to create an information system, a flow of information valuable to voters that meets them, even meets the low information voters somewhere where a lot of them use the Internet, by the way. They use it for different purposes from what we use it, but they’re accessible that way, which means media can develop and could develop rather quickly to inform them or influence them or communicate with them. But I think what that means is that the Obamas and the Democrats need to take a leading role in this. And they don’t have any time to spare that a new kind of journalism that we’ve, you and I have been talking about this for 10, 15 years, that if it doesn’t take root, it might never take root because as we know, this kind of government, it isn’t at war with reality. I don’t agree with that. I think that they don’t care about our view of reality and their strategy is to confuse us and keep us confused and keep us arguing about minutia. If we want to regain our grounding and ensure the future of the Constitution, now’s the time to do something. I don’t think it ’s going to work later.
Well, I certainly think it’s a political emergency. I myself don’t have advice for the Obama people. I’m just trying to figure out the mechanisms of… Jerry, why is that? Why don’t, why doesn’t your thinking lead you to advice? Is that because of your academic position? No, no, it’s not that . It’s just my own, I don’t like to speak unless I feel I know something deep about a subject.
That’s good. I wish we had more of that, actually.
So I don’t have ideas that I feel are better than anybody else’s ideas on what Obama should do, so that’s what I mean.
Right. Yeah. Well, I think that we’ve got a really good podcast here, unless there’s more that we should cover. Now, you mentioned there was something about hashtags that you talked about. Just a simple system for Twitter users, hashtag, and what’s the term I ’m blanking on my term now? Spine watch.
Hashtag spine watch for any links and articles you find that show the press demonstrating unusual spine in standing up to a facts don’t matter attitude.
And what happens with that, with things that go to hashtags , spine watch? Well, right now, we’re just collecting them so that we can track how aggressive the press is willing to be. See, there’s one level where journalists just sit back as savvy judges of the political system and say , “Hey, they’re lying and they ’re getting away with it, but it’s working. " And they kind of , like, groove off their own irony. And then there’s another response, which is, “We have got to try and check this train . We’ve got to try and stop this somehow. " And so the hashtag is for news articles and journalists who are clearly trying to call out lies and deception.
You really think that it’s appropriate for journalists to try to stop things? Because I don’t. I think that we would do very well if the journalists would just stick to, you know, that if they saw that a campaign was lying all the time , that they wouldn’t fudge around that, and just say, " This is a campaign that’s lying all the time,” and that in every article that has a lie in it, that they don’t skirt the issue in a paragraph after the lie, after recounting the lie, they just say, “By the way, this is a lie. " And that’s a spine that I really and to go further to say that they need to stop it, I don’t think that ’s appropriate. I think that that ’s the line that they can go to, is saying, “Here’s the fact. " And then, “Well, we have to stop it. " The rest of it.
Well, yeah, I’m with you on that. I mean, I probably didn’t phrase it the right way.
But what I was referring to is, when you have two political parties engaged in a struggle like this, but you have asymm etric tactics where one side is doing something, the other side is not doing, then the press has to react to that with an asymmetry of its own.
And it’s extremely difficult for journalists to accept that, but the only alternative to that is for their own influence and their own reputation and their own credibility to keep dropping.
I think it’s a lot simpler than that. A journalist’s job is to report events that are happening.
If one side is doing something and the other side is not, then they just report that. And that’s it. There’s no “because” to it. It’s just that’s what’s happening and that’s what they have to say.
All right. We should leave it there.
Okay. Very good. So, Jay, you ’re at PressThink. org. Is that right? Right.
Very good. And I’m Dave Winer, and I’m at scripting. com. So, thanks, Jay. Nice talking with you.
Same here. Bye, everybody.