When Media Speculate About “Potential GOP Attacks”, They’re Just Doing GOP Attacks
A popular media mode of punching left involves inventing a theoretical Republican attack line, or “swing voter concern,” and repeating it over and over again. You know, to help.
Ostensibly, the job of reporters and political commentators is to accurately reflect reality— to report the truth using the written or spoken word to convey information so the public can better understand the far-away and often inscrutable forces that shape their lives. Nowhere in their job description, at least none that I’ve seen, is it their place to guess what partisan hacks or some mysterious cohort of voters may or may not do in response to a news item. Yet, a popular trope for reporters and pundits alike is to launder their own politics, biases, and ideological preferences through “potential attacks” from “the other side,” or as “concerns from voters”.
This is a variation on the mode of reportage I detailed last week, where conservative ideology is laundered through a mysterious cohort of swing voters. But here, we’re just spitballing potential Republican attacks and potential liabilities.
A recent iteration of this trope is pundits and reporters exoticizing John Fetterman’s post-stroke speech disabilities. It’s unseemly for high-status media personalities to say, “Man, this is weird and unsettling to me, the way he talks and him needing a text assistance, and I’m ignorant.” So increasingly we get concern trolling about how voters may feel or “Republican attackers” may respond to the sight of someone with a disability:
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got in on this game a couple weeks ago.
From 0:19-0:23, Willie Geist has “concerns from voters.” Then, at 0:57, Chris Matthews channels “Republicans” saying, after he has exoticizes a routine text assistant tech, “If Republicans are smart, they’ll say, ‘How is this guy going to debate for Pennsylvania on the Senate floor?’” Then, Matthews tells us Republicans are going to “tie him to crime.” And then Matthews channels (again, an entirely undefined) “suburban voter” (he has some privileged access to and speaks on behalf of) who is too scared to travel to Philadelphia.
What Matthews (who was fired two years ago for sexual harassment, but has subtly making his way back onto MSNBC) wants to say is “Fetterman is too left-wing for me, personally,” but can’t do that. So he has to channel his objections through a theoretical Republican attack that he spells out and makes, himself, on national TV to millions of viewers. But does so by insisting it’s just electability concerns so he can give himself plausible deniability.
Last month, The New York Times published a vapid horse-race piece on the broad state of the midterms, uncritically floating Republican attacks on Democrats on the issue of “crime.” Lisa Lerer and Jonathan Weisman (whom we detailed doing this same bush league conservative spin cycle last week) speculate about how “GOP attacks” could ding democrats in the November election. While the piece makes a single off-handed mention of racism, it ignores it as the primary dog whistle at work and does nothing to examine—much less debunk—the underlying claim being made: that Democratic policies are what lad to a recent increase in crime. Lerer and Weisman do nothing to meaningfully contest this, nor do they point out the fact that red state counties saw a similar rise in crime over the past two years.
What matters is The Narrative. It doesn’t matter if it's true—the point is to launder bad faith and baseless attacks under the guise of “concern” or simply reporting what “both sides” are doing to attack “the other side.” As a news organization, they’re telling us, it’s not their place to determine if these claims are factually accurate, or in good faith, or are tinged with transparent racist demagoguery. It’s their job to report on the meta narratives and move on.
During the 2016 and 2020 primaries, Michelle Goldberg perfected this mode of laundering rightwing attacks posing as “analysis” or “electability concerns.” She wrote two articles aimed at Bernie Sanders for what she insisted would be general election “GOP attacks.” Goldberg, she tells us, was just spitballing what a theoretical Republican attack would look like. The oppo dump equivalent to OJ Simpson’s book “If I Did It.”
In February 2016, Goldberg, then at Slate, wrote “Bernie Sanders’ Radical Past: In a general election, the attack ads would write themselves,” in which she detailed and passed along every sleazy red bait attack against Sanders she (or possibly someone in the Clinton campaign) could unearth. And in April 2016, she followed up, in a virtual carbon copy of her first oppo dump, with “This Is What a Republican Attack on Bernie Sanders Would Look Like.” In both pieces, she runs a right-wing attack on Sanders posing as “electability” meta concern.
In January 2021, when Sanders was again ascendant in the primary, Goldberg again wrote the piece for a third time, this time for The New York Times, recycling all the same red baiting attacks. In fact, she more or less copy and pastes the key points, writing in 2016., “There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” Then in 2020 writing for The Times, “There will most likely be spots showing the 1985 Sandinista rally Sanders attended in Nicaragua, with the crowd chanting, “Here There and Everywhere/ The Yankee Will Die.”
Maybe the cable news chatter never took off during the months and months of Sanders vetting because the US and its contra allies were undeniably The Bad Guys in that conflict and attacking Sanders for supporting peasants fighting rightwing death squads wasn’t the gotcha Goldberg thought it was or, rather, wanted it to be.
Anderson Cooper kicked off the 2015 primary debates by asking Bernie Sanders about socialism and communism twice on his first question. “The Republican attack ad against you in a general election,” Cooper told Sanders right out of the gate, “it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union”.
Republicans—and the rightwing of the Democratic party––doesn’t need to fund attack ads, it has CNN and Slate doing it for them under the auspices of “electability concerns”.
In January of 2016, The New York Times ran a similar red-baiting oppo dump framed as “concerns” by Clinton partisans (many not identified as such) over Democrats “retaining the presidency.” In it, the Clinton camp was permitted to push out red-baiting attacks against Sanders to the most influential newspapers in the English-speaking world, under the pretense that they’re all just super-concerned loyal Democrats worried about losing in 2016—which they, of course, did anyway.
The whole charade is insulting to everyone’s intelligence. The implicit—and sometimes explicit—ban against reporters expressing their opinions, and the professional norm that political analysis has to be framed not as ideological preferences, but a nonstop posture of “electability concerns,” forces deeply ideological people with very obvious ideologies into laundering their political preferences through an ever-shifting cohort of “swing voters,” meta narratives, and “concerns” over “potential GOP attacks.” We should just cut out the middleman and permit, as a media culture, those with high status, high paying jobs to announce their ideological priors, say which candidate they prefer, and overtly lobby for them on the merits, so we can all stop with the cheeky, convoluted workarounds. If Jonathan Weisman dislikes progressives for ideological reasons—which he clearly does—he should just say so. If Michelle Goldberg wants Hillary Clinton to be president, she should make that argument directly. If Vanderbilt scion Anderson Cooper mistrusts socialists, then he should say so. And if Chris Matthews dislikes Fetterman because he’s too progressive or are freaked out over him needing text assistance, then they should be open and honest about his prejudice and ignorance, instead of war-gaming “potential GOP attacks” or speaking on behalf of “voters” he just invented in his head.