When media masters believe their own makebelieve

Among the owners and executives of the country’s most lucrative media properties, there seems to be an understanding that’s grounded not in fact but in makebelieve. It is this: if we give Donald Trump and his followers what they want, they will be satisfied. Put another way, how they respond to the news is determined by how we produce it.

As I see it, this understanding is at the heart of the recent Ronna McDaniel scandal. She’s the former head of the Republican National Committee. Second to Trump and GOP congresspeople, she has been America’s loudest election denier. NBC News hired her as a “political analyst” after Trump pushed her out. The blowback has been nothing short of stunning. NBC executives decided Tuesday to cut her loose.

That still leaves a much larger problem. According to media reporter Max Tani, the owners and executives of the country’s most lucrative media properties are preparing for the possibility of another Trump administration that’s “willing to use the tools of government to reward allies and punish enemies. For the great publicly traded conglomerates like NBCUniversal Media’s parent, Comcast, that may leave little choice but to extend an olive branch to the former president.” Tani went on:

Companies like Comcast, Disney and WarnerMedia, which dominate US television, got an object lesson in presidential revenge during the last Trump administration. Trump reportedly demanded that the Justice Department sue to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. (The lawsuit failed, though the merger also quickly unraveled.) Executives are concerned at the possibility that Trump could take revenge on the company, a high-profile NBC employee told Semafor.

In other words, they are trying to appease Trump and his followers, in advance and unprompted, hopefully without surrendering themselves or the public trust that makes their profits possible. But you can’t appease authoritarians. Appeasement requires parties involved to recognize each other’s interests. Trump doesn’t do that. Yours are a threat to his. If appeasement were possible, former Vice president Mike Pence would still have a place in the GOP. He doesn’t, because he was loyaler to the US Constitution than he was to Donald Trump.

McDaniel’s own story should be “an object lesson” for these “great publicly traded conglomerates.” Whatever he did, she did. Whatever he said, she said. That includes repeating the lie that the election was stolen. That includes repeating the smear that newspeople are “the enemy of the people.” And that includes getting involved in a plot to pressure election officials in Michigan into decertifying the results. She stood by her man. Was that enough? Nope. He humiliated her in order to run out of the RNC and replace her with his daughter-in-law.

They can’t appease Trump, but trying to, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, makes a kind of sense. After all, makebelieve is part of what makes the country’s most lucrative media properties so lucrative. They work hard to appear as if they are not too far to the left, not too far to the right, as wholesome and good and appealing to the masses as the television entertainment they make and sell. Doing that does not require actually taking a middle position, as that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, in a rapidly shifting political climate. Doing that requires manufacturing the appearance of a middle position. And that requires making things up, usually about what “the left” is doing.

To illustrate my point, here’s Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, not one of the “great publicly traded conglomerates,” to be sure, but representative enough for my purposes. In reaction to a recent Rolling Stone piece about the Biden campaign’s preparations for potential court battles ahead, he said if the election is close, “whoever loses the election will claim it was stolen. Trump did it in 2020. Clinton did it in 2016. There will be huge legal fights, massive political division and, in a worst-case scenario, rioting and/or violence. The only way to avoid that future is a landslide win for one side or the other.”

For people who know little or nothing about politics, or who consider themselves above politics, this sounds completely reasonable, as Bevan faults both sides equally while seeming to reserve hope in democracy.

But it’s makebelieve. While Hillary Clinton did at one point say the 2016 election was “stolen,” it wasn’t habitual, and it was long after it was clear, thanks to the Mueller investigation, that Trump was the obvious beneficiary, and knew he was the obvious beneficiary, of the Kremlin’s sabotage of her campaign. Clinton conceded defeat in 2016, never led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government, and never campaigned for president again on the basis of a Big Lie. There’s only one person responsible for creating conditions “for huge legal fights, massive political division and, in a worst-case scenario, rioting and/or violence,” and that person is neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe Biden.

Bevan’s goal here, which is widely shared among the owners and executives of the country’s most lucrative media properties, is benefiting one side without appearing to, because one side is better for their interests, or seems to be better. To do that, Bevan must misrepresent or cherry-pick something about “the left” – in this case, Clinton’s brief use of the word “stolen” – to make Trump’s massive industrial-scale lying seem less bad. This “false equivalence” happens all the time. It’s dissembling about “the left” to seem neutral to the right. It warps reality. It undermines public trust. It’s makebelieve.

More than anything else, this makebelieve – or the manufactured appearance of a middle position – is the source of the doomed effort to appease Donald Trump and his followers. It presumes that giving something to him will satisfy him. It presumes that how he responds to the news is determined by how the news is produced. If NBC News hires McDaniel, he and his followers will see it as politically neutral. They will never see NBC News, or any news outlet, as politically neutral. It’s not about what NBC News does. It’s what NBC News is. And what it is, according to Trump, is the enemy of the people.