Biden Should Work The Media Refs On Impeachment

Everyone knows the impeachment is b.s., so he should say that

In the final edition of Big Tent, I promised to circle back to the question of how President Biden should respond to the GOP’s impeachment scheme. (If you weren’t a subscriber to Big Tent, but you’re here now, welcome! You can read that article at this link, though I’m not certain for how long.) 

Part of it is to just be a bit more clear and rote, and a bit less coy, about what Republicans are doing: Less, “I don't know quite why, but they just knew they wanted to impeach me,” and more, ‘They want to impeach me because they’re bitter that Democrats and even some Republicans voted to impeach Trump—except he violated his oath of office and I didn’t.’ Or, ‘They want to impeach me because they’re about to nominate someone under multiple felony indictments, and they want people to think I’m as rotten as their guy.’

But there’s an additional tack Biden and other high-profile Dems could take: To more explicitly work the media refs, with public criticism of the ways they distort the truth.

The partisan asymmetries in American politics extend to party-aligned media as well. Republicans have a large propaganda apparatus, and to close approximation it exists to blare simple messages at the population. Trump: good. Biden: bad. Trump: innocent. Biden: guilty. Hunter: scandal. January 6: No Big Deal. And so on. 

Democrats don’t have anything remotely like this. If they did, they could just ask or instruct their propaganda organs to treat the impeachment with an appropriate level of outrage and disdain. Instead, they have a handful of relatively small aligned outlets, which, despite their partisan affinities, don’t all simply echo party messages. And even if they did, the Democratic Party’s message is more or less that all of this is a distraction from the economic challenges confronting everyday Americans blah blah blah—a poor response to an impeachment process that is essentially defamatory.

If they want to compete for decibels with the right-wing media, they have to filter their more honest version of events through mainstream news organizations, their reporters and editors and producers, and all the baggage that entails. Left to their own devices, the story they tell is pretty distorted. It would cut against a large number of incentives for mainstream news to be completely clear about the Biden impeachment, or the question of which party is more scrupulous, or which is led by the more ethical figure, etc. It’s a big part of why the public now sees both candidates as comparably corrupt! A big media failure, and a triumph for GOP manipulators.

But as I explained in the pilot video for Decoding the News, we can see in their own reporting, buried and sotto voce, that the people producing mainstream news know the answers to those questions. They know in particular that the Biden impeachment has no merit. 

When CNN reports, “Republicans say if they don’t move forward with an impeachment inquiry now, it will create the impression that House Republicans have essentially cleared Biden of any wrongdoing over his ties to his son Hunter Biden’s business entanglements, allegations they say show a pay-to-play scheme when the elder Biden was vice president, even as they have yet to corroborate that provocative allegation,” what they mean is ‘Republicans have decided to impeach Biden because if they don't people will realize their manifold investigations turned up nothing incriminating.’ In other words, they privately admit that they conceive of the impeachment as a propaganda device, something to confuse the public into thinking Biden engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, when they know he didn’t.

And this is why I think it’d be worth it for Biden to pressure the media directly. Not to subvert political journalism as a vocation the way Republicans do, but to air a valid, good-faith media critique, and at the same time to anchor these linked ideas—that the impeachment is bullshit, and more importantly that everyone, even journalists, knows it’s bullshit—more centrally in the discourse. 

The mainstream outlets will not generally just come out and say this. But Biden could! He could say he’s frustrated to read report after report, all of which bury a point of universal agreement: That there’s no basis for the impeachment. He could say it’s disappointing that journalists, who are supposed to play a critical role in maintaining an informed citizenry, have chosen to chase something they know to be impeachment theater instead of telling their readers and viewers the truth. He could note that playing along with a sham like this, much like fixating on The Donald Trump Show, might be better for ratings and subscriptions and traffic than covering lower prescription-drug prices, clean-energy investment, infrastructure, abortion bans, or whatever else—but goosing viewership and subscriptions isn’t always the right thing to do.

If his best bet for beating Republicans in the information war, or at least fighting them to a draw, is through the mainstream media, then trusting mainstream news to counter right-wing propaganda is not enough. He has to attempt to make the information filtering out of the legacy media as true and clear as possible. And that’s probably going to entail pressuring the outlets to cover stories more faithfully.

And he wouldn’t have to limit his observations to impeachment alone. 

Over the past few days Trump has threatened Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley, who’s a potential witness in the looming January 6 trial, with death. Last night he leveled a similar threat against NBC News, which, we must presume, is about to publish or air a damning story about him. Years into the Trump era, these outbursts generate very little sustained attention in the mainstream media. A quick note, and it’s on to the next one. Some reporters will tweet about it with the proper sense of alarm, but that’s not how their outlets cover it. And critics will note, rightly, that if Biden did anything like this, it would drive extensive news coverage. 

This one-sided dynamic is complex, but the Democratic leadership’s studious indifference to Trump-related outrages is one of the main reasons it persists. If they conveyed their anger and alarm in a fitting way, reporters would feel impelled to cover it. But Biden could drive the point home more archly. ‘Is that just the deal now? That if I threaten military leaders with death and harass media outlets I don’t like, you all would just shrug it off? No big deal? Of course you wouldn’t. You’d be derelict for downplaying it if I started acting like a dictator. But that’s what you’re doing with Trump.’ 

Would this have the effect of guilt-tripping reporters into reframing their coverage? Their approach to covering partisan politics in general? Almost certainly not. But it would have a more fleeting effect that would still be useful. And for starters, it would inject the notion that the impeachment isn't on the level—and that everyone knows it!—into the discourse.