How The Media Incentivizes Right-Wing Authoritarianism
How The Media Incentivizes Right-Wing Authoritarianism
Capitulation is complicity.
CBS announced over the weekend that moderators Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell will not correct any lies when vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance meet in New York to debate on Tuesday night.
Unstated but implicit in almost all mainstream follow-on reporting and commentary:
CBS made this decision to appease the Trump-Vance campaign in particular. Professional Democrats have generally gone with the flow of candidate debates, leaving the ref-working to lowly social-media users. Donald Trump, by contrast, has praised CNN and its moderators effusively for letting his lies go uncorrected when he debated Joe Biden, and attacked ABC news and its moderators for correcting a handful of his most egregious ones when he debated Kamala Harris.
It is, in reality, a decision to let Vance derail the debate, leaving Walz a Hobson’s choice between actually debating and responding to smears.
A seasoned, well-prepared debater can overcome this disadvantage. Walz can begin his presentation by priming the audience to expect Vance, without a popular agenda or ounce of integrity, to impugn his military service and make a variety of false allegations about his record. (Harris pre-empted most of Trump’s lies this way in their debate.) He can also marshal just a fraction of the voluminous evidence that Vance is a person of exceedingly low character—offering viewers a reason not to trust Vance’s attacks.
Walz will surely prepare well, but that doesn’t mean Vance’s predictable tactics will amount to nothing. For every person who watches the debate live from beginning to end, there will be another who only catches after-the-fact clips on TV news or social media. And whether it was god’s honest truth or a clever morsel of expectation’s setting, Walz reportedly told Harris in his candidate interview that he’s a bad debater.
In either case, the unfolding of an undercard debate isn’t terribly important in and of itself. CBS’s decision is mostly significant as an indication of how powerful institutions will bend to Trump should he win the presidency. Many are bending already, when he has no official power and is behind in the polls.
GET THE ZUCK OUT
Consider the following pattern of behavior: