As it happened, mocking was the least of it. Spite, bile, deception, antipathy and resentment typified the coverage.
Like the Democrats, the Republicans used plenty of schmaltz, patriotism and personal stories to showcase their values. But they were more energetic and optimistic, more focused on policy issues and challenges, their candidate was far more prevalent — Donald Trump dominated the event from start to finish — and they engaged directly with live audiences.
Yet much of the media coverage pilloried the event: Trump should not have pardoned someone during a convention, or naturalised citizens during a convention, or used The White House as a political backdrop, and he had far too many Trumps talking.
You will recall the usually sneering media almost universally refused to criticise the absurd spectacle at the DNC, where Biden and others waved at non-existent crowds, smiled with familiarity at giant screens of Zoom viewers, and stood metres apart in their black masks watching fireworks. This, apparently, was beyond mockery.
But the RNC? They told us the event wreaked of autocracy. Even the fireworks drew fire from many — echoed in Australia by Radio National’s resident Trump obsessive, Matt Bevan, who said the display constituted an “unprecedented use of American monuments”.
The venue for Trump’s acceptance speech was roundly condemned. “America, we are paying for a campaign commercial in a house we own for a man most Americans didn’t vote for,” tweeted former network anchor Dan Rather, giving us a good sense for where the journalistic mainstream stands.
America, we’re paying for a campaign commercial in a house we own for a man most Americans didn’t vote for.
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) August 28, 2020
Whatever you think of his character or his policies, you would have to be consumed with loathing not to find amusement in the way the US President deliberately trolled his opponents. They portray him as racist; he accepted African-American endorsements from all walks of life. They say he is sexist; he filled his event with strong women. They say he is anti-immigrant; he turned foreign arrivals into citizens, at the White House, live on network television. They are obsessively anti-Trump; he made an appearance every night, and gave slots to Donald Trump Jnr, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Tiffany Trump and Melania Trump.
His trolling works. It invites his opponents to display their flaws.
Trump warns that under Joe Biden the radical left will turn many cities into war zones like Portland, Oregon — so the protesters rumbled with police outside the White House, put a Trump effigy in a guillotine and abused and intimidated departing guests. The actions of Trump’s enemies animate his words.
Trump warned that cancel culture has people fearful about what they can say without incurring wrath or losing their jobs. Then the media parsed in full every sentence he uttered to find darker meaning, “dog whistling” or lies. Immediately after the President’s acceptance speech, CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow rattled off extensive lists of so-called errors and lies, most of which amounted to little more than the usual exaggerated political rhetoric that passes unchecked on the other side. Maddow gave the game away with her “last but not least” fact check, slamming the President for saying, “Have you looked at your gasoline bill? Have you noticed how low it is?” Maddow whined: “For those of us who do actually drive, you don’t get a bill for your gasoline, it’s not how it works, nobody mails you a bill and says ‘here’s what you’ve got’ — you pay for gas at a gas pump if you drive, and it’s, all, ah, sorry.”
There was a lot and a lot of it was wrong. pic.twitter.com/C7e7zD5nQw
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) August 28, 2020
Sorry indeed. Dale tweeted feverishly during the RNC, dismantling every flourish against the Democrats or boast about Trump’s record. “The President is doing a lot of lying,” was a typical tweet.
Journalistic doyen Rather tweeted: “As a fact checker, where do you begin? I am being serious. I really don’t know where one starts.” Maddow retweeted this and added: “You’re inside my head, Mr Rather.” Yes, they all think the same.
As a fact checker, where do you begin? I am being serious. I really don’t know where one starts.
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) August 28, 2020
Yet, by way of contrast, these people never fact checked Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech when he said: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Indeed, during the Democratic convention Dale’s feed was still a constant stream of tweets about Trump and then this: “Haven’t heard any false claims from the Democratic speakers so far tonight (Subjective opinion, as always, doesn’t count.)”
I guess it would be hard to fact check Michelle Obama’s claim the President “cannot be who we need him to be for us” or Biden’s assertion that “the tragedy of where we are today is that it didn’t have to be this bad”. The double standards in media coverage and gullibility are extraordinary.
Surely Trump’s personal and political failings are not so subtle that voters could not discern them from sober and objective coverage? The reporting insults and infantilises the public.
Biden was given a pass for pretending he had a crowd; Trump was slammed for having real people attend. Biden was praised for a formulaic speech, read from a teleprompter in a hermetically sealed environment; Trump was criticised for speaking too often, too long and for ad libbing.
The same commentators on CNN and elsewhere who sanctimoniously criticised the gatherings, poor social distancing and lack of mask-wearing during the RNC were gushing the very next day about crowds amassing for the Black Lives Matter protest in Washington Mall. Go figure.
The obsession, hatred, and absence of reason in the media is hard to fathom. Take Sydney Morning Herald columnist Danny Katz. “Donald Trump is my No. 1 internet obsession, and not in a fawning fanboy way, more in a ‘hey, let me check in and see if he fell into a soybean thresher overnight’ kind of way,” he wrote last week. “And no, of course, I’m not wishing a soybean threshing accident on him — it could be a wheat thresher, a corn thresher, anything large and spiky that can be easily hosed down afterwards.”
Katz went on to say that “Trump is the worst” and that there are few people he “hates” so much. This sort of stuff passes for commentary in a surprising amount of media.
While the media coverage lacks maturity, insight, and fairness, it creates an environment that paradoxically helps Trump — it complicates the choice to vote against Trump. Because voters see they cannot get rid of him without rewarding a sickeningly sanctimonious and disingenuous media-political class that will continue to insist it knows best.
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New roles at The Oz for top journalists
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Last week I complained about how instead of sceptically critiquing the embarrassing festival of darkness that was the Democratic National Convention, or mocking how it took Trump Derangement Syndrome to theatrical levels, most of the media pretended it was a triumph and amplified the Democrat themes. I predicted they would rediscover their mocking mojo for the Republican National Convention in the subsequent days.