Media Fragmentation Poisons Supreme Court Hearings And War Coverage

I've long argued that the "customized content" available to news and entertainment consumers plays as big of a role as anything else in dividing the American people and denying us any kind of shared cultural experience.  Having devoured an outsized proportion of news coverage from both conservative media and left-leaning mainstream media sources in the past month to authenticate my sample, it's become clear the situation is worsening rather than improving.  Getting an even-handed take on the events of the war in Ukraine and especially the Supreme Court hearings in the U.S. Senate has become increasingly scarce.

I'll begin with the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings because it's impossible to overstate how completely divorced the two versions of coverage are from each other.  In retrospect, Ted Kennedy's thermonuclear speech against SCOTUS nominee Robert Bork in 1987, blocking Bork's nomination with ruthless effectiveness, paved the way for permanent hyper-politicization of Supreme Court hearings.  The shift didn't happen overnight as we still had a couple of normal nomination cycles in the Bush-41 and Clinton era, but the realignment of unwavering partisanship in judicial appointment support is now almost entirely complete.  Worse yet, judges are no longer forthright with their judicial philosophy going into the hearings the way that Bork was, carefully parsing their words on absolutely everything and giving Senators and the public considerably less material to work with to determine whether the person they're voting on should be given a lifetime appointment.

With that pretext established, the process became even more of a circus this past week, with ambitious Senators using the hearings as a platform to improve their standing with their party's base voters in future Presidential runs.  Missouri Republican Josh Hawley's bizarre obsession with child pornography sentencing in his line of questioning was a very obvious ploy to court the unhinged QAnon faction of his party, estimated to be a quarter of the GOP base, which believes the government is run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.  Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn attempted a gotcha moment against Ms. Jackson with a question about gender reassignment, an issue gaining currency among social conservatives.  And perennial GOP Presidential nominee Ted Cruz went all in grandstanding about critical race theory, and then hilariously got busted checking his phone moments later to see how much he was trending on Twitter.

On the other side of the aisle, New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker not once but twice proceeded to suffocate us with smarmy oratory dissertations that pounded home racial and gender kinship between the nominee and those in her identity groups.  It represented just about everything wrong with the devolution of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where Senators are supposed to offer good-faith questioning of those getting lifetime appointments rather than the kind of fawning praise Jimmy Fallon proffers to celebrity "Tonight Show" guests. Booker's speeches also represent just about everything wrong with contemporary Democratic politics generally, where racial and gender tribalism matter more than anything else.  Booker ran for President in 2020 and didn't do very well, largely because he came across as inauthentic to the African American voters he was trying to rally.  It's hard to see his performance last week in the Jackson hearings and believe he wasn't auditioning for another Presidential run, attempting to put himself front-of-mind among Black voters for the next round of primaries.

At least in my observation, Booker's gambit was a variation of the same cynical and electorally motivated tactic of his GOP colleagues, but when it comes to media coverage, neither faction is willing to acknowledge that.  Conservative media is relentlessly lampooning Booker's over-the-top showmanship while pretending that Hawley, Cotton, Cruz, and Blackburn weren't out of line.  Meanwhile, the mainstream media is trashing the latter while failing to draw any kind of equivalence at all to Booker's contribution to the circus, reinforced by today's Sunday morning shows which either ignored Booker's speeches entirely or lavished praise upon him for the spectacle.  Now maybe the Republican Senators' conduct was more odious and counterproductive, but shouldn't that be decided by the public with the help of a media acting as an impartial arbiter?  Rather than an edited version of events by either Chuck Todd or Brian Kilmeade?  Wouldn't we be better as a country if all media pointed to both factions' conduct as unsavory rather than just one or the other?

The mainstream media and conservative media have done a somewhat better job with war coverage, but as is always the case with war coverage, there's a jingoist impulse in the early weeks of a conflict that serves nobody well.  Back in 2003, the kerfuffle about the Dixie Chicks trashing then-President Bush for invading Iraq led to a climate where few felt comfortable posing hard questions about a military action that, in retrospect, was clearly ill-conceived.  Today the shoe is on the other foot and it's mostly the political right who has retreated to a nonintervention posture in matters of foreign policy, sometimes in good faith but other times not.  But I cringe just as much when I hear mainstream political commentators call for DOJ investigations against Tucker Carlson as I did when Iraq War proponents were working overtime to cancel the Dixie Chicks.  The potential for globe-destroying escalation in this war means there's no margin of error for getting our response wrong.  Those advocating for a lighter touch in U.S. involvement deserve to be heard without fear of reprisal.

But while I'm generally inclined to believe that dismissing war critics as "agents of Putin" is dirty pool and a corruption of an important conversation about the U.S.'s role in this mercurial situation, there clearly exists a dark underbelly in the American right that is much more frightening than anything coming out of Tucker Carlson's mouth.  Exhibit A of this dark underbelly was showcased on a video clip of a concert last week in Portsmouth, Ohio, by Aaron Lewis, the former lead singer of the rock group Staind who has since reinvented himself as an alt-right country singer.  Lewis unloaded from the stage with a six-minute rant full of hysterical and paranoid rhetoric referring to the United States as the most corrupt country on Earth and eventually getting around to declaring that we need to start listening to Vladimir Putin.  The crowd erupted in agreement with a litany of concurring catcalls reminiscent of the most raucous MAGA rally.  You gotta figure a lot of these same rednecks cheering on U.S. defeat at the hands of Putin in 2022 were among those participating in organized bulldozings of Dixie Chicks CDs back in 2003 on the grounds that their statements were "anti-American".

So how many Americans are actually cheering for Vladimir Putin to embarrass the U.S. at any price just to discredit President Biden?  It's hard to say, but I don't think Aaron Lewis and his cheering crowd are as big of anomalies as we'd like to believe.  Whatever rabbit hole Lewis went down in pursuit of his talking points is likely facilitated by online search engine algorithms isolating angry ideologues to an increasingly radical subset of websites and progressively limiting the prospects of them stumbling across any kind of messaging that would challenge the radicalism they traffic in.  It's the latest variation of the same theme that led to the fiction of election tampering in 2020 and anti-vaccination maximalism in 2021...an echo chamber of radical "news sources" that compelled hundreds of working-class guys to get themselves arrested storming the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election, and turned thousands of their spouses and children into widows and orphans because they eschewed a vaccine that could have saved their lives.  Clearly, "owning the libs" has already come at a very high cost for those consuming radicalized news sources, and one can only speculate on what the next iteration of that will be with the same demographic now championing Vladimir Putin's victory as a means of humiliating their domestic political opponents.

And it's very telling that Aaron Lewis made this rant in Portsmouth, Ohio, the embodiment of a burned-out industrial city in Appalachian Ohio that was a Democratic stronghold for generations until the Trump realignment.  It's communities like Portsmouth, far removed from anybody's cultural radar, where some of the fiercest radicalization has occurred in recent years.  Nobody was paying attention to them when they abandoned the Democratic Party en masse to join the MAGA army six years ago....and nobody is paying attention to them now as they plunge even further into an alt-right conspiratorial rabbit hole.  There's no telling where it all ends, but we know exactly where it began.....media fragmentation.

It's obviously too late to put this genie back in the bottle, at least as it pertains to the Internet.  Proposed solutions run the potential of their own overreach as we've already seen with tech companies relying on their same algorithms to deplatform many of the same people they've helped radicalize.  But circling back to the coverage of the Jackson hearings, plenty of mainstream broadcasters are contributing to the problem just as much as the subversive online sewers, and broadcasters have a little better leverage to regulate their content.  It's a delicate balance between regulation and censorship, but the dissonant coverage of the Senate hearings this week was the latest reinforcement that the status quo is not working, and broadcasters need to do a better job of keeping the content circulating on the airwaves from rivaling the online cesspool of disinformation.  From what I'm seeing lately, they're starting to catch up!