The Cable News Burden

Popular bad-faith operators are deluding serious issues.

I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I gave up cable news a few years ago. I think the industry’s model, especially on the commentary side, is mostly garbage. Outrage porn and political idolatry may be good for ratings, but I think they’re very bad for the country.

Still, as someone who regularly writes about politics, and tries to persuade readers on particular points of view, I also think it’s helpful to keep tabs on what’s being said on cable news. It’s a medium, after all, that millions of Americans still turn to for their news, narratives, and talking points, which they spread into our broader culture. I’ve found that being privy to the cable-news media diet (which I gather mostly from online clips) has value when presenting my own arguments.

Truth be told, it’s a pretty scary window to look through at times — a portal into an alternate-reality shaped by bad-faith actors and shameless sycophants, many of whom believe very little of what they say on-air, and joke with colleagues about the gullibility of their audience when the cameras are off.

Still, I can’t help but wonder at times if some of these commentators, who’ve been bullshitting their viewers for several years now, have started to buy into their own bullshit.

A week or so ago, I saw a Fox News clip from The Five, in which prominent Trump-fawner, Greg Gutfeld, was whatabouting away the seriousness of Trump administration officials discussing highly sensitive military attack-plans over Signal, an unsecured chat-app. His basic point was that it was no big deal, because liberals ran cover for President Biden’s declining mental acuity.

He’s right, of course, in that Biden administration officials, and even some in the media, did just that. I’m not saying that the latter were in direct cahoots with the administration, but their incuriousness on the matter crossed the line into journalistic malpractice. I also agree with Gutfeld, as he said in the clip, that having a mentally-compromised president was very dangerous for the country. Heck, I argued that very point myself a number of times.

But what does any of that have to do with the Signal controversy? And why should someone like me, who takes national security concerns seriously no matter who’s occupying the White House, decide that grossly negligent behavior on one side of the aisle is somehow okay if the other side sucks at it too?

There was no logic to Gutfeld’s argument. It was just tribal nonsense. Yet, he made another remark, in the same segment, that I found even sillier.

In describing why the media was so fixated on the Signal story, Gutfeld, looking quite confident, said, “We’ve been going on for about three months since the election. The legacy media has nothing to work with but good news, which to them is no news, so that’s why they’re dying.”

Nothing to work with but good news? Could Gutfeld really believe that?

At first I dismissed his comment as obvious audience-pandering. I mean, that’s what Gutfeld does for a living these days — he gives the Fox audience what it wants. But after dishing out such nonsense for almost a decade now, I wondered if it was possible that Gutfeld and others have actually managed to convince themselves, through force of habit, that something like that is, in fact, true? Could they honestly believe that there was no legitimately bad news coming out of the Trump White House until the Signal revelation?

I guess I’m a little more open to the possibility than I used to be, since echo chambers have real consequences, but I still can’t quite get there.

Regardless of one’s thoughts on the legacy media (and mine aren’t very positive), Donald Trump entered his second term in office with an above-water approval rating — the first of his political career. To the surprise of many, the electorate granted him a honeymoon period. But over the next few weeks, he pardoned 1,600 January 6 rioters, caused needless economic chaos (with his trade-war antics terrifying investors, causing enormous economic uncertainty, and driving up prices), and repeatedly sided with Russia over Ukraine. Most Americans disliked all of those things. Thus, despite gratitude for Trump’s handling of the southern border, the honeymoon lasted only about six weeks.

These developments weren’t media concoctions. They actually happened. They were valid, widely reported stories that most American believed reflected poorly on President Trump. And they all happened before the Signal incident.

Gutfeld assuredly knows all of this. He’d have to be oblivious to major reporting on his own network not to. But his media-brand is to treat every negative reaction to Trump as either totally illegitimate or a gross overreaction. That includes professional analysis of “Liberty Day,” our president’s economically illiterate, non-reciprocal tariff plan that’s based on fake data, and amounts to the largest arbitrary tax increase in U.S. history. It has already created a level of global economic uncertainty higher than that of the pandemic, which even Trump’s former vice president is pointing out will cost American families at least $3,500 extra a year. JP Morgan is already talking about a recession, and longtime economic and strategic allies are turning away from us en masse.

Gutfeld (and countless other right-wing commentators) would of course be screaming bloody murder if Joe Biden had created this monstrosity, but because it’s Trump, the real problem is that people just don’t understand our president’s brilliance.

“It's all about negotiations,” assured Gutfeld on Wednesday’s The Five (to giggles from his co-hosts). “Trump does this all the time. He creates an asset out of nothing, and then trades it. It's amazing."

What’s amazing is the level of disingenuousness required to make such an absurd statement.

Now, consider that Gutfeld is just one of many such people on cable news, who says whatever it takes to stay on top of their profession and compel millions of factional viewers to keep tuning back in. This is the political-media landscape I and others routinely have to wade through in our efforts to put forth fair, earnest, fact-based commentary. There’s an expectation from many news-consumers for us to accept and work from the premises put forth fraudsters.

I think that expectation should be resoundingly rejected by people of good conscience, who care more about their country than personal fame.

One of my favorite cable-news commentators (from another era) was the late Charles Krauthammer. He famously said, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think—and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.”

It’s extraordinary how many of Krauthammer’s former colleagues are perfectly happy exercising such self-betrayal. My hats off to those who’ve instead heeded his words.