How many times is the media going to blow this Merrick Garland story?
After MSNBC aired a segment on Monday night which falsely suggested that a new DOJ memo would somehow allow Donald Trump to magically protect himself from indictment just by prematurely announcing a 2024 campaign, the DOJ leadership publicly confirmed on Tuesday that the memo in question will do no such thing.
This marked the fourth time this year that the DOJ leadership has had to publicly reiterate its stance that its Donald Trump January 6th probe will go all the way to the top, and that nothing will stand in the way of it. And yet even after the DOJ issued this statement, most (not all) of the mainstream media gave little coverage to the statement – and one fairly prominent pundit even criticized Garland for not making more of an effort to communicate these things.
That’s right, we’re now at the point where the media and pundit class is bashing Merrick Garland for not making more of an effort to shoot down the phony stories that the mainstream media is making up about Merrick Garland.
That’s some world class gaslighting right there. And yet it’s not Garland who’s the victim. He clearly doesn’t care what the media makes up about him, or he’d be out there playing footsie with the media on a regular basis, so it would write puff pieces about him, or let him plant stories that are attributed to a “person familiar with the Attorney General’s thinking.” You know, like how Bill Barr spent most of his time in office.
There is one accidental truth in all this, which is that if you’re holding high office and you’re not particularly headline worthy, the media and pundit class is going to find a way to get ratings anyway. President Biden doesn’t spend all day doing reporters’ jobs for them by tweeting controversial things they can write about, so the media punishes Biden by covering him in hyperbolically harsh fashion. Merrick Garland doesn’t let the media treat his DOJ investigations like reality shows, so it just makes up phony stories about him, knowing that he’s not willing to put ongoing criminal cases at risk just to push back against the media in any real detail.
If we’re now at a point where the knock on the President of the United States is that he doesn’t waste enough time spoon feeding the media mean tweets, and the knock on the Attorney General is that he’s not willing to compromise DOJ investigations just to give the media something juicy to write about, then the common denominator here is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the media itself. But the media will always go where the ratings are, which means giving the public whatever will keep them tuned in. The media won’t change until the public demands better. And until that happens, our top elected officials will be stuck having to decide whether to do their jobs, or waste all their time on reality show nonsense just to keep the media from trying to destroy them.
