How everyone got it so wrong
I’ve said before that 90% of what goes on in politics takes place behind the scenes. This leaves the media eternally digging to try to unearth more than the 10% of the political process that plays out in public view. It also leaves cable news hosts and Twitter pundits with the temptation to frame things in simplistic fashion by pretending that the visible 10% of politics is the entirety of politics.
If the behind the scenes nature of politics makes it difficult for the public to parse what’s really going on at any given time, it becomes far more difficult when you consider that 99% – or even 99.9% – of what goes on in federal criminal investigations takes place behind the scenes. The media is often left with so little information, it either ignores such probes during the long stretches in which none of what’s happening becomes public, or goes so far as to specifically claim that nothing is happening in such probes simply because none of it is happening in public.
This quandary was never more readily apparent than during this past week’s triumphant news that the DOJ has in fact had a 1/6 grand jury secretly running against Trump world for months. Even as the media and the public were demanding that the DOJ make such a move, it turns out the DOJ had already made that exact move. Okay, so some folks (including pundits who knew better) were yelling simplistically naive things like “arrest Trump immediately” or “subpoena everyone right this minute” or “somebody do something!” But when you run such phrases through an angry-yelling-to-actual-legal-procedure dictionary, what these folks were really yelling for – whether they realized it or not – was precisely this grand jury. It’s literally how such a criminal probe works.
Of course, as often happens when the media and the pundit class spends months doubling down on a ratings-friendly but knowingly false narrative such as the “DOJ is doing nothing,” even when that narrative is proven false in spectacularly obvious fashion, it doesn’t necessarily have the impact on the media’s narrative in the way you might expect.
Over the past few days we’ve only seen one prominent legal pundit flat out admit that he was wrong about the Garland DOJ. Other prominent pundits have instead tried to cover their tracks by insisting that the DOJ had been doing “nothing” prior to launching this grand jury (fully ignoring the criminal cases that were painstakingly built against the Oath Keepers leadership, which led to at least one cooperative plea deal, which made the grand jury against Trump world possible). And yet other pundits have moved the goal posts by now insisting that it’s “too late” and the DOJ will “run out of time” (this is often accompanied by falsely implying that the DOJ changes hands based on who wins the midterms).
The underlying problem is that the structure of modern political journalism and punditry – which is structured around the 24/7 ratings mandate of cable news and the viral nature of social media – is set up such that pundits are essentially rewarded for lying. If you tweet something false like “the DOJ is doing nothing,” you’re guaranteed to get more retweets and page views than if you take the time to explain how DOJ criminal probes actually work behind the scenes. If you go on cable news and falsely insist the DOJ is “running out of time” while speaking in a faux-earnest tone of voice, you’re far more likely to get invited back onto the air than if you explain that we’re not actually up against some omnipresent countdown clock that will cause us all to be doomed if a certain magic wand isn’t waved by this time tomorrow.
It’s not just that most (not all, but most) prominent political pundits have spent the past months willfully ignoring all the emerging signs of this DOJ probe into Trump world, so they could instead push doomsday narratives that produced better results for their careers. It’s that when they all got busted for it this week, nothing happened. They simply spun up a new ratings-friendly doomsday narrative about how the DOJ is still supposedly going to let Trump get away with it all, and they went about their business. Their “business,” as they see it, is ratings and retweets and page views.
We may never be able to fix the fact that most of the people attracted to political punditry (on the left, right, and center) are perfectly willing to push false narratives in order to get attention and advance their careers. What we can fix is the fact that too many audience members (again, on the left, right, and center, to obviously varying degrees) are so ill informed about the reality of how these things work, they don’t even know when pundits are bamboozling them.
Education is the key. Knowledge is power. We need not just an informed electorate, but also an informed political activist class. It’s not enough to spend hours a day following political news and punditry. You have to educate yourself sufficiently on how these things work, if you want to be able to run what you hear from pundits through the proper filter. 90% of what goes on in politics, and 99% of what goes on in DOJ probes, you never get to see happening. But if you sufficiently familiarize yourself with how these things work in general, you’ll know enough to fill in the gaps and figure out what is – or at least what isn’t – really going on.
Not one political activist or enthusiast should have been remotely surprised this week when they learned that the DOJ has had a grand jury running against Trump world for months. The publicly visible signs had been there for awhile. Though subtle, they were at least enough to have kept anyone from having concluded these past months that the DOJ was doing “nothing.” And yet most people were indeed stunned to learn that the DOJ has in fact been doing a whole lot of something. That alone tells us we have a problem. It’s one we have to fix.
