The bullshit season is now upon us
It happens almost like clockwork each Sunday, or Monday morning if they’re really trying to squeeze it in. The major newspapers each decide to hype a line of scary, defeatist, outrage inducing bullshit just before the workweek begins, in the hope of enticing MSNBC’s hosts into spending the first part of the week breathlessly hyping that line of bullshit in order to scare and outrage viewers into tuning in. It’s a consistent enough pattern that I often spend Sundays watching the newswires to see what lines of bullshit each major newspaper is going to trot out that day, in the hope of getting out ahead of it. The past 24 hours have seen the pattern repeat once again.
The New York Times ran an article aimed at convincing readers that the DOJ is considering giving Donald Trump a cushy plea deal because it would be near-impossible to prosecute him when such sensitive classified documents are involved. This article didn’t actually contain any reporting that the DOJ is considering such a thing, and instead solely quoted outsiders who hypothesized that the DOJ might be considering such a thing. In other words, it was a fake story about something that isn’t even happening.
The Washington Post ran its own article aimed at convincing readers that the FBI successfully held up the DOJ’s January 6th investigation into Trump for more than a year, and that Attorney General Merrick Garland supposedly sat there and let it happen. But this article gets the entire timeline almost astoundingly wrong. Its entire premise is easily disproven simply by looking at when the DOJ issued various subpoenas and such. After some pushback, the authors of the article are now defending their work by saying their sources within the DOJ “believe” it happened this way. But reliable sources don’t believe, they know. It’s clear that this entire article is sourced to people in the DOJ who aren’t actually involved in the probe, aren’t familiar with any of the basics of what’s transpired in the probe, and are just guessing. Yet the Washington Post somehow saw fit to print these guesses as if they were what actually happened.
Sure enough, both these deeply flawed and essentially fictional newspaper articles are now being breathlessly hyped on MSNBC, in order to stir up the kind of defeatist outrage that keeps people tuned in. It doesn’t matter that both articles are so full of shit, they completely fall apart upon first read. MSNBC is hyping them – particularly the WaPo article – as if they’re gospel.
It’s a pattern that I see over and over in this industry. Nothing new happens in politics on the weekends, meaning cable news hosts are stuck going into Monday rehashing last week’s old news unless they can get their hands on some new narrative. Major newspapers know this, so they compete with each other to see who can spend the weekend crafting the kind of narrative that MSNBC hosts will immediately seize upon on Monday. The outrage addicts and panic addicts in the audience will use it as an excuse to go out of their minds with defeatist hysteria. And by the time real news happens on Tuesday or Wednesday, MSNBC will just drop the fake storylines and move on to real ones.
What’s astonishing is just how repetitive and similarly structured these fake stories always are. The NY Times is pretending that Garland is planning to hand Trump a get out of jail free pass in his classified documents indictment, when no such thing is happening. The Washington Post is pretending that Garland was sitting on his hands with Trump and January 6th at a time when subpoenas and other moves prove that Garland and his DOJ were already fairly deep into investigating the matter. Both of today’s fake storylines portray the world’s most hated villain (Trump) getting away with it all thanks to the designated bogey man (Garland). These kind of fake stories nearly always follow that exact same pattern.
At this point the “Garland has let / tried to let / is letting / will let Trump off the hook” narrative has become something of a children’s ghost story. The story gets told over and over again, always with the same characters doing the same things, just dressed up slightly differently each time.
All you have to do is look at Twitter’s trending topics today to see how many people are falling for these latest phony storylines about how Garland is letting Trump off the hook. The problem isn’t that audiences are dumb. It’s that the media has spent all this time using repetition to precondition audiences to believe that Trump will get away with it all and Garland will make it happen. It’s reached a point where audiences have a visceral negative reaction upon hearing Garland’s name, and therefore are inclined to automatically believe any negative story about him that follows. The emotionality of it prevents them from stopping to think about whether the storyline is real – and in fact prevents audiences from thinking at all. Which of course is how you get audiences to stay glued to their screens without even thinking about changing the channel.
Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. On Sunday or Monday morning, the major media outlets will each trot out their bullshit stories aimed at getting MSNBC’s attention. As Monday goes on, MSNBC will pick one of those bullshit stories and hype it to high heaven in order to boost its own ratings, which of course helps the original article go viral. And then by Tuesday or Wednesday, when actual news happens in Trump’s criminal scandals, the whole thing will be instantly buried and forgotten – until the next Monday.
One thing does stand out as being a bit different this time around. Jack Smith (he was hired by Merrick Garland, if you remember) appears to be so near the end of his 2020 election related probe, he even had witnesses testify to the grand jury on the same day Trump was being arraigned on separate charges in Miami. This points to the election related charges against Trump coming within weeks if not days. It’s so obvious by now that even the hated Bill Barr is on TV admitting it, because there’s little use pretending anymore.
And yet now, on what could end up being the final Monday before the DOJ indicts Trump for January 6th, the nation’s two biggest newspapers are trotting out the two most ludicrous “Trump will get away with it all” articles to have come along in some time. It’s as if they’ve realized that they’ll have trouble milking the “Garland has let Trump off the hook” narrative once this next DOJ indictment comes down, and so they’re trying to milk it for all it’s worth while they still can.
This doesn’t mean Jack Smith will indict Trump for 1/6 tomorrow, or even this week. Anytime in the next month would be a reasonable educated guess. But we’re now at a point where for all we know, the indictment – or at least definitive news confirming that the indictment is about to happen – could come tomorrow. So if nothing else, the media’s sudden attempt at turning the “Garland has let Trump off the hook” knobs to eleven is a sign of just how close the media thinks we are to the DOJ’s next Trump indictment.
