The big lie and the limits of journalism

One of the fascinating aspects of the current Dominion lawsuit against Fox “News” is that it’s throwing a rather sobering light on the extent to which the journalistic documentation of the Big Lie — Donald Trump’s wildly false claims about how he supposedly won the 2020 presidential election but had the vote stolen from him — has made almost no detectable difference in American political life as a whole, let alone on Fox News and in the rest of the right wing epistemic bubble.

In short, it’s been a striking and to me frankly surprising development that basically all of the mainstream media outside that bubble — from Even the Liberal New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC all the way down to your local newspaper, assuming it still exists — has for two years now broken protocol and explicitly identified this particular series of right wing lies as lies, rather than bothsiding the issue in the usual some say the world is round others say it’s flat the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle fashion.

They even use the word “lie” pretty consistently, despite the standard squeamishness about calling lies lies, especially when uttered by the tribunes of the Real Americans of the Heartland ™.

And it somehow seems not to matter, at all. The fact the respectable media have called and continue to call Trump’s biggest and most important lie a lie, as opposed to tarting it up as something else via the traditional rhetorical conventions of “objective” [sic] journalism seems to have had essentially zero effect on the American public’s attitude toward any of this. Donald Trump is telling the very worst kind of a lie a man in his position can tell — that the presidential election he lost legitimately wasn’t actually legitimate at all — and he’s still going to be the next Republican presidential nominee, and very possibly the next president, despite the fact that the mainstream media are for once not temporizing about his bottomless political depravity and corruption.

Which leaves me at least searching for my lost shaker of salt.