The limits of journalism

The MSM are all doing very straightforward reporting on Trump’s crazy conspiratorial claims yesterday that nobody showed up for Harris’s Michigan rally, and that the supposed 15,000-person crowd was an AI-generated deep fake.

Every national outlet outside the Fox Cinematic Universe is describing Trump’s claims as “false,” as opposed to doing any temporizing or both siding.

So you have a major presidential candidate who is either completely delusional, or intentionally telling absurdly obvious and easily refutable lies about matters of public record. In Trump’s case it’s likely some combination of these factors — he’s probably delusional enough to at least sort of believe his own nutty claims, but ultimately of course he’s a pure bullshitter, who is fundamentally unconcerned with whether anything he says is true or not. But as he ages the delusional piece appears to be gaining ground on the bullshitting piece.

There remains plenty to criticize about the respectable media’s, i.e., not Fox et. al., coverage of Trump, but when it comes to this kind of thing, and most crucially his continued claims about the 2020 election being stolen, I don’t see what else they can really do. For three years they’ve reported, over and over again, that Trump’s claims about the election being stolen are false, and they’ve reported that he tried to illegally overturn the results of an election he lost. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the complete lack of ambiguity on this, which one would think would disqualify someone as a practical matter from being a major party presidential candidate.

I mean think about that: It’s a matter of public record, from the perspective of the non-Pravda media, that the Republican presidential candidate lost the previous presidential election, created an elaborate conspiracy to lie about that fact, and then tried to illegally overturn the results of the election he lost. This isn’t in dispute outside the right wing echo chamber. But it doesn’t make any difference.

That is something that even somebody as cynical about Trump’s role in American politics as myself would never have predicted in January of 2021. Yet here we are.