How MAGA Took Over Legacy Media
And what Democrats can learn from it
More than twenty years ago, the journalist Ron Suskind relayed an anecdote about a conversation he had with a senior advisor to President George W. Bush.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The next Republican president did Bush one better — and then some. Two days after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, White House advisor Kellyanne Conway sparred with then-Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd over whether Trump had really had the largest inaugural crowd size ever, as then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had declared.
Conway: “You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”
Todd: “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.”
Conway: “If we’re going to keep referring to the press secretary in those types of terms I think we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here.”
NBC News, of course, did not want to lose access to the administration, so little by little, it stopped covering every single lie that came like a firehose from the White House. Instead, it allowed Republicans to continue constructing their own reality — until it became our reality too.
Want to know how the right-wing has taken over corporate media? The answer is simple: