Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Jim Acosta (audio voiceover): Do you agree with President Trump’s decision to pardon these violent people and releasing them from jail?
Acosta (audio voiceover): What do you mean you don’t know that? We’re showing the footage on the air right now. Congressman, you were there that day. There are offenders on January 6 who violently beat police officers. There are offenders who are convicted of seditious conspiracy. That is the truth.
Acosta (audio voiceover): Are you going to respond and say whether or not it is right to let these people out of jail?
Acosta (audio voiceover): You’re a congressman, you’re a member of Congress, you’re an elected official. Take a stand.
Acosta (audio voiceover): Beating, not trespassing. Beating police officer, tasing police officers, seditious conspiracy. What happened to backing police officers? Your party has said time and again, We back the blue. It sounds like you let down the blue. You’re betraying the blue.
Acosta (audio voiceover): Why not just say, You were wrong, Mr. President? Say it. Why can’t you say it?
Sargent: Matt, how often do you hear Republicans questioned like that by reporters on the air?
Darcy had another report that the network chief Mark Thompson had a meeting by Zoom with staff on Inauguration Day and told them that he was looking for forward-looking coverage that would avoid prejudging the Trump administration. He didn’t want to hear that Trump was, say, the first president with a felony record to take the oath. This is certainly remarkable interviewing from Acosta. I hope to see more of it, but I would worry very much that he would be smacked down for it internally rather than rewarded.
Gertz: Yeah, that is apparently where we are. And I want to point out that this is the result of a very intentional, systematic effort by people on the right to break the initial consensus that January 6 was a horror show; that it had featured thousands of Trumpists, called to the White House by the president, incited with his lies about a stolen election, storming the U.S. Capitol and let loose on Congress, with scores of law enforcement officers assaulted on that day.
Sargent: What you’re getting at there, which is that there’s this separate narrative on the right about January 6, was really well-revealed in this Acosta moment as well. During this interview, Burchett keeps falling back on the counternarrative. And in the context of a CNN interview, it sounds like crazy talk; it’s inane nonsense. Yet those are things obviously that would be greeted very positively on Fox News. So Burchett was talking almost as if he were on Fox, and that’s particularly what sounded so ridiculous about it. This stuff was so absurdly off point that when it’s aired in a context where the interviewer actually knows something about the event, it is like a bubble bursting in a way. That’s what it looked like to me.
But that’s the footage that you don’t see on Fox News. They don’t want to talk about any of this. They want to have this conversation in a theoretical, Well, you know, the voters have spoken. Promised made, promised kept. They don’t want to let their viewers see the visceral realities of that day. They want them to forget.
Gertz: That’s a good question. It’s certainly been a while, I think. The original sin of this coverage was that Fox was unwilling to break with Trump. They were willing to say that the people doing the assaults in real time on January 6 were criminals. They were willing to say they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. What they weren’t willing to do was make the connection to the fact that they were there in the first place because Donald Trump had lied to them about a stolen election and told them to come to the White House. They couldn’t do that because they had also lied to the American public about how there had been a stolen election.
Once you got around to the point where the January 6 Committee was meeting, Fox wouldn’t air the hearings. Instead, they would have Tucker Carlson, who really led this effort, do his regular show and explain how there was no reason to pay attention to any of this, and it was all a lie. The counternarrative that they, mainly Tucker Carlson with the help of some fringier figures that he helped pull into the mainstream, concocted was that the whole thing had been a setup; that the FBI had basically created the whole situation; that no one had weapons, no one was hurt, everything was fine; and that these prosecutors went after the January Sixers just like they want to go after you.
Sargent: Another thing that’s really jarring about this interview, and what you just said gets at this as well, is that there’s so much euphemism in the mainstream media on the subject of January 6, on the subject of Trump’s support for the rioters, on the subject of what Trump actually did to try to overthrow the government with mob violence. There’s this unbalanced situation where the euphemism that prevails in mainstream discourse is almost outweighed by this “Death Star” on the right, this black hole of lies and disinformation about that event. And it exerts this weird gravitational pull on the mainstream media and keeps it in the realm of euphemism and bothsidesism. Can you talk about that dynamic? It’s a major problem, right? You just don’t have blunt, clear talk like that from Acosta in the MSN. And that, in combination with the Death Star of Fox News, creates a highly unbalanced media ecosystem, right?
In this particular moment, with an authoritarian right-wing president who has denounced the press at every turn and made very clear that he is willing to use the power of the federal government to punish media outlets and their owners, it just leads to a very dangerous situation.
Gertz: Absolutely. And the position that CNN is in is certainly not unique. You saw ABC News settling with Donald Trump before he took office, paying $15 million for his lawsuit. You see CBS News—this was a really unnerving report last week from the Wall Street Journal—considering settling the lawsuit that Donald Trump had against them basically as part of an effort to ensure that their parent company’s merger goes through. [That is] because they fear, correctly, that Donald Trump would hold up that merger because he’s angry at the media outlet that the parent company owns.
Sargent: There was one moment that I thought was really telling as well. You may recall during the campaign, Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg for life or something like that. And then Mark Zuckerberg made this big decision to essentially cancel fact-checking on social media, and he defended that decision in language that could have come right out of Trump’s mouth or MAGA’s mouth, about how fact-checking is all biased against Republicans or something like that.
Gertz: Yeah. And what we’ve seen in the early days of this administration, in the executive orders is the total dissolution of any wall that was existing between the White House and the Department of Justice. The very order creating those 1,500 pardons also required the Justice Department to drop all of its pending cases against J6 defendants. So that’s just a diktat from the president for who should get prosecuted and who shouldn’t, which is a very strong signal to anyone who he has previously threatened publicly that it’s not a joke. It’s something that he can do at any time. And people will respond to that.
But OK, Republicans didn’t pay a price for this, at least in this election anyway. What does that say about the info environment? Maybe they really can just speak in Fox language all the time and swing voters just won’t care? Or is this a function of the asymmetry we were talking about where the center, as it were, of the information environment is just so confused and “bothsidesy” that swing voters never really hear blunt truths anyway? Maybe Republicans have made a calculation about all this that’s correct.
But certainly, it is possible to win whether or not you are existing in the real world. The real question will be, as they try to govern based on these particular insanities, whether they are able to maintain that level of support. This is a fragile, to some extent, coalition on the right. It’s one united by Donald Trump, a one that has a number of contradictions once you get down to a policy tax. And I think we’ll see how that plays out.
Gertz: It didn’t work very well when he was actually in office. That is a precedent to look to, that once he was actually president and starting to act based on the crazy stuff he was seeing on Fox News, his popularity took a nosedive.
Gertz: That’s totally true.
Gertz: I think so. Also that Trump is similarly giving pardons and commutations to people convicted of seditious conspiracy because he wanted the conspiracy to succeed. He was hoping that this was going to work. And that, I think, is the ugly truth that Republicans have not been able to say out loud and have not been challenged with quite enough. They wanted it to work.
Gertz: Yeah. That is the major cleavage that is exploitable to some extent between Trump and Republicans who want to support Trump but are not entirely sociopathic.
Gertz: And then it’s just whataboutism from there. It’s Soros, attorneys, so on and so forth.
Gertz: That gets to [questions] like: What does he actually believe, and what can he say? And what is he afraid to say because of what it would lead to down the road, either he came under fire from Trump or anything like that? There are benefits in coalition management to having pardoned a mob of zealots who have shown that they are willing to be violent on your behalf.
Tarrio said that, for instance. He came out and he said now we’re going go after the people who did this to us as if they’ve been victimized. So it would behoove Dems to start talking about this in a forward-looking way, start saying, OK, well, do you think that this was a gesture on behalf of public safety, releasing all these people the way Trump did? You know what I mean? Pin Republicans down on the forward-looking element of it.
Sargent: Maybe what might actually happen is that if Jim Acosta gets shoved out of CNN, they’ll hire one of the pardoned insurrectionists to replace him (laughs).
Sargent: Right, you sure don’t. Matt Gertz, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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