If you get your news from almost anywhere other than Falun Gong’s Epoch Times or Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews you are aware of the arrest a few days ago, (in Las Vegas FWIW), of Alexander Smirnov, the key informant in the constantly, aggresively and loudly hyped “investigation” into Hunter and Joe Biden. You may also then be aware that MAGA Republicans’ case against Joe Biden has essentially exploded in their faces in a putrid, cringey mist.
The collapse of this case is so total you’d be embarrassed for someone — looking at you Sean Hannity — if they weren’t so completely insulated from embarrassment and shame.
(BTW — 50 Dickens Points for Smirnov’s name. Can’t make it up. Have a double, Sean.)
There are dozen different ways to examine this story, but for some reason the face of a guy I used to work for kept popping up in my head. He ran a small media operation here in Minnesota and was constantly struggling to walk what is known as the “false equivalency” tight rope, a style of footwork that required him to regularly tut-tut “the extremes” of modern media, to be specific the FoxNews and MSNBCs/CNNs of the world.
As he tried to sell it to his staff of quasi-journalists, the two ends of the spectrum (as he saw the spectrum) were equally reckless and irresponsible. The proper (i.e. safer) course was right there square in the middle where you never developed or argued an opinion on anything that mattered, other than maybe how yummy the brioche was at some new restaurant/possible advertiser.
Having a few Jewish friends and some familarity with street level Yiddish, every time I saw this guy the word, “Putz!” flashed before my eyes. And I wonder what (if anything) he’s thinking today watching Fox, with its latest long-running act of reckless hysteria-mongering, faceplant on the sidewalk like a career drunk?
On a matter more specific to journalistic integrity, there’s the as-stark-as-you-can-get issue of honesty in the way the two “extremes” are currently handling this story.
As Media Matters, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Department of Justice, Slate and others have all reported — (none of whom are funded by a looney Asian religious cult or a company that just got done paying almost $800 million in damages for its last long-running carnival of lies and bullshit) — the “FBI informant”, Mr. Smirnov, arrested by the Trump-appointed special counsel, is an almost cartoonish joke. He’s so farcical any respectable journalist could check him out in an hour. No news organization with any respect for facts would have tolerated him as the foundation for so much coverage. Not for an hour, much less for years.
But such is the seal of the bubble around America’s MAGA conservatives today. Almost nothing intrudes on what they so desperately want to hear and believe. They offer the Epoch Times, the FoxNews/Hannitys/Jesee Watters/Lauta Ingrahams of the world their embittered credulity and those “sources” exploit it.
But despite the demise of any basis of fact with the arrest of Mr. Smirnov, The MAGA Credulous are not getting anything remotely like an apology or a correction from their most trusted purveyors of truth.
My apologies if you’ve already heard this:
From The Washington Post … “… no one on Fox News invested more heavily in the ‘Biden bribe’ story than Hannity. An analysis from Media Matters determined that he has covered the allegation in at least 85 segments since it first emerged in May 2023. On Thursday night, he had nothing to say about the new development. Instead, he began by focusing, once again, on [Atlanta DA Fani] Willis. Viewers who tuned in at 7 p.m. had, by 9:30, gotten an hour and 40 minutes of commercial-interspersed discussion of the hearing involving the Georgia official.”
Said Media Matters, ” … Hannity alone aired 85 segments promoting the claim, including 28 monologues. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump estimates that Fox News mentioned the claim about 2,600 times in the last 12 months.”
Two thousand six hundred mentions — including 43 on camera, primetime interviews with MAGA’s beknighted committee chairman, James Comer — about assertions, that Fox and Hannity knew were just assertions, but they nevertheless presented as “bombshell” facts. Assertions, (the official-sounding “1023s” Hannity referenced so often are in fact just that, a statement of as yet uninvestigated assertions), in no way, shape or form verified.
And to date this morning, three days post arrest and implosion, there has not been a peep of remorse or apology from anyone at FoxNews. Not that any of us in this “extreme” bubble are surprised, of course. Reckless assertions and the unapologetic peddling of … well, lies … is built into the Fox business model. We expect no more. And much less.
My point here is the contrast. The contrast a value-free “putz” and anyone on America’s new MAGA right refuses to make between the two allegedly equivalent “extremes”. The Fox/Epoch/Mark Levin/name your favorite MAGA mouthpiece and, the CNN and MSNBC “extreme.” For simplicity sake think of it as a Sean Hannity v. Rachel Maddow battle of “extremes.” (Lord, I’d love to watch a debate between those two. At The Sphere in Vegas. $500 a pop!)
Had either CNN or MSNBC engaged in anything as high-profile, bombastic, persistent and egregiously fallacious as what Hannity and FoxNews have done they’d be fired on the spot and faced with reputational ruin. At best they’d be a laughingstock.
But you and I know the Hannity engine — from the basement of his Palm Beach mansion – will plow on without the slightest wound of consequence.
Immunity from shame may be the biggest benefit of operating within that “extreme” bubble.
