Eric Alternman - "Midterm Media Meltdown" [View all]

[TomCADem]

Nice piece from Eric Alternman that goes behind the corporate media's rightward turn of the electorate/return of "mainstream" Republicans narrative.

http://www.thenation.com/article/190505/midterm-media-meltdown#

One problem with the answers to the above is that they reside in phenomena that are complex and multifaceted, while our media insist on a narrative that is simple and straightforward. To be fair, some of the weaknesses of our system fall into the category of “It was ever thus.” Turnout is always anemic in midterms; the president’s party almost always loses in his sixth year. And while it’s true that Republican state legislatures have shamelessly gerrymandered their election maps to the party’s advantage, the distribution of the population would likely ensure a Republican House majority anyway, given the way that conservatives spread themselves across the rural areas and liberals crowd themselves into the cities.

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Finally, the 2014 election coverage suffered even more than usual from the mainstream media’s inability to admit the degree to which the Republican Party has been captured by a fringe element with an unshakable commitment to ideological fantasy. As Heather Digby Parton notes in Salon, Iowa’s new senator-elect, Joni Ernst, professes to believe “in the fringe constitutional theory called ‘nullification,’ has told audiences that she’s ready to take up arms against the government, and thinks a 20-year-old U.N. resolution to encourage nations to use fewer resources called Agenda 21 is a threat to the American way of life.” (A spokesperson has denied that Ernst supports nullification.) But as Norm Ornstein reports, The Washington Post almost completely ignored her nutty notions: “A Nexis search shows that the Post has had four references to Ernst and Agenda 21—all by Greg Sargent on his blog from the left, The Plum Line, and none on the news pages of the paper.” Receiving far more coverage was her opponent’s argument with his neighbor over some chickens. The Times, too, made no mention of Agenda 21, but seven of the chickens. (On MSNBC, Luke Russert’s issueless reporting explained Ernst’s appeal with the assertion that she was “trying to ride this popular charisma” into statewide office.)

As Ornstein demonstrates, Ernst was hardly alone in benefitting from her bizarre beliefs being whitewashed for her by the mainstream media. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said in a telephone town hall: “Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico, who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism. They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.” In this case, the Post did run a fact-check column by Glenn Kessler on Cotton’s assertion, but not a single news story. The Times made no mention of it whatever.

The whitewash was especially thick this year because the narrative of the night was that the Tea Party had been defeated and the GOP was back in the hands of its far more responsible “establishment.” In fact, much closer to the truth is that the lunatics are now running the asylum… and, rather frighteningly, both houses of Congress.