Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

It is true that most reporters, editors, and publishers are more ideologically aligned with Democrats than Republicans. They believe in climate science, support marriage equality, and think making assault rifles easier to buy than cold medicine is probably a mistake.3 Many live in New York City; Washington, DC; or Los Angeles, three of the bluest cities in America. We must acknowledge that the ideological background and geographic location of many in the media lends itself to unconscious bias in terms of what topics receive coverage and whose stories are told. Progressives unwilling to admit this make it easier for conservatives to sow distrust in the media ecosystem.

However, this is a far cry from the idea put forth by the Right that the media works in concert with Democrats or gives Democrats more favorable coverage than Republicans. After the massively disproportionate coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email habits in the New York Times or the hours of free, unchecked airtime CNN and others gifted Trump rallies in 2016, it should be

clear the media is not on the Demo...

Democrats are trying to make government work, and Republicans are using whatever power they have to break it. Coverage that Disproportionately focuses on the things that are broken versus the things that work benefits the antigovernment party.

No one who watched Kaitlan Collins go toe-to-toe with Trump and his aides could possibly think she is a secret pro-Trump mole.

Donald Trump is a racist who ran for president on a very specific campaign of white nationalism and racial grievance. Yet most media outlets and pundits insisted on arguing that Trump’s win involved everything except race.

There was an unwillingness to point out that nearly every single Republican Party leader and tens of millions of Republican voters backed

racist because they shared his racist views, supported his racist policies, or had a disturbing level of comfort with a racist wielding the power of the state. To do so would have been to risk accusations of liber...

Instead, the media attributed Trump’s victory to “e...

With the election of Trump, the Republicans had their racist cake and ate it, too; and the media helped them do it.15

The Times has done some of the most important journalism in the world. But, essentially, the paper doesn’t want to use the word lie, because, the thinking there goes, the reporter can never know the speaker’s (i.e., Trump’s) intent. Though I understand the concern of desensitizing the public,

if Baquet applied this standard of certainty of intent to all New York Times reporting, the newspaper would be unable to function. A huge portion of political reporting depends on anonymous sources recounting conversations, meetings, and documents of which the reporter has no firsthand knowledge.

The irony here is that the Times and other media outlets are angering the subscribers who pay their salary in order to appease the very people who profit, politically and financially, from their demise.

Being as tough on Biden as they were on Trump means creating controversies where there are none. This dynamic was perfectly encapsulated by a story run in the New York Times the day before Biden was even sworn in as president. Here was the headline and subhead from the “Paper of Record”:

Misstatements by Biden became equivalent to bald-faced lies from Trump.

Some in the press take these complaints as validation of their objectivity: If both sides are angry, we must be doing something right. With all due respect, that is idiocy.

In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon

adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office. And yet, Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today.

The Fox = MSNBC conversation is a proxy for the idea that liberals and conservatives engage in the same propaganda and disinformation strategies. This contention is insipid bullshit. Therefore, it is critical to underscore the real difference between MSNBC and Fox News.

On paper, the two networks have the same format: news during the day and opinion at night. However, that’s where the similarities end. MSNBC, both its news and opinion sides, operates under traditional rules of journalism, with fact-checkers, editors, and accountability. MSNBC is an adjunct of NBC News, and for the most part, its reporting adheres to the standards for the nonideological parent network. At Fox, however, the editors are full partisans. In 2018, John Moody, one of the most senior Fox execs, responsible for the news side of the operation, was forced into retirement after writing an op-ed suggesting that the US Olympic Committee would like to change the Olympics motto from “‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’” Moody’s sin, in the eyes of the higher-ups at Fox, was not being a bigoted asshole; it was being a bigoted asshole in public and lifting the very thin veil of faux objectivity for the “journalists” at his network.

The “news” side of Fox is a beard for the propaganda goals of the network. The journalists themselves are compromised by their own conservative beliefs. Witness Peter Doocy’s questions at the White House briefing every day. The dim son of Steve Doocy, the even dimmer Fox and Friends host, heads to the White House every day to ask the White House press secretary questions essentially written by the Republican National Committee. While still at Fox, midday anchor Shep Smith periodically—and I can’t emphasize “periodically” enough—fact-checked

checked Trump and pushed back on the racist dreck4 coming from Tucker Carlson and other Fox personalities. But instead of being hailed a totem of Fox’s “fair and balanced” approach, Smith left the network because there was no appetite internally (or externally) for someone who said bad things about Trump or Trumpism. After losing one too many in...

The daytime lineup at MSNBC includes some clear progressives, but it also includes Andrea Mitchell, a veteran foreign policy reporter famous for being tough on all comers regardless of party; Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press and a favorite punching bag of Resistance Twitter; and Nicole Wallace, who was George W. Bush’s White House communications director.

Fox, on the other hand, punishes people not for getting things wrong, but for telling uncomfortable truths.

The Fox poll is one of the most reliable in the business. (I

In the end, Biden won Arizona. Mishkin and his team were correct. This was a rare moment of journalistic integrity for a network that had spent the previous four years debasing itself to appease the fickle and feckless president. And how did Fox respond? Did it promote Mishkin? Nope, it fired a bunch of his team to appease Trump. Not long after the ratings were back up, and Trump was once again on the air.

But having an opinion is not an excuse for spreading disinformation.

Opinion hosts must be held accountable for the accuracy of what they say. Once again, MSNBC and its hosts are not perfect. They make mistakes; we all do. But they do not try to misinform their audience for either ratings or public gain. Maddow and Hayes are very smart, very serious, and very substantive people. Neither of them would intentionally mislead, but if they did, they would have to retract their words and face reprimand from their higher-ups.

The Dominion conspiracy theory was a central part of the Big Lie. According to its proponents, the voting machine software created by Dominion and used in more than twenty states was not only hacked but was specifically designed to be hacked.

media that they not be seen as too favorable to Biden and the Democrats. The coup de grace was, on the day the House of Representatives was about to finally pass Biden’s plan, the New York Times app featured the headline “Pelosi Predicts Thursday Vote on Biden’s Ambitious Social Policy Bill.” Honestly, WTF does that mean? You could conduct a decade of market research and not come up with a less appealing, less informative headline for a transformative piece of legislation than “ambitious social policy bill.” It’s certainly not obvious from this headline that the bill included the largest and most important investment to arrest climate change in history. Nor did it tell anyone that the House was passing a bill to provide universal pre-K and subsidized child care for millions of Americans. Or that insulin prices would now be capped at thirty-five dollars a month. The New York Times had no incentive to use Biden’s branding or to describe favorably what was in the bills. They put anchovies on the cookie because they are in the anchovy business.

The Republicans do not have this problem. They do not rely on the mainstream press to deliver their message. They have a wholly owned means of distribution. As Alex Pareene aptly described it in The New Republic:

This is why we are losing the messaging wars. Republicans have a way to communicate with their voters on their terms, and we don’t.

And I get it. I really do. I wish we could go back in time and return to a world where the traditional media had the credibility and the reach to call balls and strikes. And maybe I am helping to speed our descent down the slippery slope, but the true threat to liberal democracy is not progressive propaganda. It’s the people fighting for democracy surrendering to an authoritarian movement because we were too cowardly to fight back. It’s really that simple.

simply want a progressive echo chamber to balance out the right-wing version that is destroying our country and the planet.

By favoring balance over accuracy to avoid any perception of bias, the media is inadvertently minimizing deeply dangerous behavior. It is normalizing something very abnormal. It is fiddling while Rome burns.

not appreciate the fact that he had stashed a bunch of his money in a Swiss bank account while promising to cut taxes for the wealthy and raise them on working-class people.5 But Romney’s initial refusal to release his tax returns led to such brutal press coverage that he ultimately decided to give in. Admitting to having a Swiss bank account was less politically painful than getting beaten by the media.

In 2016, Trump did what Romney couldn’t. He refused to release his tax returns, concocting an absurd story about a mysterious audit preventing their release. The media made an issue of it for a while. The Clinton campaign tried to fan the flames, but our collective attention span was too short.

Yes, he is self-destructive, which suggests

subconscious hates him as much as the rest of us.

This story exemplifies the waning media influence. A Pulitzer-worthy scoop about a sitting president in the paper of record failed to drive coverage.

For huge swaths of the electorate, the fact that the New York Times reported the story was all they needed to know in order to disavow it. Trump and the right-wing media had worked so hard to discredit the Times, CNN, and the rest of liberal media that nothing they reported could be taken seriously.

CNN and other media outlets becoming addicted to the boost in ratings Trump brought.

The Sunday shows were so desperate to have Trump on that they let him call in by phone, something rarely offered to any other guest, including sitting presidents. It’s hard to think of worse television than watching a still photo of a caller for minutes on end, but the shows were willing to do it just to taste some of that Trump ratings magic. The reaction to the absurd abundance of Trump coverage

was not just whining from Democrats. Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary repeatedly complained about the way the pr...

Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server, Democrats correctly believed that in treating a relatively minor issue as a major scandal, the media helped elect Donald Trump.

Moments after Warren announced her candidacy to great fanfare in front of an enthusiastic crowd, Politico7 posted an article with the headline “Warren Battles the Ghosts of Hillary.” The article outlined sexist trope after sexist trope and questioned whether Warren was likable enough to be elected president.

Recalibrate Objectivity. The most important change the media can make is to recognize that accuracy and balance are two irreconcilable values. If the goal is to appear balanced or objective, a media outlet

will ultimately fail consumers.

The foundation of traditional journalism is the idea that objectivity is equivalent to credibility. The entire model assumes that consumers want an unbiased rendering of current events. And anything that could cause someone to question this is an existential threat to the entire enterprise. This is why the New York Times and others go out of thei...

Post reportedly wouldn’t allow a reporter who survived sexual assault to cover any story involving...