Mixing Up The Voters-- A Cover-Up Strategy

Chuck Schumer by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for Bloomberg News yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein noted that Republican senators don’t even know what they’re covering up for, or at least what they would be covering up for if they follow the White House’s preference to rush through the Senate impeachment trial that starts next week and refuse to hear from relevant witnesses and collect relevant documents." He's right, although Moscow Mitch very much does know exactly what he's covering up.

"Some of those senators, to be sure, just don’t care," continued Bernstein. "They’ve decided they can live with (both politically and ethically) any revelations that may come down the road-- that no one who they care about will hold them accountable for burying important evidence, no matter what it turns out to be. Others may really be so fully inside the conservative information-feedback loop that they sincerely think that Trump is an honest, innocent man being railroaded by partisans; they may not even be aware of the considerable evidence to the contrary. But for anyone else? As I said just 24 hours and a couple rounds of ugly revelations ago: 'If new ugly details are still emerging, who’s to say that more won’t turn up later?'"

And it has. Will it matter is the question. Sean Illing pointed to the method in their madness: flooding the zone with shit, utterly overwhelming the capacity for Trump's low-info supporters to be able to discern what's real and what isn't. Illing wrote that "Regardless of how clear a case Democrats make, it seems likely that a majority of voters will remain confused and unsure about the details of Trump’s transgressions. No single version of the truth will be accepted. This is a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship-- some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side... We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, 'people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.' This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment has done very little to move public opinion. The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process. One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear."

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

...For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it’s not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.

...Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem and a solution is nowhere in sight.

The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s just not that simple anymore (if it ever was). There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.

We probably need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics. Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against this kind of rethinking, however. And so we’re likely stuck with this problem for a very long time.

As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

Yesterday, for example, it was widely reported by the mainstream media that "The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration broke the law when it put a hold on aid to Ukraine." That line was from the Murdoch-owned, Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal. Think about it: "the Trump administration broke the law." There were no mainstream news sources that didn't run with the story. This is from Jeff Stein's and Ellen Nakashima's at the Washington Post, White House hold on Ukraine aid violated federal law, congressional watchdog says. Ironically, Trump and Giuliani are probably happy to see it moving Maddow's devastating interview with Trump crony Lev Parnas Wednesday night (video below). Stein and Nakashima wrote that "The White House violated federal law in its hold on security aid to Ukraine last year, according to a decision by a congressional watchdog released on Thursday and reviewed by the Washington Post. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that reports to Congress, found the Trump administration violated a law that governs how the White House disburses money approved by Congress. The GAO decision comes as the Senate prepares for the impeachment trial of President Trump, a process set to begin Thursday. 'Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,' the decision states. 'OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act.' ... The GAO found that the administration broke the Impoundment Control Act-- a 1974 law that provides a mechanism for the executive branch to request that Congress reconsider a funding decision that’s been signed into law. 'This bombshell legal opinion from the independent Government Accountability Office demonstrates, without a doubt, that the Trump administration illegally withheld security assistance from Ukraine' said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who requested GAO write the report in December... 'If the executive branch violates the [Impoundment Control Act] with impunity, then Congress loses its power to direct the expenditures of federal funds and any program authorized in law could be defunded by Executive fiat,' Van Hollen wrote in a letter to Gene L. Dodaro, comptroller general of the GAO, in December."

That all said, let's remember that the case against Trump being removed has continued to grow in popularity-- despite the Republican gaslighting strategy-- as more information leaks out. The Morning Consult poll released by Politico earlier this week shows Trump's approval number's underwater, with 54% of registered voters disapproving and just 43% approving. Also among registered voters 31% say they are definitely voting to reelect Trump and 45% say they are definitely voting against reelecting him. When you add in leaners, 39% will vote for him and 52% will vote against him. 49% of registered voters approved of the House impeaching Trump and 43% disapproved and 49% say he should now be removed by the Senate, 43% saying he should not be removed.