It's Ok For Journalists To Interview Idiots and Extremists ...
.... in fact, it's a good thing for them to do.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
Sunshine Is The Best Disinfectant
This is excellent journalism by Lesley Stahl.
For the last few days, however, Stahl and 60 Minutes have been pilloried for a) “platforming” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and b) not pushing back harder during their profile of her.
Let’s tackle the “platforming” part, which escalated on social media before the interview aired and is the easiest criticism to swat away. Over the years, “60 Minutes.” correspondents have interviewed murderers, sociopaths, and preachers of hate, including Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, a Hamas terrorist mastermind, Louis Farrakhan, Timothy McVeigh, a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and various Mafia hitmen. The show once ran a segment with Jack Kevorkian in which he killed someone. So the idea that Marjorie Taylor Greene, an elected member of Congress who wields enormous influence within the Republican Party, should be off-limits is patently absurd.
Interviewing an influential member of Congress is not “platforming” them (Greene already has a platform). It’s called journalism, and shying away from talking to people like Greene because they have hateful and toxic views is the antithesis of what journalists should do.
The criticism of 60 Minutes is the by-product of an increasingly prevalent mindset, particularly on the left, that suggests people need to be “protected” from toxic viewpoints — or that we should only hear from people who agree with us. (The worst recent example was the firing of James Bennet as head of the New York Times editorial page after the publication of an opinion column by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for the US military to send troops into American cities during the George Floyd protests).
This mindset creates an unhealthy echo chamber for both open discussion and democracy. I don’t like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and ordinarily, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch this interview because I already know plenty about her. But I certainly would never begrudge 60 Minutes talking to her. For me, sunshine is always the best disinfectant, and exposing Greene’s horrendous views to a national audience is better than the alternative.
That leads to the second criticism of Stahl — that she let Greene off easy. Here I think the detractors have a stronger argument. For example, people are mainly up in arms about this segment.
Stahl asks Greene about her oft-stated claim that Democrats are pedophiles. After pushing back and saying that “they are not pedophiles,” Stahl appears legitimately exasperated when Greene repeats the slander. I found her response and this segment compelling. But I’m also sympathetic to the criticism that a friend IMed to. Stahl “didn't rebut the use of the term *as an anti-trans slur.* She only rebutted it as ‘name calling. This was a high-profile opportunity to inform a national audience that their use of the term is *bigotry,* not name-calling.”
This is a persuasive argument. CBS should have added a voice-over pointing out why Greene’s statement is not only inaccurate (pedophilia is not sexualizing children, it’s sexually assaulting children) and why it’s rooted in bigotry toward the trans community.
But the reason I had less of an issue with this comment goes back to my point about sunshine being the best disinfectant. In the clip above, Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Joe Biden a pedophile. This is not some rhetorical masterstroke. Unless you're a true believer, these comments make Greene look like an idiot ... because most Americans will find it ludicrous to suggest that Joe Biden is a pedophile.
However, there is a notion in journalistic critiques that simply exposing idiots as idiots is not sufficient. Instead, journalists have to batter them with follow-up questions and spoon-feed viewers fact-checking that shows "this person is wrong and bad." Indeed, at the New Republic, Prem Thakker makes precisely this critique.
The production overall was too willing to move on, offering mere samplings of Greene’s issues paired with a touch of pushback. It embodied the sort-of journalism that insists on its merit by arguing that the best spokesperson for showing the wrongness of something is itself, rather than another observer explaining why exactly it is wrong. Stahl doesn’t need to actually interrogate the absurdity or danger of something Greene says; she just needs to push back once to show the contrast, and then the viewers can just see for themselves.
I’m sympathetic to Thakker’s argument, but this attitude treats viewers like children who can’t figure this stuff out on their own. Journalists can’t risk voters hearing someone like Greene and agreeing with her. They need to be told that what she is saying is wrong and racist and bigoted etc. And why do journalists have to explain this to readers? Because of Trump.
In some sense, the production felt like a time-warp back to 2016; the special was a piece built for intrigue, a self-proclaimed holistic examination into someone who is neither intriguing nor enigmatic. And, though it should be needless to say, apparently it is not: providing such room for complexity about someone so simply unfit to represent this country is exactly how we got Donald Trump—and exactly how we’ll keep getting more like him (heck, and maybe even more of him).
I don’t see it this way, and I think it’s evidence that journalists are still learning the wrong lessons from Trump’s rise to power … and eventual fall.
One could argue that providing complexity and exposing Trump to the nation is how we got Trump. The explanation for the 2016 election is far more complicated, and this notion is rooted in the idea that if only journalists had been tougher on Trump, he wouldn’t have won. But reporters were plenty tough on Trump in 2016; it’s just that enough voters weren’t bothered by it and even saw it as a positive reason to support him.
But what about everything that came after 2016? What about the 2018 midterms, a referendum on Trump in which Republicans lost 40 House seats? What about 2020, when Trump lost his reelection, and Democrats took control of the Senate? What about 2022, when extremist Republicans lost House and Senate races and the party, as a whole, underperformed? I’d argue that exposure to Trump and his band of MAGA acolytes is why Republicans have underperformed in three straight elections. I’d even say that the surest way to put a ceiling on Greene’s political ambition is to let Americans hear her speak. She’s a nutter with extreme and unpopular views.
To the extent that Greene becomes a face of the Republican Party (as it is, she’s not that well-known nationally), it is likely to do more damage to the GOP than help them. If politics is a marketplace of ideas, shouldn’t Democrats want to argue with someone like Greene than a more reasonable and less self-absorbed Republican (not that many of them exist these days)? The more attention Greene receives, the worse it is for Republicans — and anyone familiar with the last two elections should easily see that. Maybe I’m naive in trusting Americans to hear from Greene and draw reasonable conclusions about her fitness as a politician. Still, the last few election cycles have shown that outside of ruby-red political environments, the more Americans are exposed to extremist right-wing politicians, the less likely they are to vote for them. So don’t be afraid of telling Americans the truth. It likely will work out better than you expect.
What’s Going On
The data is in: Republicans like Trump more now that he’s under criminal indictment.
Donald Trump is in serious legal trouble over his efforts to hold on to classified documents and keep them away from federal officials.
I love the changes to major league baseball.
Mark Leibovich thinks Republicans are missing their chance to rid themselves of Trump. In related news, water is wet.
Musical Interlude
Thanks. I read a lot of criticism here on substack about her interview. I originally thought the same thing, like why give her such exposure? But I now agree with you that she’s fucking crazy and if you can’t see that then you’re also fucking crazy. I have hope that most people watching 60 minutes are not crazy.
I agree with you.