Mitch stands up to Tucker but...

Don't think the GOP will abandon the extremist media drug

Mitch McConnell has seen the light. Well, he has seen “a” light. After nearly 20 years leading Senate Republicans, he says there’s something rotten in the media machine he and the GOP have exploited since the 1980s. The broadcast bigmouth Tucker Carlson is a problem, says McConnell. To which I say – Well duh!

The occasion for McConnell’s criticism was the Senate’s long-delayed approval of billions in military aid to Ukraine, which Carlson urged his vast audience to oppose. In the six-month political fight against opposition riled by Carlson, Ukraine lost territory and precious  lives as its arms supply dwindled and Russian invaders advanced. All because Carlson and others had used their power to pressure members of Congress to stop assisting Kyiv.  

 “I think the demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which was interviewing Vladimir Putin,” said McConnell. (Carlson recently aided the Russian cause by giving Vladimir Putin two hours of airtime to lie and deceive Americans on the nature of the war.)   

Carlson and others in the destructive echo chamber of far-right media have had a thing for Putin and Russia for years. This affection was born of the sense that Russia is a white Christian nation, and that the authoritarian Putin is, like Donald Trump, the admirable strongman type.

The perversion of facts required to abandon democratic Ukraine as it faces an unprovoked onslaught is astounding and calling it out is more than necessary. McConnell deserves credit for this. However, he failed to mention that for decades Carlson and his colleagues online and on the air have served the same function – twisting facts and making their followers’ blood boil – in service to McConnell and his party. In fact, these media figures have done more to divide America than another single factor.

The rise of extremist (and deceptive) media and its alliance with the GOP goes back at least to the 1980s when McConnell was a freshman senator from Kentucky. At that time his  constituents were becoming avid fans of the radio bombast Rush Limbaugh who combined fevered reports of conspiracy theories about Democrats with off-color, and even racists jokes to keep millions of people politically agitated and angry. Republican politicians could be made or broken by Limbaugh and with this fact hanging over them, the ones who would survive fell in line. The others would be declare RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – and be pushed to the sidelines.

After Limbaugh came a host of imitators and the Fox News network with a line-up of flame-throwing commentators who spent every night shouting alarms about the so-called communists and socialists (read liberals) who supposedly threatened America’s very existence. At the beginning, Bill O’Reilly was the pre-eminent Fox blowhard but after he flamed out in a sexual harassment scandal Sean Hannity and then Tucker Carlson and now Jesse Watters seized power. These characters all developed big audiences as viewers kept Fox on all day long, receiving addictive doses of adrenaline.

As a member of Congress, I heard the phrases “Rush said” or “Bill said” or “Sean said” every time I met with constituents. I learned to play the game of saying just the right thing to appear on Fox and when I did, the folks back home liked me better and my chance of reelection improved. Fox was the arbiter of conservative thought and action and as you stood before the network’s cameras you received a kind of blessing. “Kinzinger’s one of us,” the network was saying.

McConnell and nearly every other Republican on Capitol Hill played the game, using the readymade media platforms to get out their own propaganda. Indeed, politicians who do almost anything to get on Fox and the attention. The fame that came with appearing there became a kind of drug. I know, because for a while I was addicted.  In exchange, Fox and the others borrowed the credibility of Senators and members of Congress. They could get the inside “scoop” on things like the fight against Obamacare and struggles over social warfare issues like gay marriage. In other words, we gave our political souls. Fox personalities got material to feed the beast that is their audience.

Today Fox is the tail that wags the dog and McConnell, who has habitually toed the network line. In fact, his deviations have been so rare that whenever they happen, it’s news. So good for the Senate minority leader. For once he has stood against the extreme media horde. But he hasn’t called out the game for what it is and there’s no sign that he won’t continue to play along.