The most pointless question
Asking Republicans if Joe Biden was legitimately elected was never anything more than grandstanding.
In the wake of the January 6 riot, major news networks attempted to hold Republican politicians accountable by asking them, often at the start of a televised interview, whether Joe Biden was the duly elected president. Most subjects skirted a straight answer by stating, “Joe Biden is the president,” garnishing their tactical lie with the flourish of a smirk. Some anchors would move on immediately, allowing the lie to run amok on the airwaves unmolested. Others would prod into the obvious omission, embarking on a hapless crusade of an admission of truth. Occasionally, the interviewer would end the segment if the most pressing fact could not be agreed upon, signaling to the audience that they were the arbiters of morality despite inviting someone who had recently incited political violence onto their news program.
Amid Republicans’ refusal to confirm that Biden was legitimately elected, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney emerged as a champion of decency. Her repudiation of Donald Trump’s election lie made Cheney a pariah in her own party, eventually losing her position as House Republican Conference chair. Her outspokenness against the former president and his role in the Capitol storming that killed five people got Cheney booked on primetime TV slots and earned her an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which she wrote of the future of the Republican Party, “History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that.”
Weeks later, in an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Cheney failed to denounce voter suppression bills being passed in a handful of Republican-controlled states and leaned on the racist trope of legal vs. illegal votes.
“I think everybody should want a situation and a system where people who ought to be able to vote and have the right to vote can vote, and people who don’t, shouldn’t,” Cheney explained to Swan.
This interview underscored how Cheney, whose derision of Democrats over the years has been quite vicious, is not guided by a compass any more moral than her Republican colleagues. She was willing to bash Trump insofar as she deemed it would ingratiate her with constituents, and perhaps the nation writ large. And yet, making the case against voter suppression legislation was a bridge too far.
Cheney’s media portrayal as putative GOP martyr exposes a fatal flaw in the coverage of Republican lawmakers following January 6. The litmus test for reputability has relied on the acknowledgement of a free and fair election in 2020 and has often ignored that such a concession is moot if the same politician cannot unequivocally condemn voter restrictions in 2021.
Additionally, any Republican who was not able to concede that Biden was president on the day the race was called deserves no benefit of the doubt if they now express publicly that Biden’s triumph over Trump was valid. Just as they wish to reduce the siege of the Capitol to a spate of violence comparable to Antifa, ranking members of the GOP are increasingly content to dial back the conspiracy that the election was rigged in order to keep the future of their party intact.
The media must contextualize for its audience that the gradual Republican bifurcation from Trump is not guided by any set of ethical principles, but rather to a deeper commitment to retain power. The endless audits on Biden’s victory and baseless bloviating from Trump as he begins his tour of stumping for Republicans has the adverse effect of discouraging voters in his party from showing up to the polls. As a source close to the former president told CNN, “I don't think it's wise to let him spend the next 17 months talking about how our elections are rigged ahead of a midterm election where turnout is going to determine how well Republicans perform. We all saw what happened in Georgia.”
When insurrectionist sympathizers like Kevin McCarthy and Josh Hawley change their stories about the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, they are only capitulating in a long-term effort to keep the slightly less extremist wing of their electorate in their back pocket. While Democrats won’t be as motivated to get out and vote as they were when Trump was in office, if the message from the majority of GOP congressional leaders is that the electoral process is broken, their hopes of flipping the House and the Senate in 2022 are greatly diminished.
The taut bullshit tightrope acrobatics would be laughable if the circus wasn’t the fate of democracy itself. Encouraging voters to participate in an electoral process they are currently attempting to overhaul in states where their future grasp is most tenuous, distancing themselves from the gravest internal threat to voter turnout while simultaneously courting his endorsement are contradictions that would drive away any reasonable group of supporters.
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait describes the unsavory pickle Trump toadies find themselves in thusly: “(Lindsey) Graham can’t get Trump to stop accidentally discouraging the party’s voters by obsessively undermining democracy.”
It is pointless for anchors to ask someone like Graham if he believes Biden was legitimately elected because it assumes his messaging reflects what he perceives to be true. Graham and his colleagues are parishioners of a church that only preaches the inevitable demise of its enemy, and to spread the sermon of hate on Sunday morning shows distills network news into a grift-for-all, rendering it indistinguishable to channels airing Joel Osteen and Cash4Gold.
Republicans, and a handful of Democrats — most notably spineless West Virginia senator Joe Manchin —ignorantly pleading for bipartisanship have no interest exercising their civic duty. Manchin’s Sunday column in the West Virginia Gazette-Mail was theater, as was Cheney’s Washington Post op-ed, as are the numerous TV appearances from GOP congresspeople begging their audience to move on from the Capitol Riot. The press can no longer be active participants in the theater. That is not their role, no matter how tempting high ratings and clicks can be.
In this fraught era when our democracy could very well be on the precipice of collapse, niceties — like Chuck Todd saying “Thanks for coming on” to Ron Johnson after reminding his audience that the Wisconsin senator was spreading conspiracy theories — sanitize acts of domestic terrorism. Describing a ban on Trump loyalists as a form of “moral posturing,” as Fox News host Chris Wallace recently wrote in Politico, is a gross misjudgment of the damage caused by platforming anti-democratic elected officials. Wallace believes it’s important to proceed with the interview even if the subject can’t agree Biden is the legitimate president, which is like handing the keys to your Corvette over to the person who said they enjoy crashing cars.
These abdications of journalistic responsibility are most egregious and visible, but the print industry has also failed to navigate the tricky terrain of at least pretending an election denier bears no credibility. The Washington Post gave Hawley an opportunity to promote his new book, while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution introduced a contender to Senator Raphael Warnock by letting him lie about the election without any fact check or pushback.
Holding politicians to account is more than calling a lie a lie. It’s more than deciding not to invite someone on a news program. It’s providing context to why the lie is being told and explaining why some politicians have backed off from spreading the Big Lie and how someone like Cheney who picks and chooses her truths is no more valiant a party representative than the Matt Gaetzes and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world.
There is significant danger ahead, and if the free press keeps playing footsie with inciters of an insurrection by asking pointless questions that lead to unchecked misinformation and dance around the root of the issues, press freedom in America may become a thing of the past.