If nothing else, the sideshow of a rich-right-wing-crank-fueled recall sideshow targeting California Governor Gavin Newsom shows that major media in this country study the example of their worst collective failures over the years.
Oh yes, clearly, debacles like the endless front page But her emails! stories about candidate Hillary Clinton, spectacularly callow coverage fueled by a fetid combination of greed, arrogance, and complacency (Trump’ll never win!), were clearly studied in detail: so they could be emulated.
‘California was a business venture for the MAGA movement, that’s it.’
As a veteran journalist who has worked side by side with cut-through-the-bullshit icons like Murray Kempton of Newsday and yes, Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, I see it as deeply troubling that so many in the media world were willing to jump whole-hog on a narrative cooked up as a right-wing fundraising scheme.
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Trash any Democrat building up a national profile, twist, and spin, and lie, and then sell a cowed press on some fake outrage and watch them try to be “fair” by printing obvious steaming crap side by side with objective reality. There, another day of doing the job… now, to wash my hands and get some dinner.
I called up a former Republican Congressman who is an expert in such matters — again, a Republican (one that wished to remain anonymous) — to ask him about the California recall, and here’s how he put it to me:
“California was a business venture for the MAGA movement, that’s it,” he told me last week. “They had a couple of things they could hook on, like the French Laundry thing, and the rest is taking small truths and blooming them into disinformation messaging. It’s the power of monetizing propaganda.”
Look, Newsom fucked up big time by going to a dinner at the French Laundry on November 6, 2020.
To be clear, this is one prominent former Congressman saying what basically everyone in journalism knows.
“The recall has been about the specific goal of certain types of politicians to move the Trump agenda forward regardless of what benefit it might have for any given state,” the former GOP Congressman continued. “Newsom is just a target of this new sort of MAGA religion, any way to twist somebody’s record through disinformation and falsehood is the modus operandi of the MAGA movement.”
Look, Newsom fucked up big time by going to a dinner at the French Laundry on November 6, 2020. He knows it. You know it. We all know it. If I’d been of a mind to give Newsom any advice when I interviewed him for a New York Times piece the year before he was elected Governor, I’d have told him to go to a San Francisco Giants game now and then, listen to the no-bullshit talk of whoever happens to be Giants manager, formulate your sentences the way he does; avoid sentences that sound like the love child of a Ted Talk and a sociologist PowerPoint presentation — and whatever you do, don’t even set foot in any restaurant anywhere with “French” in the title. Stick to BBQ joints or anything with “JJ” or “Bar & Grille” in the title.
But it was one fuckup. One. Who among us has not second-guessed ourselves at some point during the long national nightmare of a crazy-ass power-hungry cabal on a mission to spread, rather than fight, a virus that will claim a million American lives by next year, if it hasn’t already?
Overall, Newsom’s leadership on Covid-19 has by all accounts been better than that of most Governors in the country. Later, looking back with some clarity, we can add up the score, assess what Newsom did well and what he mishandled, but not in the glare of the moment. (And let’s not even delve into press reports glorifying the egregious, off-the-rack-Trumpist Ron DeSantis of Florida for his barbaric, blood-on-his-hands handling of the pandemic.)
I cringe thinking of all the “hard-headed” press types who assured us that Newsom’s moves on the virus were all with an eye to surviving the recall. I call bullshit on that as well. If Newsom has a higher motivation, it’s a higher office.
He’d love to sit behind the Resolute desk. If he’s going to run for President, it won’t be any time soon (there’s a bit of a line), so his only play is to put together a strong record as a multi-term California Governor that stands up to scrutiny. As for the recall, I am sure Newsom and his team saw both danger and opportunity here; they never took lightly the possibility of disaster striking, but also always calculated defeat was highly unlikely. But in the short term, for reporters, letting a catty, insinuating tone creep into stories is great click-bait.
I submit that when historians look back at this decade, they will raise serious questions about whether there was ever any serious chance of Newsom actually being recalled. I for one don’t buy it was ever close, whatever a poll or two might have indicated. And yet story after story flogged this notion, and story after story told us all about going-nowhere candidates like Caitlyn Jenner. OK, I’ll even allow that in tough times media outlets have to pander, but not so droningly and unrelentingly that it drowns out the chance to do real reporting on important developments in California.
“I think a lot of the CA recall coverage was absurd,” my former Salon colleague Eric Boehlert, author of Lapdogs: How the Press Lay Down for the Bush White House, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, and the Press Run newsletter, told me last week.
“The DC press swooped in all summer to push the storyline that Newsom ‘could’ lose,” Boehlert told me late last week. “They love the Dems in Disarray narrative. Also, why was Jenner being interviewed on CNN this week when she was polling at 1%.”
Here’s the game: Clog up the lane with story after mind-numbing story, all presenting the recall effort as proof of widespread outrage and disgruntlement with Newsom, leaving aside the truth that it was big Republican money that got the recall going, and then follow up with stories about the recall being a “distraction” for Newsom.
The warped approach led to more warped news decisions: On Wednesday, November 8, the New York Times homepage led with a story about President Biden calling for the nation to move toward generating nearly half of all its electricity needs through solar power by the year 2050. Good, interesting story. I expected a sidebar about how California and the West would be key in helping move the country in this direction — instead, my eyes moved down to this utterly preposterous headline: “CALIFORNIA RECALL VOTE COULD WEAKEN THE STATE’S AGGRESSIVE CLIMATE POLICIES” with a lede claiming inanely that California’s “ambitious climate policies” were facing a “reckoning.” The point being: If Newsom were to lose, policy changes would ensue. And if pigs fly, and the moon is green cheese …
By the day that piece was posted, it was clear there was no way in hell Newsom was being recalled. Dan Morain, the dean of California political reporters, so far as I’m concerned (author, for example, of Kamala’s Way: An American Life) had checked in with a Washington Post piece politely blowing out of the water the “well maybe it could happen” notion.
“Republican fantasies of evicting Gavin Newsom from the California governor’s office are about to be dashed,” Morain wrote on September 2. “Despite some recent polls indicating potential trouble for Newsom, actual turnout in early voting — as well as patterns in candidate fundraising — suggest that he is all but certain to survive the Republican-backed recall effort.”
You did not have to be an expert or insider to know by then the die was cast: a two-to-one Democratic edge in registration, mail-in voting, a huge Newsom fund to promote getting out the vote, overall guardedly positive trends on state covid efforts, very weak competition on the Republican side — and the failure of Newsom to do what some apparently expected, to return to the French Laundry with a video crew and slurp down oysters with thousand-dollar wine and … (you fill in the blanks).
So why does any of this matter? Because I think the sordid chapter in political journalism has helped Newsom to a very useful new mindset that will help this intriguing figure, part genuine visionary and part self-sabotaging riddle, get a shot at establishing himself as a truly bold leader: Namely, to stop caring about most of what the press writes or the TV talkers say. Newsom, who grew up dyslexic, struggling with his studies at times, has a deep respect for the written word and writers, but I’m sure, reading all the stories playing up the very, very thin possibility of him being recalled, Newsom has gained a valuable perspective on news-as-entertainment.
The Governor knows it is his record, his ability to move the state forward, that will get him re-elected — and no one will remember or care about all those stories whispering in our ear about the scenarios where Newsom has been ousted, like Gray Davis before him. Make no mistake: He’s stronger than he was before, and even with the certainty of other bullshit coverage and other bullshit recall attempts looming, he’s going to laugh it all off and go for it as Governor.
That’s my prediction. And I like it a whole lot better than anything I’ve been reading in the national press.
