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From here to eternity: How Murdoch plans to maintain Fox as a right-wing force

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On July 26, 2024

In Media

Photo (cc) 2019 by ajay_suresh

If there has been one consolation about Fox News’ ongoing subversion of our political discourse — and even of democracy itself — it has been the near-certainty that 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch does not actually have a pact with the Lord of the Underworld and will at some point depart this vale of tears. His rabidly right-wing son Lachlan Murdoch, who Rupe put in charge a few years ago, is outnumbered by three of his siblings, and they reportedly have more moderate views.

Now that is in danger. On Wednesday, The New York Times published a deep dive (free link) into legal steps Murdoch is taking that are aimed at ensuring Lachlan’s continued reign after Rupert himself has departed the scene. Reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler write that the old man is seeking to rewrite the terms of a trust that specifies four of his many children will share equal control of his media empire:

The trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children when Mr. Murdoch dies. But he is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs.

The toxic effects of a ruling in Rupert’s favor can’t be exaggerated. We in the media like to focus on how Mark Zuckerberg has profited by allowing Facebook to be weaponized by shadowy, malignant forces and how Elon Musk has transformed the cesspool that was Twitter into a far worse place that indulges far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists like, well, himself.

But Fox News is without question the single most influential player on the right, flagrantly promoting lies of omission and commission, including the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump. Fox had to pay a $787 million settlement to the Dominion voting machine company for deliberately lying that Dominion had switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. But other than firing its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Fox has continued on its lying, hate-mongering way.

It’s disheartening to think that this might continue long after Rupert Murdoch’s departure.

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No one has done more to harm our public discourse than Rupert Murdoch

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On September 21, 2023

In Media

Rupert Murdoch. Photo (cc) 2015 by the Hudson Institute.

Over the past 50 or so years, no one has done more harm to our public discourse than Rupert Murdoch, who announced earlier today that he’s semi-retiring from his position as one of the world’s most powerful media moguls. Since his son Lachlan Murdoch will remain in charge of the family’s various media holdings, as he has been for several years now, today’s news should be regarded as little more than a symbolic moment at which we can take stock, once again, of the damage Rupe hath wrought.

Murdoch, now 92, wields enormous power through his various media holdings in his native Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Over time, though, that power increasingly has become centered within the Fox News Channel, launched in 1996 as a supposedly conservative alternative to CNN. (MSNBC, founded the same year, didn’t embrace its liberal identity until much later.) Fox News was never what you might call a normal conservative operation — despite initially billing itself as “fair and balanced,” it always trafficked in anger and mudslinging, epitomized by its most popular host, Bill O’Reilly.

Since the rise of Donald Trump, though, Fox News has gone crazy, embracing Trump’s lies about the election, engaging in climate-change denialism, spreading falsehoods about COVID and vaccines, and generally spewing weaponized right-wing propaganda in order to goose ratings and keep viewers glued to the set. I’m not a fan of cable news talk shows as a genre, but at least CNN’s and MSNBC’s are grounded in reality. Fox News lies. It caught up with the Murdochs in 2023, when they agreed to pay more than $787 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company, whose business had suffered at the hands of a smear campaign by Trump insiders, amplified by Fox. That, in turn, led (or seemed to lead) to the firing of Fox’s biggest star, the white supremacist Tucker Carlson.

Through it all, Murdoch came across as the ultimate cynic. Numerous profiles have portrayed him as someone who cares about nothing but ratings and money. He holds Trump in contempt, and he made several attempts to cast him aside — trying and failing to take Trump out during the 2016 presidential campaign and then initially refusing to embrace election lies after Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020. Both times, Murdoch and Fox were dragged back to Trump at the first sign that their ratings might suffer. You might say that Murdoch followed rather than led his audience, but it was a symbiotic relationship. If Murdoch had any courage, he could have weathered the storm, and Fox News might have emerged stronger than ever. As it is, it’s now a wounded behemoth, kept alive by an elderly audience that is averse to digital and without any clear path forward beyond the next few years.

How much does this matter? In recent years, many observers, including me, have blamed our cultural descent into alternative reality and authoritarianism on social media, especially Facebook and to a lesser extent the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. That may always have been exaggerated, though. In a new piece on polarization for The New York Times, Thomas Edsall places the blame squarely on cable news.

If you want to give Murdoch credit for one thing, it’s that he maintained The Wall Street Journal as one of our three great national newspapers after he bought it. Sure, the opinion section is nutty, but that was true long before Murdoch arrived on the scene. On the other hand, he took a respectable if fading liberal newspaper, the New York Post, in an aggressively downmarket direction after he purchased it in 1976. As a leading retail executive supposedly said when Murdoch complained about the lack of advertising support, “But Rupert, Rupert, your readers are my shoplifters.”

Murdoch’s announcement that he’s reducing his role coincides with the news that the celebrity journalist Michael Wolff is about to release a book titled “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.” It is, in a sense, the perfect match: a book by an author who’s often accused of playing fast and loose with the facts writing about an empire built on a foundation of lies. As CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote earlier this week, “Wolff has a history of printing claims that end up being strongly disputed by the subjects themselves.” Still, a book written by a bestselling author that describes one host, Laura Ingraham, as a “drunk” and another, Sean Hannity, as a “moron” is sure to get attention.

This would be an excellent time to say good riddance to Murdoch except that he’s not going anywhere, and it wouldn’t matter that much even if he was. Unlike Rupert, Lachlan Murdoch is said to hold genuinely right-wing views. Thus the House That Murdoch Built will continue to wreak havoc at least for a few more years. I wish I thought that what comes after will be better, but I’m not holding out much hope.

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Tucker Carlson had to go because his racist text cost Rupert Murdoch money

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On May 3, 2023

In Media

Trump supporters rally following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Photo (cc) 2021 by David Geitgey Sierralupe

Who could have imagined that Tucker Carlson, a white supremacist in public, is also a white supremacist in private? The New York Times has unearthed what it claims is the text message that got Carlson fired from Fox News. It’s from Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the insurrection. Here it is in full:

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

Fox executives were terrified that the message, which Carlson had sent to one of his producers, would be introduced at trial by Dominion Voting Systems as part of the company’s libel case against Fox. That fear contributed to Fox’s decision to settle the case for nearly $800 million.

In other words, Carlson had to go because he cost Rupert Murdoch money.

That time when Tucker Carlson sicced his mob on two freelance journalists

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On May 1, 2023

In First Amendment, Media

Carlson calling: Telephone sculpture in Bryant Pond, Maine. Photo (cc) 2019 by Zendry 423.

The Boston Globe has published a story about ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s summer home in Bryant Pond, Maine, and how residents are taking his defenestration. Reading it reminded me that two years ago I gave Carlson a New England Muzzle Award for siccing his on-air mob on two freelance journalists who, he falsely claimed, were seeking to dox him by exposing the exact location of his Maine redoubt. Here’s what I wrote at the time for GBH News:

One night last July [2020], three members of a terrified family locked themselves in an upstairs room of their home in Maine as someone — apparently more than one — pounded on the door and tried to get in.

“My brother-in-law is a journalist and a news source posted his name on, uh, Tucker Carlson show and his address and things of that nature so he has, um, been getting threats all night long,” said the brother-in-law of Tristan Spinski, a freelance photographer who occasionally gets assignments from The New York Times. Spinski and his wife were there as well. The quote comes from a 911 call obtained by Erik Wemple of The Washington Post.

So what happened? Last summer, Tucker Carlson claimed, falsely, on his Fox News show that the Times was planning to dox him in an upcoming story by revealing the address of his home in Maine and running photos of it. He called out the journalists by name: “So how would Murray Carpenter and his photographer, Tristan Spinski, feel if we told you where they live? If we put pictures of their homes on the air?” And he let his adoring fans do the rest.

“The threats against the two freelancers came via email, voice mail, etc.,” wrote Wemple — even though the Times had reportedly already assured Carlson on two separate occasions that the story would not include the address or photos of his home.

Carlson has a weird history regarding his privacy in Maine. Two years ago, he canceled plans to build a studio next to a public library from which he sometimes hosts his show, blaming the Sun Journal of Lewiston for revealing the location. Yet he had all but announced its coordinates on the air, referring to it as “the northernmost bureau of Fox News.” A year later, his plans were apparently back on again.

In any case, putting two freelance journalists at risk of bodily harm even though he had been told they had no intention of doxxing him had its intended effect. The story never ran. And though the Times has a well-deserved reputation for resisting intimidation, freelance journalists everywhere were put on notice not to mess with Tucker Carlson.

But his emails: A working theory of why Tucker Carlson was pushed out by Fox

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On April 24, 2023

In Media

Tucker Carlson. Photo (cc) 2022 by Gage Skidmore.

It’s going to be a while — if ever — before we know why the loathsome white nationalist Tucker Carlson and his ratings-obsessed enablers at Fox News parted company.

Carlson was far from the biggest on-air liar in claiming that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. As Josh Marshall puts it, “If you looked at the material Dominion had assembled the most damning stuff was about Bartiromo, Pirro, Dobbs. Very much the B Team. As odious as he may be, Carlson is quite good at the ‘just asking questions’ shtick.”

Carlson’s internal emails, though, were incredibly embarrassing and damaging, proving beyond a doubt that no one inside Fox believed claims by Donald Trump and his hangers-on about voting-machine fraud. My insta-theory is that Rupert Murdoch fired Carlson in a blind rage after Dominion extracted a nearly $800 billion million settlement.

For those of you who are hoping for a kinder, gentler Fox, you may recall that the firings of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly a few years ago led to similar dreams. Instead, Fox took a sharp turn from the right toward the far right. I’m not sure a similar move now is even possible unless Carlson is replaced by, say, Alex Jones or Steve Bannon.

Carlson is the big media news of the day, but let’s not overlook Don Lemon, the hapless CNN host who was fired today. Lemon has been on thin ice since making some cringe-worthy sexist remarks on air, but he deserved better than (as he claims) to be cut loose without any communication from CNN management.

For Carlson, it’s been a long, strange devolution from principled conservative to openly racist hate-monger. In 2019, I wrote a piece for GBH News detailing my own experience with Carlson, including a convivial lunch at The Palm in Washington more than 20 years ago. I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to that guy. Maybe he does, too.

Why relevations that Fox stars knew Trump was lying may boost Dominion’s libel suit

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On February 17, 2023

In First Amendment, Media

Tucker Carlson. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore.

The reason that Sarah Palin lost her libel suit against The New York Times was that the Times’ extraordinarily sloppy editorial page editor, James Bennet, was extraordinarily sloppy. (In an unrelated matter, Bennet left the paper after it was revealed that he hadn’t even bothered to read an op-ed piece by Sen. Tom Cotton suggesting that violent protesters be gunned down in the streets.)

Under the Supreme Court’s 1964 Times v. Sullivan standard, a public figure such as Palin can’t win a libel suit unless she can show that false, defamatory information about her was published with “actual malice” — that is, it was published in the full knowledge that it was false, or that the publication strongly suspected it was false.

That’s what makes the latest revelations in Dominion Voting Systems’ libel suit against Fox News so mind-boggling. As The New York Times reports, internal communications show that Fox stars such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were fully aware that Donald Trump was lying about his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. Yet they boosted those lies anyway, whose voting machines were a principal target of Trump and his allies. Dominion claims that Fox damaged its reputation and harmed its business.

As the Times story notes, Fox doubled down on the Trump camp’s claims after initially accepting his defeat — a move that resulted in many of its viewers shifting to even farther-right cable outlets like Newsmax and One America News. Fox wanted those viewers back, damn it. In a particularly revealing passage, we learn that Carlson wanted a Fox News journalist fired for tweeting the truth because it might harm Fox’s ratings:

On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.

“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.

Ironically, right-wing figures such as Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have all suggested that it might be time to get rid of the actual malice standard, which erects a nearly impossible barrier for public officials and public figures who want to sue media companies.

Under ordinary circumstances, Fox would be a prime beneficiary of that standard. Trouble is, the new revelations show that even Times v. Sullivan may prove insufficient to protect Fox from Dominion’s lawsuit. As Bill Grueskin of the Columbia Journalism School put it on Twitter:

The Buffalo horror raises thorny issues about hate speech and the media

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On May 16, 2022

In First Amendment, Media

Image via Today’s Front Pages at FreedomForum.org.

Correction: An earlier version of this post identified 4chan’s hosting service. In fact, it was a porn site that uses the name 4chan but is otherwise unrelated.

Our thoughts at this time need to be with the Black community of Buffalo — and everywhere — as we process the horror of one of the worst mass murders of recent years. We need to do something substantive about guns, racism and white supremacy. What actually happened, and what we can do to prevent such horrific events from happening again, must be at the top of our agenda.

This blog, though, is primarily about the media and often about free speech. So let me address some of the secondary issues. The shootings intersect with notions of hate speech, social media and the role of Fox News in mainstreaming dangerous racist ideologies such as so-called replacement theory, which holds that the left is trying to push out white people in favor of non-white immigrants in order to obtain an electoral advantage.

First, keep in mind that hate speech is legal. The New York Times today says this about New York Gov. Kathy Hochul:

When pressed on how she planned to confront such hate speech online, without impinging on First Amendment rights, Ms. Hochul noted that “hate speech is not protected” and said she would soon be calling meetings with social media companies.

Hochul is wrong, and the Times shouldn’t have used “noted,” which implies that she knows what she’s talking about. If hate speech were illegal, Tucker Carlson would have been kicked off Fox long ago.

What’s illegal is incitement to violence, and you might think whipping up racist hatred would qualify. In fact, it does not — and the very Supreme Court case that made that clear was about a speaker at a rally who whipped up racist hatred. Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) held that a ranting Ku Klux Klan thug demanding “revengeance” against Jews and Black people had not engaged in incitement because his threats were non-specific.

Hochul can cajole and threaten. And she should. But it’s going to be difficult to do much more than that.

As for the media themselves, that’s a morass, and it’s too early to start sorting this out. But the shooter reportedly fell down the 4chan hole during the pandemic, immersing himself in the racism and hate that permeate the dark corners of the internet. There are a lot of moving parts here, but it seems unlikely that a young mass murder-in-the-making was sitting around watching Fox, even if some of his rants paralleled Carlson’s rhetoric. Fox’s role is to mainstream such hatred for its frightened, elderly viewers. The radicalization itself happens elsewhere.

So, are we going to ban 4chan? How would that even work? If the government tried to shut them down, they could just go somewhere else. I’m sure Vladimir Putin would be happy to play host.

4chan represents the bottom of this toxic food chain; Fox News is at the top. In the middle are the mainstream social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Twitch (which allowed the shooter to livestream his rampage for nearly two minutes before taking it down) and the like. It’s too early to say what, if anything, will happen on that front. But it’s probably not a good time to be a billionaire who wants to buy Twitter so that there will be less moderation on the platform than there is currently.

As it turns out, that billionaire, Elon Musk, may be backing away.

The new ‘Beat the Press’ examines Zelenskyy’s use of social media

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On May 14, 2022

In Media

Image (cc) 2022 by id-iom

The latest edition of the “Beat the Press” podcast takes a look at how Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s brilliant use of social media has helped rally the world to his country’s side. Other topics include the Biden administration’s botched rollout of a disinformation governance board and The New York Times’ massive dive into Tucker Carlson — and more, including our Rants & Raves.

Emily Rooney is in the anchor chair, joined by Lylah Alphonse, Jon Keller and me. Please subscribe and give us a listen.

The Times’ Tucker Carlson series is a triumph of explanatory journalism

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On May 2, 2022

In Media

Tucker Carlson. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

Yes, I read The New York Times’ massive deep dive into Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News program was dubbed — accurately — as “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.”

Something as lengthy and detailed as this defies summary. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to slog through the whole thing, the “key takeaways” sidebar is quite good. I also recommend that you interact with the digital version of part three, in which you’ll hear Carlson’s own words, taken from more than 1,100 episodes.

Times reporter Nicholas Confessore has done a remarkable job of combing through Carlson’s past and present in an attempt to explain his rise from stylish but obscure magazine writer and failed television host to the most powerful force in cable. And Confessore offers partial answers, at least, to some aspects of the Carlson phenomenon. For instance:

• Did Carlson change? Or has he always been this way and we just didn’t see it? Several years ago I wrote a piece for GBH News in which I recounted my own long-ago experience with Carlson, who came across as a charming raconteur with mainstream conservative-libertarian views.

Confessore’s answer, I think, is that Carlson really did change, although the seeds of his transformation were always there. His childhood sounds like it was truly miserable. And, in looking back, I have to say that my only personal experience with him was in how he interacted with a fellow white man. It doesn’t sound like he’s spent much time at all with people of color.

• Does he really believe the terrible things he says? Or is it all an act? This comes up in conversation with friends and associates all the time — again, mainly because he seemed to be someone entirely different a generation ago. Confessore’s answer: it’s a little of both.

I thought Confessore was especially strong in his explanation of Carlson’s attempt to reinvent himself after his failed stints at CNN and MSNBC by launching The Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet that moved increasingly to the fringe right. Carlson comes across as someone who embraced extremism partly out of conviction and partly as a way to amuse himself. He does not seem like someone who ever gives much thought to the consequences of what he writes and says.

He is also portrayed as really, really wanting to make it in television, and he was probably willing to do just about anything to make his Fox gig a success. The late Fox impresario Roger Ailes reportedly once said that Fox was Carlson’s “last chance.” So Carlson’s shtick could be seen as a poisonous combination of his own flirtation with extremist ideas; delight at provoking the “elites” whom he hates; and desperate ambition.

• What’s next? Would Carlson run for president? Confessore doesn’t get into that, even though he portrays Carlson as the logical successor to Trump — “Trumpism without Trump,” as he puts it. I don’t see why Carlson would take the next step given the riches and fame that have already come his way. But we don’t know whether he lusts for power, just as we didn’t know that Trump would aspire to authoritarian rule once he got past the novelty stage of what started out as a celebrity candidacy in 2015.

Confessore also does a good job of explaining how Fox has overcome the problems with advertisers that Carlson has experienced, and the role played by Lachlan Murdoch, who is far more ideological and extreme than his cynical, greed-crazed father, Rupert. The Times has produced a triumph of explanatory journalism.

Republicans have a Putin problem — and the media need to stop glossing over it

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On March 16, 2022

In Media, Politics

Madison Cawthorn. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

Previously published at GBH News.

Madison Cawthorn didn’t get the memo.

Sometime in early March, the extremist Republican congressman from North Carolina decided to go off on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug,” Cawthorn told supporters. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

If Cawthorn had spoken, say, a month earlier, he might have earned the praise of former President Donald Trump and gotten invited to trash Zelenskyy some more on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. But that was before Zelenskyy had emerged as a heroic figure, standing up to Russia’s invasion of his country with a combination of eloquence and courage. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” he said to those who thought he should flee.

So former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, the sort of establishment Republican who was frozen out during the Trump era, used his Wall Street Journal column to let his readers know that Republicans like Cawthorn and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”) are outliers — and that the party is oh-so-very supportive of Zelenskyy. “Republican members of Congress, candidates and commentators echoing Mr. Trump’s isolationism and Kremlin apologetics are out of sync with GOP voters,” Rove wrote.

WRAL.com of North Carolina, which obtained video of Cawthorn taking the Kremlin line, pushed that message even harder, stressing in its lead that Cawthorn’s vile rhetoric was at odds with his party and calling it “a comment that runs counter to the overwhelming share of Republicans with a favorable view of the leader fending off a military invasion from Russia.”

Oh, please. Can we get real for a moment? Yes, Rove and WRAL cited poll numbers that show Republicans, like most Americans, are now pro-Zelenskyy and support Ukraine in fending off the massive Russian invasion. But that is an exceptionally recent phenomenon.

In January, for instance, a poll by The Economist and YouGov found that Republicans viewed Vladimir Putin more favorably than President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — hardly surprising after years of pro-Putin pronouncements by Trump.

No wonder former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who’d like to run for president, told Fox News that Putin is “a very talented statesman” with “lots of gifts” who “knows how to use power,” as Eric Boehlert, who tracks conservative bias on the part of the mainstream media, took note of.

Now, some of this reflects a split between the Republican Party’s right wing and its extreme right wing. Way out on the authoritarian fringes, figures such as Carlson and Steve Bannon have long admired Putin for his unabashed, anti-democratic espousal of white Christian dominance and attacks on LGBTQ folks. Politicians such as Cawthorn, Vance and Pompeo, rather than standing up for principle, are trying to thread the needle.

Meanwhile, their less extreme counterparts, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have flipped from coddling Trump, Putin and Russia to claiming that Biden is to blame for the invasion and the high gas prices it has led to.

All of this has a historical context. As everyone knows, or ought to know, Putin has represented an existential threat to Ukraine since 2014, when he invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and incorporated it into Russia. Putin appears to be gripped by the idea of a Greater Russia, of which in his mind Ukraine is a part. Ukraine was a Soviet republic, and Putin has always expressed nostalgia for the U.S.S.R. But the two countries’ ties go back centuries, and apparently no one cares about that more deeply than Putin.

Into this box of dry kindling came the spark of Trump in 2016. His numerous statements of support for Putin and pro-Russia actions couldn’t possibly all be listed here, but a few that pertain to Ukraine stand out. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Paul Manafort, had worked for a pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine and, upon being forced out, offered his services to Trump free of charge. You may also recall that a plank in that year’s Republican platform guaranteeing Ukraine’s security was mysteriously watered down — and a delegate to that year’s convention later said she was asked directly by Trump to support the change. (Manafort later went to prison for financial crimes he committed in Ukraine, only to be pardoned by Trump.)

That was followed by revelations in the fall of 2019 that Trump, in a phone call to Zelenskyy, demanded dirt on Biden in return for military assistance — assistance that Ukraine needed desperately to deter Russian aggression. Trump was impeached over that massive scandal. Yet not a single Republican House member (not even Liz Cheney) supported impeachment, and only one Republican senator — Mitt Romney — voted to remove Trump from office.

As detailed a month ago by The Washington Post, Trump has continued to praise Putin, hailing his war against Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy,” while Trumpers like U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona sneer, “We should just call ourselves Ukraine and then maybe we can get NATO to engage and protect our border.”

Mother Jones reported over the weekend that Russian media outlets have been ordered to quote Tucker Carlson as much as possible. Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed Republican congressional candidate in Washington state, endorsed Cawthorn’s eruption this past Saturday and went him one better, tweeting: “Zelenskyy was installed via a US backed color revaluation [sic], his goal is to move his country west so he virtue signals in woke ideology while using nazi battalions to crush his enemies. He was also smart enough to cut our elite in on the graft. @CawthornforNC nailed it.”

There was a time when, as the old saying went, politics stopped at the water’s edge. That wasn’t always good policy, as elected officials came under withering attack when they dared to criticize misbegotten actions such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. But there was a virtue to it as well. When we go to war or, in the case of Ukraine, engage in high-wire diplomacy aimed at ending a war, it’s that much harder when critics are sniping at our leaders. Can you imagine if Republicans had gone on television in 1962 to say that Nikita Khrushchev was right to place Soviet missiles in Cuba?

Claiming that Republicans are united in supporting Ukraine doesn’t make it so. Some are, some aren’t. It’s shocking that a few fringe figures like Cawthorn and Kent are openly criticizing Zeleneskyy even now — but it’s just as shocking that praise for Putin was a mainstream Republican position as recently as a month or so ago.

Unfortunately, the media’s tendency to flatten out and normalize aberrant behavior by the Republicans will prevent this from growing into an all-out crisis for the party. We’ll move on to the next thing, whether it be expressing faux outrage over Vice President Harris and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s touting electric cars while gas prices are high (what better time?) or Biden’s latest miserable polling numbers.

Anything that enables our feckless media to cover politics as the same old both-sides game that it used to be.

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