Role of the Media

But the larger purpose of all the disinformation—about Democrats paying Muslim caravaners to infiltrate the country, and Republicans advancing a middle-class tax cut plan that doesn’t exist—is to pervade the news environment with storylines that, beyond the slander and lies, aren’t particularly relevant to next month’s vote. And to that end, it has been a stunning success.

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These stakes have disappeared from national headlines, leaving us with the caravan and the fake tax cut as dominant 2018 storylines, both of which will disappear the moment polls close on November 6. In this way, the coverage of the 2018 midterms looks as much like the coverage of the 2014 campaign as it does of the 2016 campaign, which is a damning fact, because it’s actually the third time journalists have allowed Trump to lead them by the nose to bullshit ahead of an election. Four Octobers ago, Trump—who was then a racist birther reality television show host, and thus an important figure in Republican politics—fanned racist panic about an Ebola outbreak in west Africa, which he and the GOP immediately stopped pretending to care about once Republicans won control of the Senate.

Republicans also predictably stopped pretending to care about government email protocols after the 2016 election, and, thus, so did journalists.

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