Up to the job? Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
It’s hard to say exactly when unbridled, gossipy speculation about the health of our political candidates became an accepted part of the American media landscape. It might have been November 2015, when Vanity Fair published an article entitled “Is Donald Trump Actually a Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In!“. Or perhaps it was a month later, when Buzzfeed lampooned the doctor’s letter that declared Trump physically fit for office, juxtaposing its content with unflattering photographs that suggested he was anything but. (“Trump has lost 15 pounds over the past 12 months and his cardiovascular status is excellent,” was quoted directly above a repulsive photo of the future president cramming what looks like a massive piece of chicken satay into his mouth.)
Certainly, this norm was well-established by the following year. In October 2016, the Washington Post published an article mocking Donald Trump’s weight and asking a panel of “experts” to guess how fat he was. “Even more important than Donald Trump’s weight is how unhealthy he looks,” said cardiologist Dean Ornish. “Unhealthy complexion, puffy, pasty skin, sweating a lot.”
This type of coverage certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of medical ethics, which discourages doctors from performing armchair diagnoses of people they don’t treat. But the Left’s defence was that it was part of a vital truth-telling exercise. The press should have an adversarial relationship with those who seek the privilege of governing us! They should ask tough, even invasive, questions about a candidate’s fitness for office! The health of our aspiring leaders is a matter of public concern, after all, especially when it comes to retaining the necessary faculties to do the job. But especially, and more importantly, when the aspiring leader is that guy. And so, the resistance media was born, and went on to thrive during Trump’s presidency.
At the root of all this was a conviction that it was the job of the press to, as Arianna Huffington put it in 2015, “never [fail] to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents” — but this was about more than Trump. He was only the catalyst for a long-overdue transformation of journalistic norms. Telling the public what is true, objectively, became somewhat less important than telling them what is right, morally. And what has since become clear is that this concept of rightness is not just morality-infused but highly partisan — which brings us to last week’s controversial interview between NBC journalist Dasha Burns and Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman.
Fetterman is nearly seven feet tall with prominent tattoos, a shaved head, and a penchant for wearing shorts and hoodies rather than three-piece suits. He has become something of a star for Democrats trying to combat their image as smug coastal elites in couture clothing who’ve fallen out of touch with the working class (even though, despite his grungy aesthetic, Fetterman actually holds a PhD). He was also, until recently, well-positioned to win in the upcoming midterm elections against his Republican opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, a Trump-endorsed candidate who was previously best known for hawking pseudoscientific cures on Oprah.
Unfortunately, Fetterman suffered a relatively serious stroke in May — and while he was back on the campaign trail two months later, he and his team remained somewhat tight-lipped about his health. Videos surfaced of Fetterman seemingly stumbling over his words during public speaking engagements, giving ammunition to Right-wing claims that he was no longer up to the challenges of holding office. Fetterman’s campaign said the videos were misleading; the truth, as usual, appears to be somewhere in the middle.
The NBC interview was his first on-camera since the stroke. Introducing it, Burns told NBC anchor Lester Holt that Fetterman continues to have auditory processing difficulties for which he uses technological assistance, which Fetterman himself explains in the interview: “I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear, so I use captioning, so I’m able to see what you’re saying.”
The trouble began when Burns told Holt that without the captioning, Fetterman had struggled to communicate: “In small talk before my interview, it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying,” she said. She clarified these remarks the next day on the Today show, noting that auditory processing issues are not the same as cognitive damage; Fetterman’s problems are specifically listening-related (the signal gets garbled somewhere between ear and brain), can be mitigated, and may also improve over time.
By the standards of 2016 — or indeed, of journalism in general — it was completely appropriate of Burns not to shy away from discussing this issue. Reporters have a solemn duty to tell the honest truth about a candidate’s limitations, whether or not they find that candidate repulsive.
In this case, the NBC appearance was arguably to the candidate’s benefit. The interview, along with the background provided by Burns, makes the extent of his current limitations clear in a way that voters might find reassuring. In contrast to the viral videos, which seemed like serious cause for concern, he came across here as being in relatively good shape.
But rather than being lauded for her brave and honest reporting, Dasha Burns became the resistance media’s sworn enemy of the week. Podcaster Kara Swisher tweeted a scathing criticism of Burns to her million-plus followers, writing: “Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.” The women of The View also jumped on the “Dasha Burns is bad at small talk” train, with Sunny Hostin also claiming that she “broke journalistic ethics”. Buzzfeed condemned Burns for ableism and included quotes from a disability activist who said the interview would “worsen attitudes and violence towards disabled people in a time when virtual accommodations are being removed left and right after they were implemented overnight in 2020”. And Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, said she couldn’t believe Burns had been allowed to describe the candidate’s communication difficulties without “consequences”; she demanded them a few days later: “I would love to see an apology towards the disability community from her and from her network for the damage they have caused,” she said.
The word “damage” is interesting, in that it seems like a rare, open acknowledgement of the deference politicians on the Left have come to expect from the press. (The Burns interview triggered nearly as much outrage as a far more scandalous remark from Oz’s communications adviser Rachel Tripp, who mocked Fetterman’s struggles, saying that if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly”.) Fetterman was, of course, not personally harmed by the observation that he still struggles to interpret speech. His chances of election, on the other hand… well.
But this is what happens when journalists begin to see themselves not as mere reporters, but arbiters of moral truth, with a responsibility not just to inform the public but to guide them to the proper conclusions. And the new norms, and new normal, ushered in during the Trump presidency have lingered long after the conclusion of his time in the White House, to the detriment of basically every election since.
The problem isn’t a press that challenges power, which is of course what the press should always do. The problem is that it challenges inconsistently, and only in one direction. The same folks who spent all of 2016 chortling about how Trump was too fat and crazy and congenitally stupid to be elected president are now, in 2022, calling for sanctions on any journalist who raises salient questions about Fetterman’s fitness for office — and relatedly, studiously ignoring some fairly newsworthy senior moments on the part of President Biden.
That call for moral clarity, which sounded so elevated in theory, becomes something far baser in practice: a facile narrative about heroes and villains that invariably breaks along party lines. We see this not just in the expectation that Fetterman be protected, but in the treatment of his opponent, who has been roundly mocked as an elite Trumpian carpetbagger who can’t even pronounce the name of the local grocery store. Oh, the irony of Oz being condemned for his “Wegners” stumble by the same people who consider it a cardinal sin to even mention the other candidate’s difficulties with verbal communication.
One need not be a Republican to understand why this stuff makes ordinary people feel like they’ve stepped through the looking glass. Or to observe that the media establishment that now frets over the scourge of “big lie” conspiracies is the same one that spent years salivating over the end (it was going to happen, any day now!) of Trump’s obviously stolen presidency. Or to wonder why Stacey Abrams’s refusal to concede the legitimacy of her election loss in 2018 is courageous and inspirational, while Trump’s represents an unprecedented fascist threat. And yet the expectation is that good liberals will not notice the lopsidedness of this narrative — or if they do, that they will never mention it — because to do so would be to express “a Right-wing talking point”. Everything, even the truth, is now filtered through the lens of tribal politics.
Obviously, this makes for especially high drama when a presidency is on the line; obviously, it is especially bad and shocking when the norm-flouter is also the most powerful man in the nation. But it’s the trickling-down of this phenomenon to state and local elections, a reshaping across the board of both politics and the way the press covers them, that genuinely imperils democracy. Elections, once understood as a race, are being increasingly treated like an endless war — one that goes beyond politics as spectator sport, into a world of divergent realities. A world where the loser might capitulate to a corrupt system but never concede defeat. A world where the polarised press no longer even pretends to care about truth, but instead acts like a sort of hype team for its respective party.
And on that front, the upcoming midterms seem poised to be a watershed moment — one in which we either collectively move on from Trump’s America, or decide to live in it, forever.
Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.
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SubscribeIt is a decent article, but it feels like it would have been old news a half a decade ago. I remember when half the media and celebrities were calling for Trump’s win to be overturned through any means possible after he beat Hillary. That was followed by years of saying the Russians literally “hacked” the election. We even had a fake investigation into it lasting for years. Then we had years of the press knowingly lying about various subjects and insisting everyone who pointed it out was a conspiracy theorist. Remember all the reversals and censorship during Covid-19 (lab leak not possible, vaccines stop the spread) or how massive rioting was made to disappear? To make things even more egregious, many of the media “resistance liberals” now just happen to be former associates of the Bush Administration, and lied for him back in the day. This was followed by the media being the Obama Administrations greatest and most loyal asset. I seriously don’t know what there is to even add anymore.
“Western World’s media, institutions, and political systems continue to burn to the ground. More tonight at eleven!”
When you attack your opponents for things that you would object to them attacking your friends that is simply hypocrisy. Politics is shot through with hypocrisy particularly among the Democrat boosters in the MSM. But what can you expect of a party that insists a man who claims to be a woman should be entitled to be treated as a woman for all purposes. Lying is being baked into the system – just as it was in Soviet Russia.
particularly among the Democrat boosters in the MSM
Surely Fox news, the biggest network (viewership larger than CNN and MSNBC combined) is as least as bad? Or so say Americans:
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-biased-news-outlets-in-america-cnn-fox-nytimes-2018-8?r=US&IR=T#1-fox-news-51-tie-1
Fox is popular, but its reach doesn’t come close to equaling that of the entire MSM, which properly understood includes dozens of major newspapers, every large-circulation legacy news/culture magazine, local TV and radio stations, NPR and PBS, entertainment/opinion outlets like the late-night “comics,” and nearly every Hollywood production.
And every woke TV show, movie and countless corporations’ “
re-education camps” mandatory diversity and sensitivity training programs.…and you are sure that the multiplicity of news outlets on the left & centre, and the relatively few on the right, is an indication of bias? Is America not a relatively free capitalist society; do Republicans not have the money and resources to set up their own news sources? Outside of news, what’s to stop right wing comedians, film producers etc from setting up their own….?
Moreover in TV news terms – which is where most Americans get their news (newspapers and news magazines have small and diminishing circulations) – Fox does come close to equalising the ‘other side’.
When major media are willing to alienate half the country to broadcast leftist tropes, there is something going on beyond any business model I’ve ever seen. Fox gobbled up the other half and thrives.
The viewers of the alphabet networks news, staffed with the same sort of people as CNN and MSNBC, are seven times more numerous than FOX’s. These are the couch potatoes who absorb the journalistic poison drip daily and nightly and think they are getting the truth, poor fools.
CNN has nearly destroyed itself by forcing all commentators to go after Trump using negative spin constantly, day and night. Fox day is simple reportage on the events with a right wing slant but less personal attacking. Fox evening presenters are strongly conservative often pushed into defending that view.
The MSM is uniformly anti-Fox, almost obsessively so likely fearful of critique of a near uniform leftist viewpoint. Mahr has often gotten laughs as he exposes the nonsense that arrives.
Uh, not quite “for all purposes.” Biden has made it clear that trans women are just ordinary men when it comes to registering for military conscription.
I hesitate to put clarity and Biden in the same sentence. His handlers, I suspect, determine policy matters which they feed into his teleprompter or inculcate into his diminished brain. With mediation from Doctor Jill.
For sure, it’s hypocrisy, but it goes much deeper and darker. It’s an evil denial of reality, more like gaslighting in the sense that they roundly deny that it’s even happening. Reality is reversed and that’s perfectly “normal.” People are told that they are not seeing what they are clearly seeing. Mainstream media is “balanced.” Biden is just fine, and why would you even ask, you bigot?
It’s also abusive. Consider a family with two children where the parents routinely call out every possible flaw or mistake pertaining to one child, never acknowledging their good points or deeds, while doing the opposite for the other child. If everyone were an adult, you COULD simply label that hypocrisy. BUT, if the parents also knowingly made completely false statements of blame for one child—convincing half the people in their town that one child had embezzled their life savings when that child hadn’t taken a penny—that’s evil, slanderous, and abusive.
Children who are only ever praised are likely become adults who are blind to their own faults and unaware of their true motives when the motives are less than worthy (their darker purpose in Shakespearian language): the type who who would claim to be protecting transgender people by threatening J K Rowling, the type of person who takes on a ‘good’ cause for profit or vengeance.
I find it rather amusing, as well as intensely frustrating, that the media and ‘progressives’ chose to completely sacrifice their integrity on the hill called Trump. Coincidentally (was it?), in the U.K. the media and ‘progressives’ made the same sacrifice on the hill called Farage, managing to beat back Farage under May, then doubled down on the hill called Johnson. They got Trump and Johnson in the end, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory as both of them achieved key changes, and now the electorate are wise to their hypocrisy.
It’s interesting to see where this will go next. They didn’t get Farage though – maybe a comeback in 2024?
I find it deeply depressing, as well as intensely frustrating, that media, ‘MAGA’ and GOP choose to completely sacrifice their integrity on the hill called Trump.
Perhaps you don’t appreciate that the Tea Party movement was an effort to hold government accountable for irresponsible spending and corruption within both parties. It failed because there really was no leader and was completely trashed by the press and all democratic politicians with many Republicans silent about controlling their Tea Party advocates. Up comes Trump who renames the movement and actually leads. He has been knocked aside and there is an effort to demonize MAGA except the organic movement to reform government remains. That movement is too large to subside and will find a leader and perhaps a new name.
The media does the opposite, as this article clearly points out.
It wasn’t until I moved over to the US seven years ago that I realized the extent to which media projection is distorted to the rest of the world. From inside America and outside Democrat enclaves, Trump was seen to be doing a pretty good job. He was by no means perfect, but he was the only politician who seemed to have the energy to fight back an entrenched establishment that is becoming increasingly authoritarian. For all his faults, Trump loved America hence the slogan Make America Great Again.
I do wonder if his flaws were a necessary component of his character for him to have the energy and the will to carry on and not be deterred by endless slurs and negative press.
I remember arguing with my father a couple decades ago when he quoted Rush Limbaugh and droned on and on about the bias in the MSM. After seeing the hyperbolic reactions to Trump from 2016-present, I had to concede that he was right, and I was wrong. They have done far more damage to America than Trump and his army ever could.
and how did the MSM etc capture the judiciary, who ruled 79/80 against Trump’s cases, and Republicans (the majority of damning testimony against him comes from them, and ex Trump employees).
Who was found to be lying. He’s done nothing that every other politician before him has done except go against the entrenched establishment which is why he must be punished so hard that no-one ever dares stand up to them again.
Delusional. Other pols before him did not, for example, instigate, and lose, 79 court cases contesting the results if their non- election. He is an insider, his only threat to the establishment are his lies and grift. He has no real policies, just hot air that he blows upp the ass if his easily manipulated herd. There are of course many on the left who also do this, and I am critical of them in equal measure.
Two things:
I didn’t understand the last sentence. The US is likely going to give control of the house and senate to the GOP in November. What else are you supposed to do when faced with a President with dementia controlled by people who continue to push an extreme woke agenda that harms most people financially. Are they supposed to vote Democrat just because of Trump?
The answer to your last question is yes, they are, obviously. Trump is a threat to democracy even when democratically elected. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to treason. Are you some kind of alt-right terrorist? *sarcasm off* To be fair though, this is a British site, and for better or worse, the Democrats are the party of the establishment who will be more likely to continue the internationalist focus the US had pursued since the end of the Cold War. Trump and co. are much more likely to cut them off to tend to the needs of our own people. People in Europe have good realpolitik reasons to root for a Democratic regime.
As Steve Bannon puts is – the Democrats complaining hypocritically about Democracy – well that will soon change – as they are about to receive a “Democracy Suppository’ on November 8.
And how true it is.
Beginning on the first day the house flips is scheduled the Impeachment process against Biden for his Constitutional crime of not only failing to secure the borders of USA – but in fact handing the control of the Southern border totally to the Mexican Drug Cartels. There is no provision in the Constitution for this.
The Cartels are making many $Billions by charging every last one of the 4 Million ‘Illegals’ so far since Biden took Office, $Thousands each – Illegals who have just walked over the completely open border to free transport to anywhere in the country, medical, housing, cell Phones… Meanwhile Biden is spending $60 Billion so far trying to protect Ukraine’s border, and pretty much destroying the global economy in the process.
Democracy Suppository….coming Nov 8, 2022.
That’ll be the Steve Bannon who is due to be sentenced to jail today?
I don’t know what you mean by: “There is no provision in the Constitution for this.” There certainly is for impeachment, and the President has a constitutional duty to protect the country from invasion — which is exactly what’s going on, albeit with mostly unarmed invaders. His non-performance in this respect amounts to treason.
I don’t know what you mean by: “There is no provision in the Constitution for this.” There certainly is for impeachment, and the President has a constitutional duty to protect the country from invasion — which is exactly what’s going on, albeit with mostly unarmed invaders. Biden’s non-performance in this respect amounts to treason, as does the non-performance of Cackling Kamala, his designated “border czar”.
Doing so well until the last paragraph. It could easily have been:
Arguably Biden is the prime example of a gerontocracy – and older people, even in good health, may still mislay the car keys (or the codes for the nuclear response).
I agree fully – that final sentence “move on from Trump’s America” (move on is good she implies) “, or decide to live in it, forever” (eek! No escape from Trump and secure borders, peace in Middle East, Russia too concerned about retaliation to attack, energy independence, strong economy – eek!!) shows the author’s bias pretty clearly.
Well-corrected. It is not Biden’s age per se which is the issue. It is his obvious mental impairment. And the absolute refusal of his handlers, and his party’s propaganda arm in the media, to acknowledge it, poses a grave danger to the country.
The observations of the article are well-taken, but I think Kat is showing her youth a bit regarding how long interest in the health of US candidates has been a feature. I can recall Paul Tsongas being given intense scrutiny in the 1992 US Presidential primaries over his cancer history, if I remember he was shown energetically doing swimming pool laps to show his full health (he died of cancer a few years later). Although that also highlights the change towards open media bias, even if Tsongas was a Democrat nobody back then thought it was weird or inappropriate to ask questions about his cancer risk.
JFK and Cushings
Actually, Kennedy had Addison’s Disease, which is adrenal insufficiency. His primary health issue may well have been autoimmune illness starting in his youth. Reading this makes one wonder if he was really medically fit to be POTUS:
https://www.practicalpainmanagement.com/pain/myofascial/autoimmune/john-f-kennedys-pain-story-autoimmune-disease-centralized-pain
And interestingly, though even further back, is that I believe no media made anything of FDR’s polio and his almost complete inability to stand let alone walk.
That maybe because people recognise that the brain, cognitive impairment, psychological problems are relevant to a leader’s prime directives, whilst use of legs, not so much.
Yes, the newspapers and radio knew best about keeping the president’s physical condition secret. It was for the public’s own good, you see. Sort of like today, come to think of it.
Well said!
Or how he squeezed the Japanese until they had no choice but to go to war and then denied intelligence to the naval and military in Hawaii about the approach of the Japanese Imperial Navy. A “bloody nose,” as FDR put it, was necessary to subdue the strong isolationist feelings of a large part of the nation and get us into the war before the British threw in the towel.
“Everything, even the truth, is now filtered through the lens of tribal politics.”
When truth becomes relative, anything goes. And when anything goes, ANYTHING will go. Buckle up.
Brilliantly exposed and analysed. Organised religions might look on in envy at the way the partisan media refuses to acknowledge any inconsistency with orthodox party line in their “reporting.” And whosoever is proclaimed the heathen like Trump – anti-christ even – or heretic like Tulsi Gabbard*, can expect the full wrath of a pre-ordained “truth” brigade in the media. This is about the pursuit and retention of power, and as vicious and unrelenting as any in American memory.
*Gabbard, a highly intelligent and articulate woman of colour, and Congressperson from Obama’s state of Hawaii, was cast out of the Democrat Party, branded as a traitor throughout the Dem media, and called out by Hillary Clinton as a “Russian Asset” for daring to challenge the party’s war-mongering in the Middle East.
The trashing of Tulsi has been rather interesting. By not conforming to groupthink dogma she must be removed. Her sentiments never seemed motivated by personal anger as have been Cheney’s who also has been shoved aside. Tulsi has a likely future, Liz not so much once Trump becomes less an issue.
The American mainstream media has been in the bag for the Dems as long as I’ve lived, but their willingness to suppress the truth and outdo Pravda really took off during the Bush II years. And then 8 years of running interference for Obama, even when he had journalists spied on. They were perfectly poised for what they did to the Trump presidency.
A Gallup Poll the other day showed that trust in the mass media has dropped to an all-time low, especially among Independent voters. You could swap the average journalist with the average social worker and you would get the same result on both sides.Living in the media bubble means you don’t know the contempt the audience has for you or you don’t care.
More obvious now is that the news media reporters seem all of the same mold created by a common training. The less educated but street wise reporters have aged out. Media might do better in building diversity of thought into their reporting. The nominal role of holding government to account is no longer operative.
And so it happened that the great Roman Republic, having conquered all its foreign enemies, stood astride the world, not as it once was, but as a shadow of itself corrupted by wealth and power, destitute of the pride and virtue of its forefathers, defended not by free farmers and citizens but by oligarchs in walled mansions with their personal armies. A Republic no longer, it became the Roman Empire, where politicians fought in the street and handed out bread and games, forsaking all dignity and decency, to garner the support of a frothing mob and rule the Empire.
“…despite his grungy aesthetic, Fetterman actually holds a PhD”
Not to mention comes from a VERY wealthy family who he freeloaded off of until he was nearly 50 years old.
Unfortunately Ms. Rosenfield isn’t acknowledging how deeply disturbing the whole scenario is.
Morally bankrupt
I’ll take the seven words ending your last paragraph in a heartbeat.
” Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like.”
Trumpers and Wokers mirror each other so well it’s spooky. Similar cognitive errors, anti-democratic arrogance, deficits in self-awareness, primitive defences…and spreading division and dysfunction in equal measure.
You’re absolutely correct that this is a real danger. Unfortunately, it seems that this has now become the way of the world. Disagreeable but polite discourse is abandoned for insults and slurs. As a bystander it’s important to avoid ideological capture. The best way to do that is to question everything, particularly news or articles that are written to rile instead of inform. At this point I hold the American media establishment wholly responsible for the hatred and division going on in the US at the moment.