CNN's Jim Acosta again shows how journalism can save itself

There is a notion among "political journalists," which is an invented category of journalism that does away with issue details, background research and fact-checking to instead insist that the true news to be followed is whatever the most powerful figure on offer wants to bleat out, that confronting obvious lies by their subjects is uncouth. It is entirely self-serving; the translated version is that challenging the lies is unpleasant and will make important people mad at them, so the job at best is shuffled off to fact-checkers who make a tenth of the salary and who have agreed to be the designated punching-bags who will accept the scorn that the people with their own makeup teams couldn't bear to risk.

The mere existence of that journalistic carve-out for cowards is what brought us to the current moment: political figures empowered to lie to our faces and who now deftly weaponize the ability. An American public so deluged in propagandistic rhetoric that they can no longer discern between truth and fiction. And the natural result of unchecked, authoritarian-backing propaganda: a fascist government that declares emergency powers to do away with the rights of any citizens or groups it has designated as an enemy.

On CNN, Wednesday morning, host Jim Acosta showed the near-trivial ease of holding the powerful to account. And it was glorious—a throwback to a past in which journalists challenging the claims of elected officials was what all parties thought the job ought to entail.

Congressman Tim Burchett has made a name for himself as the sort of insincere bootlicker who spins a jus-folk image in which crimes by his allies are mere oopsies and he may or may not have completely forgotten about the events that unfolded during a violent insurrection—it depends on the state of what we can assume to be sudden-onset comas that the congressman so often experiences when television cameras are pointed his way.

Burchett attempted to get away with a truly odious, vulgar lie, claiming to be unsure of whether the seditionists convicted for bloody attacks on Capitol police officers were "truly violent." It was the sort of lie that a man would get punched for, if CNN was a bar and the person on the next stool was one of those officers—shameless, stupid, and gobsmackingly cruel towards those who lived through it.

And Acosta called him out for the lie. Period.

Acosta followed up by showing the contempt that is appropriate to direct at an elected public officials who attempts to manipulate the public by spewing propagandistic falsehoods. He behaved as a journalist should, not only protecting the public interest by shutting down lies by the powerful but by conveying the contempt that the public themselves has the right to express when their elected leaders get caught trying to snow them. It is an act of corruption; those who lie to the public for the sake of their own interests are crooks.

The upsides to this once bog-standard journalism practice are enormous. It grounds the discussion in facts, rather than allowing the airwaves to be used to disseminate transparent propaganda. It drags "political reporting" back into the realm of actual journalism, rather than giving it over to the sort of faux-Hollywood celebrity stylings of big-name fake journalists and their celebrity-styled often-corrupt-to-the-core guests.

And it is, to use a phrase recently come into vogue, riveting. It is riveting storytelling. If more of each news cycle consisted of this—not the reality television-premised impotent screaming of two paid actors intentionally tailored to end in public bafflement, but a genuine political leader of some import being shown as has his true self—then perhaps political "news" would neither have collapsed as an institution nor been the latest industry for Americans to flee in disgust from.

It may have been in a moment of deserved pique, but Acosta's quip about Fox News was not off the mark. Think of how many interviews Burchett has likely done in which he insisted that he, a mere gullible idiot with no eyes or ears of his own, a wee political waif whose only contact with the outside world is rumors and vagaries but who is determined to reshape the entire republic with whatever new bills his cohorts shove into his fumbling hands, could not possibly know whether the people caught on videotape and convicted of viciously attacking police officers during Trump's Jan. 6 coup attempt had really done what every goddamn camera in the Capitol had tracked them doing.

How many interviews has Burchett done in which faux-journalists every bit as dishonest as he is nodded and gave no pushback to the Orwellian notion that well maybe that thing we saw happened and maybe it didn't?

There's your problem. And that is why most of the American political media acts and has long acted as a vehicle for fascism—a blindingly powerful disinformation hub that privileges any lie a corrupt figure invents. That is why most of the public doesn't have the vaguest damn idea whether the "economy" is good or bad, or whether internment camps will now be imprisoning hardened criminals or innocent American children, or whether Trump is a convicted felon who left office after a failed violent coup attempt or the only billionaire in the world who really, super-duper cares about the common Trump-cryptocoin-owning public.

It's all because celebrity bumpkins who style themselves "news program hosts" sit glassy-eyed behind their lucite desks while elected officials insist that reality is whatever they want it to be.

There is a downside in this approach, of course. Acosta's journalistic strengths are what quickly earned him the ire of Trump's camp of crooked liars and the media executives who pay his salary and who imagine themselves to be political players of even greater import than the officials their hosts interview. Performing journalism on a network that doesn't want it means making an enemy of all the crooked people in the world—the risk that journalists in every other section of the papers experience every damn day of their lives.

Other risks are overblown. There is no chance that Rep. Burchett will avoid Acosta when the next chance for an interview comes up. For starters, he has already proven to have the memory of a goldfish—it's not an issue. For seconders, without national interviews Burchett will never float, in his party, to any level above generic interchangeable toady. He needs CNN; CNN does not need him.

I was once baffled as to how it was that the scandal-obsessed political press, from the New York Times to even the most vapid CNN hosts, could muster unending energy and attention on rumor-mongering over even plainly invented scandals but could not mount any opinion at all over whether a television-broadcast violent attempted coup that lead to deaths in the U.S. Capitol even amounted to a corrupt act, much less a criminal one. I was stumped as to how Trump could be convicted of nearly three dozen felonies—a drop in the bucket compared the indictments that are now dropped or in limbo—and could be caught lying flat-out to federal agents in an attempt to hide national security documents at his damnable resort, and seemingly nobody in the top ranks of American "journalism", from editors to producers to hosts to pundits, could muster up the energy to insist to the public that no, these crimes were very fucking much not all right—it should be beyond any decent American, powerful or unknown, to brush them aside.

I was once baffled, but then we learned from Jeff Bezos and other company owners that journalism is not incompetent, it is rigged. It is rigged to benefit the political figures that the wealthy owners believe they can squeeze the most favors from—the whole thing is a carnival game. The hosts do not allow the guests to lie because they are stupid and uninformed, the hosts allow the guests to lie because if they do not allow the guests to lie corporate executives like David Zaslav will yank them from their timeslots so as to better curry regulatory favors from the liars.

If the news media is to save itself, though, it cannot maintain itself as the nation's primary mouthpiece for corruption. The market for unrepentant bullshit-spewing is so thoroughly saturated that no number of new flags shoved into studio backgrounds can make it dazzling again. Like reality television itself, it has gone from innovative and exciting to the cultural dregs of the also-rans. Nobody wants to watch that shit. The audience continues to flee, because no matter how loud the paid actors yell you cannot make lying riveting.

Think of any movie or television show. Imagine a new one of those, one in which the plot is reduced to:

1. There is a conflict that needs to be solved.
2. Two groups of people assemble to shout about the problem. Some of the people are lying about the problem; some are not. There is no hint given to the audience as to which is which.
3. The yelling stops and everyone goes home. Roll credits.

The problem remains unsolved, there is no comeuppance for the liars, the audience never even learns who was deceiving them and who was earnest.

Would you watch that, David Zaslav? Answer me sincerely. Why is that not the format for every movie your company produces? Every new television show? If it is the most exciting thing you can envision, for attracting an audience to one channel, why are you not ordering every other property to produce the same?

Because it's as boring as shit, that's why, and everyone knows it. A wrestling event that consists of every wrestler preening and then leaving without doing any actual wrestling gathers an audience of Not Damn Much. A movie franchise in which no villains get their comeuppance or are even acknowledged as villains would enrage audiences, not satisfy them.

What CNN produces, and what the editorial pages of the Bezos-owned Post and the endlessly pompous power-jumpers at the New York Times churn out, is pink-slurry kayfabe in which not even inciting a riot that leaves dead bodies in the Capitol building can be considered good or bad. We are all ordered to be the idiot waifs Tim Burchett claims to be—the journalists, the editors, the public. We present the information and the public must decide for itself, says every one of these preening favor-seeking autocrats—and then they take every step to hide the "information" for that decision behind an insurmountable daily wall of gleefully printed lies. It is all a fraud. There is no difference between "political journalism" and "political corruption." They merged and are one.

If a news company wanted to drum up some riveting storytelling but does not consider stories like "internment camps" or "attempted coup" to be riveting enough to display emotion over, they can hardly expect their audience to be riveted by their gutless, villain-less, forever-adrift versions. That is not what journalism is; journalism is premised on exposing wrongdoing as wrongdoing, not on the endless back-and-forth pomp of op-ed word battles that bicker over whether entire campaigns of weaponized deceit amount to wrongdoing or just exceptional cleverness on the part of the most dishonest.

You want riveting? Find a lie—they are everywhere, they litter the ground like fall leaves—and expose the teller. Confront the teller. Scorn the teller. Probe whether it was a momentary fumble or an intentional act of propaganda—of corruption. Examine whether the corruption is coordinated, the lie intentionally repeated by conspiring actors looking to mislead the public on a grand scale.

Is Rep. Tim Burchett truly a nitwit who has not once, in 4 years, been invested enough to learn whether violence occurred on a day now known worldwide for its violence, and who could not once muster a glance at his phone to see whether those Trump pardoned included those caught on camera doing the worst of the violence? Or is it a campaign of propaganda, a party-devised strategy note intended to fog memories and paint over the crimes committed that day?

Find your story, you sad bunglers. You may have to earn the ire of a billionaire or two. You may have to expose a billionaire or two, if it comes down to it, and history suggests there's very little in the world the public finds more riveting than that.