The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 3, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Greg Sargent: At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, the CBS news moderators fact-checked JD Vance a single time. Once. That was all it took to trigger Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who fanned out and hammered CBS relentlessly for that enormous transgression. All this opens a window on a larger story: the degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on top of an immense superstructure of endless and shameless lies. Bullying the media into not fact-checking Trump and Vance is essential to that larger project. Today, we’re talking about all this with Jamison Foser, who writes regularly about media capitulation to the right wing on his Substack, Finding Gravity. Thanks for coming on, Jamison.
Jamison Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: At the debate, JD Vance exaggerated wildly about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, an obsession of his, suggesting that they’re here illegally. CBS’s moderator pointed out that they’re actually here legally on temporary protected status. Vance objected saying, “Hey, the rules were that you’re not supposed to fact-check.” That triggered MAGA. Trump erupted on Truth Social. Other Republicans jumped in. Here’s audio of Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Newsmax:
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming, especially since the rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves because I think they were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.
Sargent: Jamison, I guess CBS maybe violated its rules, but still it was one extremely minor correction. What’s your reaction to all this?
Foser: Yeah, extremely minor is exactly right. The moderator literally just said, “To clarify for our viewers, there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield who are here legally.” Vance then flipped out, and first we have to acknowledge just how pathetic he sounded saying, “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” I immediately thought of that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Chevy Chase is playing a befuddled Gerald Ford in a debate and says, “It was my understanding that there’d be no math involved.” It was just ridiculous. He looked small and weak and dishonest. That was my first reaction. But we have to understand this objection Vance had in the moment and the reaction since that you’ve highlighted from his fellow conservatives, that it’s extremely just completely insincere, right? They don’t actually believe that the moderators were biased against them.
They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint.
But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like.
Sargent: To highlight a point you made, Trump and MAGA know the ability to lie with impunity—and that’s the essential thing, impunity—is absolutely central to the success of their political project. The debate really showed this in a new way. Vance lied about everything. The borders are open when in fact crossings are down. Immigrants take Americans jobs when in fact they’re helping grow the economy and labor force. Trump tried to protect people on the Affordable Care Act when in fact he tried to destroy it. Trump’s economy was uniformly fantastic when it actually ended in Covid-fueled catastrophe. Biden and Harris have decimated energy production when in fact oil production has soared. It’s really endless. Now Jamison, we all recall George Bush, Karl Rove, and the making of their alternate reality. Is what we’re seeing now something different?
Foser: I think it’s something different in kind of a hyperinflation of it. What we’re seeing now in terms of how the Republican candidates and the conservative movement are behaving and how the media reacts to it are trends that have been in place for decades and that many of us have been talking about and highlighting. I know you have been, and I have been for a very long time. What’s happened in the current MAGA era and the Trump era is the natural conclusion of those trends continuing unchecked. They’re just going to grow. It’s not hard to see the connection between the Bush administration saying “we create our own reality” and the way Donald Trump and JD Vance are behaving right now. If they’re allowed to do that and the media goes along and helps them in doing that by treating their lies and their fabrications as legitimate topics for discussion on things we should focus on, then they’re just going to do more and more of that.
Sargent: You had an interesting piece recently comparing coverage of Trump to coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. The press at that time decided that Gore was a liar and an exaggerator and they covered him that way in a concerted relentless way. Can you talk about that and how it compares to the present?
Foser: A core theme of the 2000 presidential campaign coverage was that Al Gore was this fundamentally untrustworthy figure, this compulsive liar. It was based on a couple pretty trivial small examples that weren’t even true. There were ironically enough things that the media exaggerated from Gore’s comment in order to portray Gore as an exaggerator. What you had all that year was this constant through line in coverage of the campaign. George Bush was a straight talker, and Al Gore was fundamentally dishonest. It wasn’t just that they’d fact-check him in one piece when he’d say something. They’d criticize it. That was then the dominant frame through which they covered him.
And that’s a striking contrast to the way the media treats Donald Trump and JD Vance. With Trump and Vance, to your point, they do fact-check some of the lies. Sometimes they even do it pretty consistently. We’ve seen in the lie that JD Vance and Donald Trump have been telling about Haitian immigrants. If you look at the articles about that, the media has actually done a pretty good job of saying, It’s not actually true, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating cats…
Sargent: Or spreading diseases.
Foser: ...or spreading diseases. But the way they do that actually helps further the core agenda that Trump and Vance have here. They do something that I call “privileging the lie.” This is a concept I developed about 15 years ago during the 2008 campaign. When the news media reports a lie, even if they make clear that it’s false, if they adopt the lie as the framing of their story, they’re helping the liar. They’re giving the liar the license to set the terms on the topic of discussion. All these stories about Vance’s Haitian immigrant lie, they’d point out that it’s not actually true what he’s saying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, but the whole article would then be about Haitian immigrants and the effect that they’re having on the communities in Ohio and elsewhere, and the problems that this is causing according to some of the residents and on the other hand, some of the benefits from it. That core story would be one about immigration, which is what Trump and Vance wanted. JD Vance has explicitly said he made these stories up to get that outcome. The other way of approaching that would have been the way they approached Al Gore.
The story here is not immigration. The story here is that JD Vance is a fundamentally untrustworthy figure who is lying yet again—he has a long history of lying. That then becomes the story and the focus: JD Vance and Donald Trump and their history of lies, their fundamental dishonesty and untrustworthiness. If you cover it that way, you don’t privilege the lie. You don’t privilege the liar. You don’t incentivize future lies. But instead what we’ve seen is [the media] giving the Trump campaign exactly what they wanted.
Sargent: Yeah, I like your coinage there. There’s another device or at least another technique that’s used by these guys, and I’ve been calling it the “secondary lie” or the “subordinate lie.” What happens is the press gets relentlessly focused on a falsehood like “Haitian immigrants are eating pets.” And understandably, it’s a pretty big story, that they went there, right? But for days and days and days, every story about that would have the fact-check of the lie about eating pets, but then underneath it, JD Vance or whoever was speaking would advance another set of lies, like Haitians are spreading diseases. Readers and viewers are seeing, OK, the pet eating isn’t true, but then they’re hearing Vance say, Well, there are these other problems, like they’re spreading diseases, and that isn’t checked. That’s a subsidiary problem to what you’re talking about.
Foser: Yeah. That’s a core part of the Trump and Vance strategy, and that’s a core reason why privileging the lie and allowing… Not just allowing, because news companies have agency here, right? They’re not allowing Trump and Vance to dictate anything. The news companies are making a decision to cover the topic that JD Vance wants them to cover when he tells these lies. The consequence of doing that is you then create this story that has space for all these other lies and you can’t possibly keep up with them. You can’t possibly correct them all. There isn’t time and space for that. It is fundamentally a conversation that rewards the liar.
Sargent: Absolutely. Let’s step back and retrieve some more context here. When CNN failed to fact-check the debate between Trump and Biden a few months ago, the result was it let Trump lie uncontrollably with impunity for 90 minutes. That was widely acknowledged as a journalistic travesty and a grave disservice to the American people, including by some in the journalism profession. Then CBS stepped up and said you know what, we’re going to do the same thing. Journalists all understood perfectly well that CBS had calculated that if they fact-checked Vance, they’d get hammered by MAGA, and CBS just didn’t want that. Now, the Overton window has moved so much that MAGA is ginning up fake outrage over a single fact-check, never mind a sustained set of fact-checks out of the debate. What does that say about what’s happening to the profession more broadly in the Trump years?
Foser: It demonstrates just how thoroughly the media buys into this completely phony grievance that Republicans offer toward their coverage and have not yet wrapped their heads around the fact that we’re going to get attacked no matter what we do, so we may as well do good journalism. Because if we do bad journalism for the sake of heading off attacks, we’re a, doing bad journalism and b, we’re getting beat up anyway. There’s no upside there unless you want to conclude that they know what they’re doing and they’re going along with it. It’s what they want.
Sargent: Brian Beutler has been good on this on his Substack as well. He’s pointed out that these numerous failures to fact-check the debates under pressure from Trump and MAGA are actually a form of capitulation to authoritarian politics, a politics which actively turns any institutions that won’t affirmatively rig the political debate in their favor into enemies of the movement. I feel like we need to stress an essential point that goes back to what you said about how they just simply expect our institutions to create a situation that’s favorable to them. Only one side bullies and threatens the media for fact-checking, for telling the truth. It’s Trump and MAGA. Democrats don’t do that. Yet, again to your point, the press responds to this at least to some degree by rewarding it. Is there some way out of this perversity? What’s the way out?
Foser: The way out is to do good journalism and not worry about what Republicans are saying about you, to fundamentally recognize that your job as journalists is to inform the public. That’s who you have a responsibility for. You don’t have a responsibility to keep Donald Trump happy and you couldn’t do it even if you thought you did. Your responsibility is to make sure that your readers and viewers come away from every interaction with your news product, with your broadcasts of a debate, with your articles, with your op-eds, understanding the world better, having an accurate understanding of things that matter. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job.
Sargent: It seems to me that when people react on Twitter or wherever to a failed headline or a failure to render accurately the true pathologies that Trump is betraying or revealing, it actually has an effect. We were in a situation recently where we were all beating up on The New York Times for sane-washing some really crazy stuff that Trump was uttering about the economy. I think it was a speech about the economy that he gave. Then it actually changed for a while there. They started to do stories where they really showed how ridiculous what Trump was saying was. They were really rendering accurately the mental unfitness he was displaying. Yet it just keeps backsliding. It just keeps slipping back. Are we going to be stuck in this loop forever where we all react without rage, we all pressure them, things get better, then they don’t, and then they backslide again? What can people do?
Foser: The answer to that is: Yes, we will be stuck in this loop forever. That unfortunately is the reality of having news media dominated by a few companies that have a pretty clear trend of behavior. The natural state of The New York Times is to behave this way. They’ve been behaving this way for decades for as long as anybody can remember. I’ve been publicly criticizing it for decades. You can, to your point, have an effect. If people are vocal and forceful about demanding better, that effect will be temporary. You need to keep showing up every day and doing it. And also vote with your advertising dollars, vote with your subscription dollars. There are other news companies people can get their news from if they’re not satisfied with the ones that they’re going to. It’s not going to be a situation in which we point out one flaw in media coverage and we do it aggressively and collectively for a week and it fixes itself or they fix it and stay fixed. They will backslide. They will continue to behave in the way that’s consistent with their instincts, which are very bad instincts journalistically.
Keep in mind, one of the reasons to cut them a little bit of a slack here is that they’ll get constant pressure from the other side, right? Republicans and conservatives aren’t going to let up in their attacks on the media. We shouldn’t think that we can push back once or twice and fix the problem and then we can go home and stop doing it. It’s unfortunate that that’s the nature of the situation we’re in, but if one side doesn’t participate in a debate, you’re going to lose it.
Sargent: We’re at a deep structural disadvantage here as well, which is that when liberals criticize the media, the instinct of a lot of newsroom leaders and executives is to say to themselves, Well, you know, that’s actually good because it’s going to quiet the right. Their default position is that the right is right about them.
Foser: Yeah, it is. That’s false, but it’s their default position, and that is the reality of why we can’t just disengage. If their default position is that the right is right about them and the right criticizes them, they’re going to keep moving further and further to the right, absent some force pushing back a little bit. It’s unfortunate. Nobody wants to hear it, but it’s not going to just get better without people working on it. And again, find other places to get your news.
Sargent: Jamison, does it all matter? That’s what I want to ask you, finally. My tendency is to think that whenever people criticize a New York Times headline, a whole chorus of contrarians attacks those critics for supposedly wasting everybody’s time obsessing over small things. But those things matter. The New York Times’s headlines really influence, I think, how smaller news companies around the country cover stuff and present reality to their readers and viewers, don’t you think?
Foser: Absolutely. The New York Times is the most important news company in the world, right? That’s not just because of the number of people who get their news directly from The New York Times, though that’s a lot of people. It’s also because they’re the leader in the media industry in America. Other journalists look to them for cues. If The New York Times says something’s important, then other journalists internalize that. They treat it as important. So it is important not just to push back on the Times, but other news organizations as well, and to encourage them to cover some of the things that they aren’t covering at all.
One of my pet examples in recent weeks is Donald Trump last week threatened to imprison people for criticizing the Supreme Court. And The New York Times hasn’t reported that. Not once, not a word. During last night’s debate, JD Vance attacked Kamala Harris and Tim Walz saying that they wanted to censor people. Well, that would have been the perfect opportunity for The New York Times and for media coverage today of last night’s debate to say, Well, look, JD Vance talked about censorship. There’s only one campaign that’s threatening to imprison and fine people for criticizing the government, and that’s Trump and Vance.
Sargent: I mean, Trump is making these threats constantly. Well, Jamison, are you optimistic or pessimistic about where things are going right now? I feel like in some senses, the truth about Trump’s authoritarian leanings is getting through to people. But I also think that that’s partly because his big red face is screaming in the faces of other people. That’s what actually gets them to get scared of this guy, not the way that press is covering it or not covering it.
Foser: Fundamentally, a core truth of the Trump era that is really easy to overlook, and a lot of people do overlook it, is this guy’s never had a majority support in this country. It’s not for a day. It’s never been the case. He lost the 2016 election by three million votes. His approval rating was underwater every day that he was in office. He lost the 2020 election. He’s never had majority support in this country. That’s something I think people should feel some comfort in, but recognize that we’re up against a lot here. We’re up against the large number of people who do like him. We’re up against some structural imbalances that favor the Republican Party from the Electoral College to any number of other mechanical realities about our elections and our government, and we’re up against a media environment that is elevating his lies and centering them. That means we all have work to do.
Those two things, if you put those facts together, we should feel hopeful. There are more of us than there are of them. But we can’t passively expect that things will sort themselves out because we are up against way too much for that to be the case. Part of that means, Look, if the news media is centering what Donald Trump and JD Vance want to center in this election, it’s our responsibility in our conversations with each other, those of us who have public platforms, those of us who just talk to our friends and family, to talk to them about the issues that matter to you. We don’t have to have the conversation solely about the issues that JD Vance and Donald Trump want us to talk about.
Sargent: I’m going to choose to hear that as a note of optimism and call it a day there. Jamison Foser, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to come over to tnr.com and check out some of our new content, including a piece by Melissa Gira Grant, which looks at how JD Vance used the V.P. debate to lie about abortion, and tune into the latest episode of Deep State Radio, which looks at the Middle East at its most dangerous point in decades, and what the U.S. can do to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control. We’ll see you all tomorrow.