How do you cover reckless and dangerous politicians who are willing to traffic in lies? I have been thinking a lot about that since seeing reports over the weekend about Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida holding an “America First” rally in Arizona.
The primary purpose of the rally was to show support for an audit of 2020 presidential votes in the state’s Maricopa County. It includes examining ballots for traces of bamboo in a vain attempt to find evidence to support a conspiracy theory that illegal ballots were flown in from Asia for Joe Biden. Greene and Gaetz used the opportunity to push the Big Lie that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
It is not hard to mock the event as the bamboo hunt meets the Big Lie. But the rally was apparently enough of a success that Greene will be staging another one Thursday night in Georgia, according to her Twitter feed.
This is the same Greene who earlier this month stood outside the House chamber shouting at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, “You don’t care about the American people! Why do you support terrorists and Antifa?” according to Washington Post reporters.
This is also the same Greene shown on recently unveiled video to be hectoring Ocasio-Cortez through a mail slot on Ocasio-Cortez’s locked office door. “If you want to be a big girl, you need to get rid of your diaper, and come out and be able to talk to American citizens,” Greene is recorded saying through the slot.
The video was posted earlier this month by CNN. It is from 2019, before Greene was elected to Congress. But as her actions from earlier this month show, her stalking and tormenting has continued in the halls of Congress since her arrival.
How do you responsibly cover that? Some in the media say you don’t cover it. The thinking is Greene and Gaetz are minor players in Congress. She has been stripped of committee assignments, and he is under investigation in connection with the alleged sex trafficking of a minor. Each time each of them gets widespread coverage for saying or doing something transgressive, they are able to raise money off it and strengthen their position within the party. So ignore them. They are nothing but trolls.
It would be nice if ignoring were possible. I would like nothing more. Like many in the mainstream media, I have been wrestling with this in connection with Donald Trump since 2015. I do not have a bulletproof answer. But I know you cannot ignore them.
You have to report on what they do. As widely ridiculed as it has been in the mainstream media, the audit in Arizona has the potential to inspire others elsewhere. Friday, a judge in Georgia ordered Fulton County to set up a process for unsealing mail-in ballots from November’s election for a possible recount there.
Coupled with all the restrictive voting laws enacted by Republican state legislatures in places like Georgia, this is an assault on democracy. If nothing else, the recounts, partisan and bogus as they might be, undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the election process and Biden’s presidency. The more people who believe the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump, the more our democracy is weakened. And if you don’t have trust in elections, you don’t have a democracy any more.
Nor is simply reporting always enough. Opinion writers and broadcasters also need to clearly condemn the more offensive and dangerous words and actions by people like Greene.
Monday, John Berman, co-anchor of CNN’s “New Day” morning show, did just that in reaction to Greene’s comparison last week of members of Congress being compelled to wear masks on the floor of the House chamber to Jews in the Holocaust. She followed up in a tweet Sunday night disingenuously writing, “I’m sorry if some of my words make people uncomfortable.”
“No, your words don’t make me ‘uncomfortable.’ They make me sick,” Berman, who is Jewish, replied on-air.
Good for him.
There should be no down the middle when covering Republicans who have gone around the bend on partisan enmity and anti-democratic behavior. They pose a direct threat to a functioning government and democracy.
____
