Nothing can turn my rant meter on faster than seeing, reading, or hearing about yet another interview with tender Trump voters (aka middle-aged white men) and their thoughts on whatever Democrats are doing. It's disingenuous, it ignores everyone else in the country, and implies that the only people who matter are middle-aged white men.
"In the process of focusing on Democrats and the alleged struggles impeachment presents, news outlets continue to eliminate Republicans from the entire process," media critic Eric Boehlert wrote earlier this week. "The GOP, apparently, faces no impeachment fallout, only Democrats."
Joy Reid's panel had many thoughts to add to Boehlert's observations, but no one hit it like Tiffany Cross did. "This is not Republicans versus Democrats. This is truth versus lies. This is patriotism versus traitors," she said. "And so when you present these arguments, like when the Republicans, yes, you know the Democrats are ugh... pink pigs flying outside. And then you have a conversation in the media where it is like, well, they say the Democrats are pink pigs flying outside and the Republicans said it and Democrats disagree, there you have it."
"No!," she exclaimed. "You can't present these two asinine thoughts as though they are equal, as though this is just a simple disagreement."
Here's the entire transcript, but I recommend watching her say so in the clip above from Sunday's AM Joy.
CROSS: Yeah, I think the master narrator has not caught up with the demographic of the country. As the country changes, the power structure has not. And so when you have the narrative being presented through that prism, it's dangerous and it's really true, I guess disappointment and danger is this is we saw what happened in 2016 when the media failed.
And here we are again seeing the same things happen. When people felt the media was not speaking to them. The media was not addressing issues of concern to masses of people. And they found a more relevant voice in the IRA, the Internet Russian Agency, and it wasn't that particularly people of color, black people, were not more susceptible to Russian interference than Donald Trump, for instance, but there was a voice speaking to them that nobody else was. And I think we're seeing that same thing play out.
First of all, it's dangerous to even present this through the lens of politics. Right? This is not Republicans versus Democrats. This is truth versus lies. This is patriotism versus traitors. And so when you present these arguments, like when the Republicans, yes, you know the Democrats are ugh... pink pigs flying outside. And then you have a conversation in the media where it is like, well, they say the Democrats are pink pigs flying outside and the Republicans said it and Democrats disagree, there you have it.
No! You can't present these two asinine thoughts as though they are equal, as though this is just a simple disagreement. This is our country. This is what patriotism looks like, and you know, the press will be on the front line of democracy. I think we cannot fail twice. It is almost like gifting Donald Trump again with our billions of dollars of coverage.
So I think we have to be very careful with presenting some of these thoughts. This morning on the media Joy, I saw people at Trump rallies, reporters asking them how they feel about impeachment. What do you think people at a Trump rally are going to say about how they feel about impeachment?
Let's try to again listen to them clumsily string together some thoughts about it. They don't know why he was being impeached. Do you think we're gong to get any diversity of thought there? So I think this is yet again a colossal failure by the media. And look, power concedes nothing, without demand. And so, I think we're going to have to become a part of the system of the media to disrupt it.
