Curtain Up on 2023: Are Broadcast and Cable News Ready to Cover the Show?
Old Fashioned Show Trials and Next Year's Show Time on Capitol Hill Just Might Have A Lot in Common
Republicans who hope to win the House, Senate or both next month have made no secret of the all-out assault planned on the Biden administration. Whatever the issues or crises confronting the country, they'll take second place to the wall-to-wall hearings, aka the GOP's political theater, including its hype and hyperbole, that will play out on Capitol Hill. The Republicans have done it before. The question is, will broadcast and cable news be up to covering the drama, including the misinformation and mendacity, or succumb to sensationalsim that buries the facts?
"The production of a political melodrama, staged in a courtroom in Moscow, Prague or Budapest needs … painstaking preparation, just as a musical show or a motion picture does, only more so," the famed journalist Arthur Koestler wrote in 1951 in his preface to The Accused. The book by Koestler’s friend, Alexander Weissberg, analyzed the Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Weissberg knew the subject well. Arrested and compelled to confess to bizarre lies, he was fortunate to survive in the hands of the secret police during Stalin’s Great Purge.
Koestler couldn’t have characterized better the Republicans’ coming attractions if they win a House or Senate majority next month. A chorus line of GOPers already has promised multiple investigations of President Biden’s administration including threats of impeachment in 2023. Given the predictable role Fox News as well as other far right imitators and social media will play, it’s a casting call for real journalists. The question is: are they up to covering the coming political theater, including its bogus claims, misrepresentations and lies?
Read my latest analysis of the forthcoming political theater season at In the National Interest on www.mediavillage.com or by clicking on the link below.