Jacobs could have more honestly framed her reaction to the White House’s cheeky response to a lie by describing it as exactly that: a response to an obvious lie. Yes, others like Dale at CNN and Katie Shepherd at The Washington Post were forceful in their rebuttals, but Jacobs’ tweet is an example of how lies can create cracks in reality with help from mainstream journalists.
What makes this especially frustrating is the fact that these lies aren’t even new. The claim that Democrats are coming for your hamburgers has been an odd staple of right-wing rage bait for years.
After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal in the House and Senate back in February 2019, Fox News and others on the right churned out an extensive list of outlandish lies about the resolution. According to Fox, the Green New Deal would ban meat and cost “$25 bazillion” to implement, and mandate that a train be built to Hawaii (on account of air travel being outlawed). This is all just a rehash of those same nonsense narratives.
After Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) talked about being a vegan but not imposing his approach on others, Fox News claimed he was doing the exact opposite, saying Booker “wants to impose his meat rationing on the rest of us.”
“They want to take your pick-up truck, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburgers,” right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka said during the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference. “This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.”
It’s all bullshit. There’s not a nicer way to put it. It’s bullshit, and it’s exactly what you get when there are zero consequences for telling outlandish lies. In just the past week, Fox News and others on the right have not only pushed the fake story about meat rationing, but also promoted false narratives about schools supposedly ending accelerated math courses and the outright lie that children being held in immigrant detention facilities were each being provided with a copy of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 children’s book. Thankfully, there were some mainstream media outlets on the case to debunk the lies.
But making things up to smear Democrats has long been a successful right-wing approach to the media. And perhaps the more damaging aspect of this is the lack of accountability in mainstream media for people who spread lies in the first place.
For instance, in 2011 and beyond, CNN repeatedly gave reality TV host Donald Trump a platform to speculate about whether then-President Barack Obama was actually born in the United States. Trump then took his racist conspiracy-mongering and turned it into a successful political platform.
Another example of lies not having any actual consequences can be seen in the way mainstream media outlets seem to have just shrugged and pretended that it wasn’t less than four months ago that 147 Republicans voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. These people still get invited on TV and treated like legitimate members of the legislative branch rather than as people who went on record trying to end American democracy to install an illegitimate fascist dictatorship. Mainstream media outlets are unwilling to implement even the barest of accountability standards for fear that these bad actors will call them biased (which, of course, they’ll do anyway).
Yes, the problem is partly that right-wing media will invent nonsense to be angry about, whether it’s some new moral panic about Dr. Seuss or Lil Nas X or the existence of trans people or hamburgers. There’s no doubt about that. But the problem is also that mainstream outlets and the journalists who work for them help launder the bullshit through their more respectable outlets.
Where would we be right now had CNN taken a stand in 2011 against a racist grifter spreading nonsense lies about the first Black president in our country’s history? Where would we be if people were deterred from inventing lies like the idea that the Affordable Care Act created “death panels” — as right-wing commentator Betsy McCaughey did in 2009 — by turning such false claims into an instant career-killer rather than continuing to book them years later? Where would we be if truth meant more than ratings and the false appearance of balance?
