MAGA is the ventriloquist, some media are the dummies

Words come out of Republicans’ mouths and go into news reports unfiltered.

Journalism is not the process of repeating whatever someone says. It’s trying to get at the truth, which often means listening to what people say and assessing how it fits with the facts.

But too often, that “assessing” step gets skipped, and lying politicians know it. So they use news outlets as their ventriloquist dummies.

After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated as Health and Human Services secretary last November, a National Public Radio headline cast him in heroic terms: “RFK Jr. wants to 'Make America Healthy Again.' He could face a lot of pushback.” It took 10 paragraphs for the story to get around to Kennedy’s dangerous, unfounded health theories, including his opposition to vaccines. A recent Washington Post headline also had a positive spin: “There’s a new form of environmentalism. It’s called ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”

Major media are suckers for phrases like “Make America Healthy Again” that are promoted by the right. For years, they repeated right-wing rhetoric about “the deep state,” until Donald Trump started ruining the careers of public servants and canceling vital government programs.

Lately, the media have adopted Trump’s hackneyed predictions of a coming “Golden Age.” In March, a supposedly straight-news Washington Post report included a sentence reading: “President Trump’s economic plan is causing brief pain while the nation advances to a new ‘Golden Age.’” That sentence was not attributed to anyone. It was written as if it’s an established fact that the pain will be brief while we march to El Dorado.

“Woke” is another popular term in right-wing ventriloquism. A June 2023 article in the Washington Post headlined “‘Woke’ no longer means anything” observed smartly that the term was useful to Republican propaganda because of its vagueness and catch-all quality – “because it captures the full range of perceived left-wing insidiousness without boundary.”

But that article didn't stop the Post itself from later using the term in its news coverage, with headlines such as “House Republicans wage ‘woke’ culture wars with the military” and “Leaked memo shows J.D. Vance’s anti-woke ideology on foreign affairs.”

“Woke,” of course, originated a century ago in Black culture as a term for societal awareness and has been hijacked by the right in recent years. With the media’s help, MAGA co-opts other perfectly good terms such as “hoax,” “weaponization,” and “coup,” perverting them for their propaganda value. When Joe Biden left the 2024 race in favor of Kamala Harris, Republicans called it a “coup.” When courts ruled against Trump policies this year, they called it a “judicial coup d’etat.” Yet these same people insist that the violent Jan. 6 attempt to overturn a fair election was not a coup.

While latching onto right-wing terminology, major media also amplify MAGA storylines without skepticism. An April 2 story in Politico was an example.

The headline read: “Key House Republican opposes Medicaid cuts.” But did Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., chair of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, really oppose Medicaid cuts? The story said House Republicans were looking for about $880 billion in cost reductions to make their spending plan work, with few options for savings other than Medicaid. As an alternative to Medicaid cuts, Buchanan pulled out the old fantasy of suggesting that they root out “inefficiencies.”

Politico said it was “a matter of debate” whether the GOP could make its plan work without cutting Medicaid benefits. But it’s not. There simply aren’t that many “inefficiencies.” And a month and a half later, Buchanan is boosting the Republicans’ budget megabill, which would cause an estimated 8.6 million Americans to lose Medicaid coverage.

So why did Politico let Buchanan say unchallenged that ​​“I’m not for cuts in Medicaid”? Perhaps because Buchanan made his remarks while appearing at a Washington event sponsored by … you guessed it … Politico.

There are lots of examples of the news media passing on dubious notions like that. They help float Trump’s trial balloons, such as “Trump Suggests Savings From Spending Cuts Could Be Returned to Taxpayers” (New York Times) and “Trump Claims Revenue From Tariffs Could ‘Completely' End Income Taxes For Some Americans” (Forbes).

Politico especially loves to take outlandish claims seriously. When Politico reported that “Trump won’t rule out a third term,” it forgot to say in the headline that such a thing would be unconstitutional.

Politico also amplified a key pre-election lie last year in which Trump tried to distance himself from the radical Project 2025. As detailed in a past Stop the Presses newsletter, a Politico story headlined “Trump team preps list of banned staffers” included an unidentified Trump insider claiming that “people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted” from being hired in a second Trump administration. Surprise, surprise: Project 2025 figures were then welcomed onto Trump’s team.

Politico also served as the dummy in a spectacularly absurd act of ventriloquism. Trump insiders claimed that surviving the assassination attempt had transformed Trump into a “serene” and “spiritual” person with “a new softness.” They said he showed “humility, in the biblical sense.” And Politico bought it!

The reporter who wrote the story, Natalie Allison, was later rewarded for her ability to repeat what Trump insiders said. A week before Trump’s inauguration, she nabbed a White House correspondent job with the Washington Post.

In today’s ventriloquism acts, even the dummies get paid.