Political Theater in 2023: What Role Will Broadcast and Cable News Play?

By In the National Interest Archives
Cover image for  article: Political Theater in 2023: What Role Will Broadcast and Cable News Play?

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?

The GOP’s proposed playbill covers serious topics, such as the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, the immigration deluge and how trillions in pandemic-related outlays were spent. Opposition controlled legislatures legitimately challenge the Executive Branch, and Congress can provide critical oversight if policy rather than politics sets its script. Take Afghanistan. Hearings that dig into not only the U.S. pullout but also the withdrawal deadline in President Trump’s ill-conceived deal with the Taliban could educate and add value. That said, don’t hold your breath. A letter this month from 31 Republican senators suggests what’s actually top of GOP minds.

Notwithstanding recession, climate change, Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s rise, the 31 Republicans apparently see the country’s biggest challenge in President Biden’s family tree. They’re calling on the Attorney General to turn the U.S. attorney investigating Hunter Biden for his Ukraine and China connections into a special prosecutor. Like the two-year-long Benghazi House investigation that targeted Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, the GOP missive suggests the senators expect raves from their faithful in 2024 if they can just keep Biden’s son on center stage.


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Hunter also is only the start. Teasing their investigative plans, the senators’ letter offers their list of the Biden administration transgressions: the FBI’s search of Mar a Lago for stolen top secret documents; the G-men’s threat to parents who speak out at school board meetings against critical race theory and mask mandates; the feds’ blind eye turned to the perils facing anti-abortion activists, and the Justice Department’s misguided inquiry into state-level efforts to ensure election security because they actually might be a ploy to suppress voters’ rights.

Which concocted faults and alleged failings will make the final cut if the GOP wins the House or Senate remains to be seen. But clearly no Republican on Capitol Hill searching for a windmill to tilt will find the landscape wanting. The GOP’s far right fringe also may well add more. Congressional candidates who are beholden to Trump, for example, are pushing his stolen election lie; election deniers have been chosen as Republican Senate or House candidates in 27 states. Meanwhile, incumbent House Republicans already are targeting the January 6th Committee, threatening to subpoena its records on the Trump inspired insurrection in order to do whatever they can to undermine the finding.

Real world events aren’t likely to deter the GOP from making a November victory into curtain up on their political theater. Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz said so this week. The Florida congressman disavowed interest in legislating next year, asserting it was time for investigations to settle scores. With sidekicks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert and Paul Gosar, the show will conjure Monty Python. Or Mitch McConnell. In 2010 as Americans struggled after the financial crisis, the then-Senate majority leader averred the GOP priority had nothing to do with such problems. It was, he said, to ensure Barack Obama served only one term.

Obama’s re-election or not, McConnell and company certainly gave it the old college try. According to a Washington Post analysis in 2019, the Republican controlled House aimed seven of the 13 major multi-year congressional investigations between 2010 and 2018 at the Obama administration or Obama himself. Reporters, of course, would say they handled the hype. Good journalism as well as the news media’s competition can sort facts from falsehoods, helping to ensure that ultimately truth will out.

Maybe so. But like Broadway revivals, the plot, characters and script in the GOP’s 2023 drama aren’t a secret. Nor is the challenge for television reporting when spectacle, not substance, shapes the news. Fox and the other news media on stage right know their lines and are ready for opening night. The question is, what role will the rest of broadcast and cable journalism play?

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