When you travel by air throughout this country you tend to see the same things, over and over again. A good number of passengers on any given flight are seasoned business travelers, often middle-aged white males, often conservative, some with a Wall Street Journal tucked under their laptop, evidently getting whatever passes for their political “opinions” straight off its rabid Editorial page. You get to your hotel and you’ll see them at the bar, again, mostly guys, watching sports or sometimes Fox News (It depends on your locality—red states mostly run Fox News, blue states mostly run CNN).
But whatever part of the country they’re in as they check into their Hyatts and Hiltons and Courtyard Marriotts on their way up whatever corporate ladder they’ve chosen, they’re also getting little doses of news from USA Today. Stay at a hotel and you’re a captive audience to the infamous “McPaper” waiting outside your room in the morning or in a stack across from the front desk. In airports you see the discarded sections (“Sports," "Money”) of USA Today littering the terminal waiting areas. Same thing when you’re sitting in reception to see your physician/dentist, or the waiting rooms of many businesses. Whether anyone actually subscribes to this paper is a total mystery—it appears to be primarily designed for the perusal of business travelers or folks just waiting around for something, but millions of people end up reading it:
The top three U.S. newspapers by total average circulation – from print products, digital subscriptions and other papers that use their branded content – are USA Today (4,139,380), The Wall Street Journal (2,276,207) and The New York Times (2,134,150), according to Alliance for Audited Media.
And its content is usually pedestrian, almost vapid, often stretching to cover “both sides” of an issue. You can usually finish the “News” section in about two minutes. It is not an opinion leader like the New York Times or Washington Post. It’s meant to provide a bland, fairly generic pleasant overview of the news geared not to ruffle any feathers for its audience, many of whom are the corporate type of Republican white males on business travel junkets, impassively flitting back and forth between red and blue America. Overall the paper leans center-right, though not as much as it did in the mid 80’s when it was relentlessly pro-Reagan.
So this from the USA Today Editorial Board was a telling sign of just how the mushiest of the mushy mainstream media are reacting to the latest revelations about Donald Trump:
Imagine what would have happened had a President Hillary Clinton abruptly fired the man overseeing an investigation of her campaign’s ties to a hostile foreign government.
Imagine if the firing came, according to The New York Times, weeks after Clinton had asked the man to drop a probe of a close associate who had lied about conversations with that nation's ambassador.
Imagine, further, what would have happened had she invited the ambassador and foreign minister of that hostile government to the Oval Office at the request of their autocratic leader, closed the meeting to U.S. journalists...
And then imagine that she had used the meeting to share classified intelligence with the envoys.
We all know what would have happened. Not only would Republicans have already drawn up Articles of Impeachment, they would without a doubt vote in lockstep for her conviction for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. And many Democrats would have joined them. Clinton would already have been escorted out of the White House in handcuffs and placed in a minimum security correctional facility. Every single person remotely connected to her campaign would be subpoenaed for brutal, around the clock public hearings. There would be grandstanding and hyperbolic speeches, 24/7.
No Democrat would be standing by her, saying they needed to wait until the process “played itself out," (John McCain, R-AZ) or that they "would hope" the President would be forthcoming with the facts (Pat Toomey-R, PA) Are you kidding? Instead, the debate would be what kind of prison sentence should be imposed. How many years and in what type of facility. And you can guess that a few rank-and-file Republicans wouldn’t hesitate to loudly suggest another type of punishment.
Had Clinton been elected and done a 10th of the things Trump has done, the calls from the right for her removal would be deafening, louder even than the “lock her up” shouts during the presidential campaign.
But instead of that reaction we see, as the Editorial points out-- Mitch McConnell bemoaning the unfortunate “drama" the White House has saddled him with, and Marco Rubio saying the situation is “less than ideal." “Less than ideal,” when the newly elected leader of your country has been outed as not only a probable criminal, but a possible traitor:
How about a breathtaking degree of ignorance, incompetence, immaturity and impulsiveness? Trump's disclosure of classified intelligence would put anyone but a president in legal jeopardy. He has harmed national security by raising questions among allies about whether they should cooperate with the United States and trust America to keep secrets. And he has used the powers of the presidency to attempt to impede a credible investigation into how he came to be president.
This is unusually strong stuff coming from USA Today. Their Editorial Board concludes that it might be helpful if Republicans remembered their oath to defend the country ”against all enemies, foreign or domestic.” But so far that shows little sign of happening, and they place the blame squarely on the Republican Party for its hypocrisy.
The USA Today Editorial is useful because an otherwise fairly innocuous publication takes the extra effort to point out the Republicans’ willingness to turn a blind eye to treachery in terms anyone can understand, even the stodgy business traveler reading it over his breakfast buffet. No, Republicans wouldn’t be acting this way if their target was Hillary Clinton. Not a chance.
When Walter Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War in February 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson turned to his aides and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” One month later he told the nation he would not seek re-election.
Trump has nothing remotely approaching the integrity or the intelligence of Johnson, and USA Today is not Walter Cronkite. We’re living in a much different time.
Still, when you’ve lost USA Today, you’ve really lost America.