Media Distrust is Becoming Evermore Potent Political Ammunition
Heed the developing story about Jim Jordan, the House Rep from Ohio facing and deflecting allegations over a sex abuse coverup in his former capacity as a wrestling coach.
Jordan, a Republican running for reelection, was an assistant coach on the Ohio State University wrestling team in the 1980s and 1990s. Since NBC News broke a report Tuesday that Jordan witnessed and covered up ongoing sexual abuse of young student athletes, five former Ohio State wrestlers have corroborated the story.
But there is mounting evidence — spurred by conspiratorial responses from Jordan and President Donald Trump — that voters in the state don’t buy the stories.
The New York Times coverage of the situation, published on Saturday’s front page, highlights Jordan’s resistance to the numbingly outrageous moral scandal as a “deep state” conspiracy. “Deep state” or not, Americans overwhelming distrust of news sources, even those backed by brave and compelling testimony, underpins Jordan’s resistance.
Representative Jim Jordan is facing the kind of slowly percolating scandal that would bring down other politicians in other times…But like the man Mr. Jordan doggedly supports, President Trump, the Ohio Republican has the kind of stalwart supporters who do not lose faith easily, and they are already defending the conservative powerhouse, saying he is the victim of the same “deep state” conspirators…who are trying to bring down the president.
At the cornerstone of whatever political conspiracy is favored to refute damaging political information is distrust of mediums that carry that information.
I’ve cited these statistics before, but in the context of something like this they are doubly pertinent.
In 1974, when the Washington Post traversed a White House conspiracy investigation that lead to President Richard Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, over 70 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research trusted the news media to “report events fairly and accurately”.
In 2016, as President Trump’s administrators are embroiled in an FBI conspiracy investigation, fewer than one-third of Americans express that same trust in surveys about fair and accurate news coverage.
The senator’s resistance to what many would expect to be catastrophic news, backed by athletes of a venerable and wildly popular state university, depends entirely on his and his supporters’ ability to cast doubt on the sources through which that information travels.
Mike Tokes, founder of conservative political group The New Right, issued this widely shared Twitter rebuttle in Jordan’s favor:
“Jim Jordan goes against the powerful interests at the F.B.I. & deep state to expose them & hold them accountable for their crimes,” tweeted Mike Tokes, a founder of The New Right, a conservative political organization. “Now all of a sudden there is a concentrated smear campaign against him in a deliberate attempt to discredit his work? The American people know better.”
Central to Tokes’ proclamation is the “concentrated smear campaign,” or in this context, interviews from five college athletes published across major news outlets.
Conspiratorial rebuttles in Jordan’s personal scandal are not purely symbolic. The senator has been one of a growing cast of Republicans agitating doubt over the investigation into Trump’s White House.
Trump has successfully weilded his adversarial standing with the media to minimize any hint of political damage from unsavory, if well established, information. With no trusted third party to arbitrate, Trump and Trump alone can convey a sufficiently adoptable version of just about any events, at least to enough voters to secure an election victory.
The Republican establishment remains neutral in Jordan’s case, for now. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said he would await the results of Ohio State University’s internal investigation before issuing judgment.
The U.S. public has trusted state and local news sources more than distant national press, but if Jordan can hold past what seems like an obvious source of local outrage, him and others seeking power will have a roadmap to overcome and cast doubt over ever greater moral slights.
John Harper is a freelance editor, journalist and content consultant. He is founder of Grapple Media and The News Genome Project, a startup creating algorithms that can trace information distortion and sources by mapping news cycles. Check out www.grapple.news for more information.
