As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.
The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also included the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.
There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.
In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.
“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.
Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”
Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”
Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.
“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.
“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.
Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.
The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”
When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.
“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.
But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.
“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.
As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.
On OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.
Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.
On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.
Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.
Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.
As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.
When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.
“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.
Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.
Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.
Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.
“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.”
