The Jack Smith hearing shows what was lost in the fracturing of American media

Perhaps the most enlightening comment former special counsel Jack Smith offered during his hours-long testimony before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee centered not on Trump but on what Smith was tasked with doing.

The case his team had assembled in obtaining an indictment against the then-former president, Smith said, was ”built to be tried in a courtroom, not in the media.” But here he was, facing questions from legislators not in a courtroom but on Capitol Hill — which, for all intents and purposes, means “in the media.”

There wasn’t much use to the hearing. There’s no actual question to adjudicate. No serious and unbiased observer questions Smith’s objectivity or credibility and no serious observer questions that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, triggering the riot that overwhelmed the building on Jan. 6, 2021. In effect, then, the existence of the hearing necessarily served to reinforce the falsehood that there was a debate in the first place.

Smith summarized the importance of recognizing reality in his opening remarks.

“The rule of law is not self-executing,” he said. That is, the bounds of the law are real only to the extent that they are respected. Smith, better than most, understands what it looks like when that respect evaporates.

The product of the hearing wasn’t a studious consideration of the validity of his work since, as stipulated above, there was nothing serious to mull over. Instead, the primary output of the hearing was probably a tidy stream of social-media-friendly video snippets. Members of the House (nearly all of whom will soon face primaries or reelection) saw an opportunity to make news and most of them tried.

What this means, in effect, is that the hearing not only didn’t resolve any tension between reality and surreality, it simply dug each side in a little deeper.

This wasn’t Smith’s fault. He very carefully responded to Republicans’ questions/attacks, offering a cautious deliberateness that will undoubtedly be read as hedging by the Republican media universe. But the decisions he and his team made about who to charge and when and with what were, again, centered on obtaining a conviction, not on muting Sean Hannity. He couldn’t help but leave plenty of space for Republicans to use cheap little rhetorical tactics aimed at collapsing trust in him and, by extension, his very-obviously-valid investigation.

Not to sound like the middle-aged man I am, but at one point in time the effort to convey reality would have been aided by the presence of an intermediary layer between the legislators and the public. Congress would hold a hearing and reporters would observe it and then they would tell the world what happened. They did so imperfectly, absolutely, and not without introducing some small measure of bias. But these, too, were largely accounted for and corrected through the systems in which they worked: being unfair or dishonest was a good way to find yourself looking for work.

What the public would have heard about the hearing wasn’t, say, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) hyperactive dishonesties about Smith and the aftermath of the 2020 election. It would (ideally at least) be a summary of the hearing and his actions leavened with an anchor of truth. That Smith’s findings are credible, as is he, and that Republican politicians are biased in a way that Smith clearly isn’t.

These days, Americans are generally unencumbered by any such anchor. If they want to just get the “JORDAN HUMILIATED BY DEMOCRATS!” take, it’s there on YouTube. If they only want to hear “DERANGED SMITH COMMITS PERJURY,” they can subscribe to any random Republican legislator’s social media feed. Or, for that matter, the president’s. There is no filtering layer between the event and the public; there’s no net to trap the lies. More accurately: There are plenty of ways to drink the raw sewage without waiting for the water treatment plant to do its work.

It’s important to recognize that the presentation of falsehoods from legislators (particularly Republican ones today) is not solely a function of dishonesty. There are some, like Jordan, who think it’s clever to shade the truth to get what they want. There are also a lot who simply haven’t done the homework and trust the Jordans of the world to tell them how it is or what to say. Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington admitted during the hearing that he really didn’t know anything about Smith’s work, but then ended his time at the mic by equating the special counsel to a soldier in Vietnam who endorsed the massacre of a village. If we can’t even get members of Congress to take five seconds and figure out the difference between true and false, what luck are we going to have with the public? And that’s considering those who actually perform their duties in good faith.

While Smith was testifying, we learned that the White House had shared a manipulated photo of someone arrested by the Justice Department to show her crying, a new line crossed by an administration fully committed to prioritizing the scoring Online Points Against Their Enemies over dutifully informing the public even if they seek to persuade them. It’s just another form of lying, one for which a large segment of the media will make excuses — or offer cheers.

Consider Smith’s line in light of that: he was aiming to meet the careful standard of a courtroom, not the non-existent standard of rhetorical disputes in the mass media. These two things used to be in relative alignment, even if they differed in rigor and methodology. But they no longer are, because one is a traditional system of rules and self-respect while media has shattered into a ruthless marketplace dominated by snake-oil salesmen. And elected leaders consistently see more value in becoming snake-oil franchisees than in telling anyone what they don’t want to hear.

Photo: Capitol police officers embrace on Thursday, August 5, 2021, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Flickr/White House/Adam Schultz)