Media Maven Marjorie Taylor Greene
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has learned how to manage the news media. Some might say she has learned how to manipulate the media. The profile of her on 60 Minutes is proof of that, but it’s not the only one.
The report was criticized before and after it actually aired.
Before, because the fear was it would just give Greene an undeserved platform. And it did.
After, because it was a very weak effort to have Greene explain her controversial positions and statements. And it was.
The biggest condemnation of the Stahl profile might have come, not from the many critics, but from Marjorie Taylor Greene herself. Not directly but indirectly and unintentionally. Greene loved the interview so much that she posted the whole interview along with numerous parts of it several times on her Facebook page.
The few defenders of Stahl’s report focus on her questioning Greene about two Tweets — that the Parkland School shooting was a “false flag planned shooting” followed by a ‘like’ to another posting that House Democrat Nancy Pelosi should be “shot in the head.”
Greene simply denied tweeting about the Parkland shooting being a ‘false flag’ and then excused the ‘like’ tweet by saying that there are several people who work on her social media accounts. And Stahl did not challenge that. Then Greene asked Stahl if she was going to ask about all her statements “from kindergarten to grade 12.” And Stahl replied weakly that they were “legitimate questions.”
(Ornstein is a political science professor and Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The National Journal.)
DISCLAIMER: In fairness, it should be noted that reporter Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes may have been in a virtual no-win situation. Greene’s opponents were going to be critical of anything Greene said or did while Greene’s supporters were going to be critical of anything Stahl said or did.
Not surprisingly, Fox “News” joined in the discussion. Possibly surprising to some people, the report by associate digital editor Jeffrey Clark provided a correction of sorts to Greene’s accusation about Democrats being “pedophiles” and that Biden was “sexualizing children.”
“There is no evidence that prominent Democrats molest children,” he wrote, adding though that “some Republicans like Greene have leveled the accusation that their views on such issues as drag shows and transgenderism equate to pedophilia.”
He even went so far as to cite news commentary by rival network MSNBC and NBC criticizing Stahl’s decision to interview Greene whose known for “her past support of some far-right conspiracy theories…”
The news site Semafor which claims to provide reporting that has “journalistic transparency” did an analysis and follow-up to the Stahl interview in which reporter Kadia Goba did her own interview with Greene. Like Stahl, Goba provided a personal profile of Greene. Also, like Stahl, Goba seems to have fallen under the spell of Greene’s newly found media skills.
“She was inviting and didn’t shy away from questions that, in the past, might have prompted a fierce response. Greene did not take offense to being asked whether her plan for a “national divorce” between red and blue areas was inspired by her own recent divorce from her husband.”
Goba said Stahl asked some “hardball questions.” By nearly all accounts, Stahl’s two deflected questions were not softballs, but they sure weren’t hardball either. Again, like Stahl, Goba asked a series of questions that would hardly qualify as ‘hardball.’
However, despitet all that, the Goba interview with Greene was much more informed and revealing than Stahl’s interview/ profile. Greene pleaded that her earlier questionable actions in Congress were the result of being misled by other members of Congress in her first years. Boda called this her “self-confessed tumble down an online rabbit hole”
The most interesting tidbit in the interview is that Greene has become a staunch defender of The First Amendment. She invoked The First Amendment several times during the interview saying it was something “we have to protect… and respect.”
She says meeting the father and brother of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who provided leaked military documents to the media is part of the reason. But she also credits her new dating, Partner, Brian Glenn, program director of the conservative media company, Right Side Broadcasting Network, for her change of heart. He “explained a lot… about how things work.”
What he clearly explained to her about how things work is how to not just manage the media and the message but how to manipulate the media and its members.
“So maybe I’m falling in love with the press,” she told reporter Kadia Goba, adding coyly, “is that what’s happening, Kadia?”
