CBS Fawns Over Book From NYT Reporters, Skirts Dirt on Democrats

They promote their book on a media tour that lasted weeks. It Will Not Pass, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns joined Monday’s CBS Mornings As expected, nearly the entire eight-minute segment of the video was spent on attacking the Republican Party (R-CA), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The authors ignored attempts to raise their reports about the infighting, pitfalls, and the White House.

Tony Dokoupil, cohost of Socialist, made it clear that the tease was a tease. He said that the show would discuss how to be a socialist. “the January 6 riot led Republican leaders who turn their backs on then President Trump, but not for long.”

The segment itself began with CBS gushing over a clip of President Biden using part of his speech at Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner to attack McCarthy, so there again we knew how things would go.

Dokoupil claimed that Biden was his favorite. “poke[d] fun at his political opponents, including House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was recorded saying things he had denied that he ever said…after the January 6th riot that he was thinking of telling President Trump he should resign.”

Turning to the authors, Dokoupil fretted that he’d “like to say congratulations to our country, but I can’t because the book paints a very disturbing picture of where we are[.]”

Having been invited to describe what it had to have been “like listening to…hours and hours of Republican leaders talking very candidly,” Martin said his book succeeded in “pull[ing] back the curtain” What the Republicans actually think “say behind closed doors” about Trump and that there’s been a “vast gulf” There are between “the GOP leaders…and…voters.”

Co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King then tried and failed (as she’d do later) to have them reveal how they obtained their recordings. Instead, Burns spoke generally about their “enormous amount of primary source material” and thus they were faced with “unpack[ing] all of that.”

Burns tried then to change topics and said that the book was being rewritten. “is not just about Republicans”While “people are loving the Kevin McCarthy material if they don’t like Kevin McCarthy, but you know, this is not a book that goes easy on Joe Biden and his party either.”

King, pretending not to be a party member, called their “deep dive on both parties” “the beauty of the book” That will help readers see the similarities between both of these parties. “are so busy blaming the other as opposed to looking inward.”

Burns tried to pull more on that thread, but Dokoupil interjected to say he “wanted to stick with Kevin McCarthy for a second” (click “expand”):

BURNS: Right. You know, it’s something that Jonathan and I talk about almost every day is that these two parties, and I think the book shows this really vividly, these two parties are almost in a competition to see who can do a better job of keeping the other one in business, right, that when the leaders of both parties are behind closed doors, they will acknowledge, as you hear with Kevin McCarthy, but other folks, including on the Democratic side, like we have got some real big problems here, and we have some extreme forces in our party, we’ve got to do something about it. The two parties aren’t identical, but they’ve got some big problem.

DOKOUPIL

BURNS: Sure.

DOKOUPIL: Because I think for the average person reading this book, it shows them something about politics that they may not understand, that I don’t understand.

MARTIN: Yes.

DOKOUPIL: So you’ve gotten McCarthy in that private recording, saying I’ve had it with this guy referring to President Trump and then in the same month, just a few weeks later, he’s in a picture with the President basically giving a thumbs up.

MARTIN: Right.

DOKOUPIL – So, how can you understand these two words?

MARTIN : We have an entire chapter, which really captures, week by week. What we call that rowback, is how Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy went from denouncing Trump so harshly after January 6th to kind of returning to, at least in part, his good graces. Now, is it McCarthy —

KING

MARTIN: — a head-snapping reversal, and the reason is pretty straightforward. McCarthy is determined to become Speaker of the House, and this is his ultimate goal. And he looks around his caucus, they just don’t care what Donald Trump did on January 6th. They’re more concerned about what their voters think and their voters are just fine with Donald Trump. And once McCarthy figures that out, I’ve got to be where the caucus is. He goes back to the caucus and says, we’re not going to impeach Trump, and in fact, we’re going to patch things up with Trump. McCarthy poses for the now-famous picture at Mar-a-Lago before January comes out.

Not surprisingly, the focus remained on bashing the media’s enemy in Republicans and how GOP voters are game with “ignor[ing] or at least set aside concerns about January 6th, and certainly Donald Trump’s conduct,” This spells doom “American politics.”

In other words, because Republicans won’t support for Adam Schiff’s latest boondoggle, you’re the enemy of the country.

Following a brief portion about Trump endorsements (and before another ribbing from King to reveal their sources), they wrapped by sounding the alarm about how world leaders see a weaker United States, which seemed like it was being pinned on Republicans (click “expand”):

KING: You write that people say one thing publicly and another thing privately and maybe the voters here don’t care, but the world is certainly as you say in the book, looking at us very differently after January 6th, aren’t they?

BURNS: — it’s one of the things that we heard over and over.

KING: Yes.

BURNS – We interviewed foreign leaders and diplomats to help us write the book. A lot of members of Congress that have spent the last year overseas said they were often asked “Is the United States okay?”

KING: Yes.

BURNS: And they can’t really answer a confident yes to that.

KING: You couldn’t either in the book, either.

MARTIN : It’s sobering to talk with Tony Blair from the U.K. and Malcolm Turnbull from Australia. Is it going to be OK? America is the anchor of — because America’s success depends on America. America is the anchor of —

Jonathan King: What was your response to that question?

MARTIN: We’re not sure. We’ll see. But our reporting in the book doesn’t give us a lot of confidence. The good news is that there’s some good news. This is ultimately in the control of the American people. The voters control our destiny, and they’re going to be able to make choices in ‘22 and ‘24. But after reading this book, they’re going to have eyes wide open on both sides.

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You can view the CBS transcript for May 2 by clicking here.