America is amusing itself to death — and the media still can’t face

America remains in the grip of an existential democracy crisis: Donald Trump’s Republican-fascists and their movement are on the march, winning victory after victory while the Democrats and the “resistance” are hunkered down, doing little if anything to fight back.

Yet the gatekeepers among the American news media appear more interested in stories about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s possibly imaginary friend, who supposedly suffered swollen testicles because of the coronavirus vaccine — supposedly damaging his marital prospects — than in doing the hard work of advocating for democracy and real accountability.

America is literally amusing itself to death, even as we learn further details about how Donald Trump and his agents attempted a coup to overthrow American democracy after his defeat in the 2020 election. The newest “revelation”: Step-by-step plans for this coup were outlined in a memo written by right-wing lawyer John Eastman, who became a key Trump adviser during the latter days of his presidency.

Some of the most influential voices in America’s mainstream news media — with the notable exceptions of CNN and the Washington Post — have largely ignored this story. At Mother Jones, Tim Murphy offers these details of Eastman’s memo, and the media’s non-response: 

In six concise bullet-points, the memo outlined a process by which Vice President Mike Pence could use his powers on January 6 to throw out the electors from seven states that President Joe Biden won in the 2020 election. The plan counted on Republicans in those states to submit competing sets of electors, based on the false and fabricated premise that Trump had somehow won those states … .

Not knowing for sure what happens when you dissociate “peaceful transfer of power” from “a society entirely predicated on it,” I sort of think this is a pretty big deal. This is a break-the-glass moment, as some have said, only someone else already broke the glass and took the axe and is running around with it.

But it is not such a big deal, apparently, if you watch network TV news. On Wednesday, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz reported that the total number of minutes devoted to the story on either the morning or evening editions of ABC, NBC, or CBS News in the first two days after the memo was published was zero. “In fact,” Gertz wrote, “the only national network broadcasts to mention Trump’s coup memo were the late-night variety shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers.”

In a new essay for the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan offers this warning about what the media silence surrounding this newest “revelation” reveals about America’s democracy crisis:

In a normal world, the “Eastman memo” would be infamous by now, the way “Access Hollywood” became the popular shorthand in 2016 for the damning recording of Donald Trump’s bragging about groping women.

But it’s a good bet that most people have never even heard of the Eastman…