Enabling Chris Christie

[NastyRiffraff]

From Salon:

The day Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal broke, with the release of damning emails and text messages, the immediate response of Fox News was flat-out denial. For six long hours, the network simply said nothing about the scandal, according to Media Matters. In total, Fox devoted less than 15 minutes to the scandal all day, compared to more than two hours by MSNBC and CNN. It was striking, but not surprising. Chris Christie was the Republicans’ great white hope, the one candidate capable of possibly winning the White House in 2016, and this scandal posed an immediate and obvious threat to that prospect. Since Fox had famously clung to denial as Romney lost the 2012 election, it was not really surprising to see them revert to denial once again.

Ten days later, Fox did it again, when Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer went public with her charge that Christie withheld tens of millions of dollars in requested aid because she wouldn’t OK a real estate deal he wanted. That day, again according to Media Matters, Fox mentioned Christie just three times, compared to 44 on MSNBC, and 38 on CNN.

Thanks to Oprah, denial is one of the best-known of the so-called ego defense mechanisms, mechanisms individuals subconsciously use to deal with anxiety, fear, even primordial terror. Although best known and understood in individual terms, the phenomena of group denial is common enough as well — just ask any Cubs fan, for example, as he waits for next year. Or consider another example from Fox: its decade-plus promotion of global warming denialism.

Given that, it’s not surprising that Fox responded to Christie’s crisis with denial, or that other defense mechanisms also showed up as the scandal unfolded. What’s interesting, though, is how they showed in two distinct, yet overlapping ways: Conservatives were far from being alone. On the one hand, Christie’s conservative supporters quickly shifted gears to a second line of defense: contrasting Christie’s supposedly heroic owning up in his marathon press conference with Obama’s alleged dissembling over a variety of pet peeve pseudo-scandals beloved on the right — Benghazi, the IRS, etc.

Here's the link It's a long piece but worth reading.