Obsessed: The Right-Wing Media’s Favorite Midterm Storylines
By Jaden Satenstein, October 26, 2022
From slates of GOP election deniers to a TV doctor mocking his stroke-victim opponent to armed “poll watchers” lurking around ballot drop boxes, the leadup to the midterm election has been a wild ride. With more than eight million votes already cast, here’s what the right-wing media is writing about as the nation decides its political future, according to TheRighting.com’s curated list of headlines from the right this month.
Worshiping Kari Lake
Before she became the recipient of the right-wing media’s highest praise and adoration this year, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake spent two decades behind the anchor desk herself. After 22 years at a local Fox News affiliate station in Phoenix, Lake launched a campaign built on election lies and COVID conspiracies, and conservative media is eating it up.
The right’s obsession with Lake has dominated its coverage of the heated Arizona race, with PJ Media claiming she “may be the greatest thing to happen to Republicans this year.” While the Republican candidate has never held political office and was even registered as a Democrat between 2008-2012, El American is already predicting Lake’s eventual inauguration as the United States’ first female president.
Think that’s extreme praise? Newsmax wrote last week that Lake’s political success is “guided by God.” It seems the MAGA crowd has chosen a new poster child, and right-wing media thinks Arizona voters will choose her too. Or, if they don’t, get ready for Stop the Steal II.
The Big Lie
Right-wing media continues to cry wolf as early voting numbers climb, spreading discredited, 2020-style conspiracies. Big League Politics called voter fraud the “order of the day in several blue states,” sharing faulty data from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), whose reports on voter fraud have been repeatedly debunked. And Infowars is using classic xenophobia to inspire election denial by writing that swing state electorates are being influenced by a “surge” in the “foreign-born voting population.” WND looked even further ahead in a recent story outlining the many ways that Democrats “plan to steal the 2024 election.”
Bashing Fetterman’s Health
There is one clear piece of fraud in the senate race in Pennsylvania, and its name is Mehmet Oz. The GOP is having a hard time distracting voters from the fact that their candidate is a reality TV quack who only lives in the state on paper. Ignoring the fact that his idea of health is weight loss miracle pills, right-wing media’s desperate attempt to boost support for Oz centers on painting his opponent as “half-brained,” “dazed and confused” and “unfit for office” after suffering a stroke.
Fetterman has been working tirelessly on the campaign trail, as The New Yorker has detailed. “In recent weeks, Fetterman has held rallies, spoken at town halls, met with editorial boards, and accepted live-interview requests…In a way, then, the continued questions about Fetterman’s health seem to ignore the ample evidence that he is already carrying out a demanding job, and may reflect a bias on the part of the media and the electorate to focus on the new and dramatic.”
Still, the right is quick to exploit any potential weakness in its opposition, even if it promotes misleading and pseudoscientific stereotypes about a man’s health. If it wasn’t already clear how low they’ll go, check out this headline from PJ Media: “Fetterman’s Wife Is Giving Off a Creepy Jill Biden Vibe.” Is that really the best attack they’ve got?
‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracies
Finally, the right loves to frame every story as a divisive “us versus them” issue, and far-right media is strongly pushing the culture war narrative this election cycle. Conservative outlets want white Americans to feel like their livelihoods are under attack and that voting red this November is the only way to save them from the woke mob. For example, SteveGruber.com asks: “Why are the Dems trying to wipe us out?”
Newsmax shared a simple call to action, claiming that “we can rescue our culture by voting GOP in November.” Whose “culture,” exactly? The answer is pretty clear in headlines like “The Left’s Hatred of White Evangelical Christians” from Western Journal. Conservative leaders are experts at using fear to drive voters to the polls, and painting the opposition as a “commie coalition of racists, butchers, liars and ghouls,” like NOQ Report wrote earlier this month, is a sure-fire way to inspire its base to gear up for battle.
Jaden Satenstein (@jadensat) is a writer, producer and social media consultant. She has worked for WNYC, FRONTLINE PBS, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Straus News Manhattan.
Interested in more news about right-wing websites curated especially for mainstream audiences? Subscribe to our free daily newsletter.
Right-wing media outlets appear to be obsessed with a slew of topics this month including voter fraud, John Fetterman’s health and Kari Lake’s rise to the top of the GOP. (Image: Pixabay)
