How media makes the sausage: The anti-Trump bias that made a local politician a national figure
To create a false narrative, the Fascist legacy media turned a local "anti-Trump Republican" candidate into a national story about how the GOP is a lost cause
Obscure Texas Republican and small business owner Michael Wood was elevated to national attention for his supposedly “anti-Trump” stance during the recent Sixth Congressional District jungle primary. (Photo: L.M. Otero/Associated Press)
Twenty candidates faced off in a jungle primary in Ft. Worth, Texas early this month. A “jungle primary” pits all comers, from all parties against one another with the top two vote-getters advancing to a runoff.
It was a special election to fill the seat of Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX), who died from CCP virus complications in February. The top two candidates in the primary format advanced to a runoff election on July 27. Former President Trump endorsed Wright's widow, Susan Wright. On May 1, the results were in — Wright and another Republican, Jake Ellzey, advanced to the runoff.
Ellzey was attacked in ads for being too moderate — including for the “error” of receiving a small donation from #NeverTrump leader Bill Kristol in 2018. Ellzey is a well-known local Republican while Wright had built-in name recognition. Local media focused, for the most part, on them and one other candidate who finished far behind them.
Ironically, most of the coverage of this race centered around a Republican candidate whom Kristol endorsed in the special election. It was the legacy media that invaded Ft. Worth to build a narrative with which to attack President Donald Trump. The hook: He was supposedly “anti-Trump.” Perfect story line for the Fascist media on the Democrat Party leash.
Michael Wood is a military veteran and small business owner, running in his first election. He ultimately would finish in ninth place, well behind four Democrats and four other Republicans. To give you an idea of the scale of the race, Wood received 2,503 votes — the top two candidates in the runoff received 15,052 and 10,851 voters.
Wood was portrayed as the candidate who carried the #NeverTrump banner into battle for the wing of the party supposedly dedicated to “truth” about the 2020 election. “Michael Wood, the hope for anti-Trump Republicans” was the headline of a Texas Monthly profile in April. He made an appearance on a popular local political radio show.
His media coverage grew much bigger than that — with an audience far outside the Fort Worth district. The national media attention Wood got — both before the results, but particularly after the loss — has been illuminating in how the national media is interested in framing single data points to paint a wider picture they already have in their minds.
Despite heavy national media attempts to influence the Texas 6th District primary, two pro-Trump Republicans — Susan Wright, widow of the congressman who died in office and local politician Jake Ellzey — advanced to the July runoff. (Photos: Wright and Ellzey campaigns)
It's a great case study in how the media sausage gets made.
Wood's campaign manager Brendan Steinhauser is based in Austin. He has worked in Washington, D.C. and extensively in Texas state politics — ironically, mostly for the Texas Tea Party Republicans who formed the early base of Trump support.
"Earned media was a part of the strategy from the beginning," Steinhauser said. “The short time frame of just about eight weeks for the entire campaign made it necessary. "[The national media] were interested because he was critical of the former president and said something different than the other Republicans running. I don't think he would have gotten the attention he got but for that unique message."
How does a candidate with a message the national press was anxious to scoop up get that attention? Steinhauser's deep rolodex was behind the mechanics. Steinhauser knows The Washington Post's Dave Weigel, and Weigel wrote one of the first national media profiles of Wood March 2.
He also knows CNN and Bulwark contributor Amanda Carpenter, who tweeted about Wood the day before, putting it on the radar of other national media types covering the political spectrum. Of course there was a Dispatch profile. A lengthy Politico profile wasn't far behind.
Television was key. Wood was interviewed in several lengthy segments by CBS News' streaming network. He also made a late March appearance on Kasie Hunt's MSNBC show, shortly after she tweeted about the controversial endorsement of Wood by rabid #NeverTrumper Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-OH) — who seems to spend as much time on TV as he does in the Capitol. Kinzinger also recently defended Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (R-NY) for questioning the emotional stability of Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-FL) — who was elected based on her strong Trump support — emotional stability.
Wood himself was the MSNBC connection — Hunt went to his wedding. A source says she was a plus one guest at the wedding more than a decade ago. Journalistic credibility demands such personal information be disclosed but Hunt apparently did not think it was worth mentioning.
Experienced campaign veteran Brendan Steinhauser was key for Michael Wood’s candidacy, though he jumped ship from his past Trump conservative stance to run Wood’s tepid anti-Trump campaign. (Photo: Trinity Lewis/Austin Statesman)
It was CNN even more than MSNBC which really took a liking to Wood's candidacy. Steinhauser had contacts at CNN through past work. The personal cell phone number of Jake Tapper, Jim Acosta and Dana Bash are in that Rolodex file.
Their attention to the Sixth District race drew into the mix other producers and reporters aa the network covered Wood several times, both on-air and online, before the election. Somehow CNN was able to drag reporter Donie O'Sullivan away from his busy QAnon beat to head to Texas personally to cover Wood on the campaign trail.
One has to question how such national media exposure would translate into votes in Fort Worth. The number one cable news network in Ft. Worth is Fox News by well over a two-to-one margin. The results were as expected, but the attention of the Fascist media apparently attracted Fascist money to the race, going directly into Wood’s campaign cffers.
"What it does is puts your name and brand in front of thousands if not millions of people who could potentially get excited about your campaign and make a donation, and we'd see that happen," Steinhauser said. "Media begets media begets more media. He became a national figure in the course of a few weeks."
Essentially that national coverage was a standard fundraising tactic.
That exposure, of course, did not amount to victory. But for the media, that didn't seem to matter. In fact, you can make the argument that the loss was as much a victory for them as a Wood victory might have been. The story could now be about how the Republican party is so lost it rejected the "pro-truth, anti-Trump" candidate.
The post-election autopsy included Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — just removed from her House party leadership position by the GOP this week — who called it a “sad commentary” on the state of the party.
Chris Cillizza did his Chris Cizilla thing, sounding the death knell of the Republican Party for being so “backward and narrow-minded.” Then, three days after the vote, Wood was back on CNN for a lengthy interview. "You are the only candidate who ran on the notion that the 2020 election was fair. And you got your clock cleaned. So what does that tell you?" asked John Berman.
It should be worth noting here that the question implies a “fact” that simply is not true — no candidate in the Sixth jungle primary was running on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen. Eve the crawl at the bottom of the screen got into the act, stating gravely that Wood "lost badly" as a "sign of the times."
Noted beligerent #NeverTrumper Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) weighed in on the Wood trouncing in Texas, calling it a “sad commentary on today’s Republican Party.” (Photo: Liz Cheney/Facebook)
Wood initially pushed back a little, noting, "This is one data point. I'm not sure what it says about the rest of the country."
Eventually, however, he got the drift of the interview and decided to play ball.
"If believing a lie is the price of admission to the Republican party as it's constituted right now, why join the party?" asked Berman, who later also pressed the point that "voters are demanding you commit to The Big Lie."
Again, none of the candidates, including the four Republicans who performed better than Wood on election day, were committed to "The Big Lie" as CNN falsely calls it. The Big Lie is the story line of the Fascist Democrats and the media, as it was Hitler’s, the last successful Fascist. Wood was simply the only candidate who made Trump a centerpiece of his campaign, and that was a blatant fund-raising ploy.
National Review, given it is Kristol’s publication, also chimed in with a Wood commentary. The outlet drew sweeping conclusions from the results, with Kevin Williamson writing a column about Wood (a former National Review Institute Regional Fellow) a couple days after the election with the sub-head "A failed congressional candidate in Texas told Republicans truths they needed to hear, but didn’t want to."
Is that what what actually happened? Obviously, no.
Wood was never the perfect anti-Trump candidate for the media anyway. That was made apparent by an interview Wood did with Nicole Wallace of MSNBC last week. Wood revealed he voted for Donald Trump — in 2020. He switched to the anti-Trump side after the election.
When pressed by Wallace why he wanted to be a Republican anymore anyway, Wood cited the trillions Biden was spending and the fact that the Democrats couldn't allow for pro-life candidates. Wallace, who has long left her days as a Republican, was incensed by his responses.
That's really the point. Wood ran what he believed to be the right campaign for him and his party. But the media tried to extrapolate this out into the existential fight they've been waging for the last five years.
In a way, they used Wood's candidacy for their own preconceived purposes — to continue trashing Trump, his voters and to try desperately to recover from their ratings slump since Trump left office.
Wood got exposure for his point of view, and perhaps he will join the ranks of anti-Trump GOP commentators now. The bottom line is that the national media got what they wanted — an anti-Trump story to fit their anti-Trump narrative — until the next one comes along.