A Trump-Enabling News Roundup
Journalists are calling out the normalization of Trump. But the journalists they're speaking to refuse to hear.
A short one this week, as I am working on deadlines for other gigs. And my daughters are back in town for the month. So I’ve been spending whatever free time I have with them.
Here’s them waving to you…
But I’m still reading voraciously, and I am still terrified by how the news media is normalizing Trump v Biden. Here are a few pieces I’ve seen in the last few weeks.
This is a chilling editorial by the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, who lays out how, as Trump is likely to sail to victory in Republican primaries, the few people who stand up to him now will get behind him when he is the nominee. And the U.S. government systems that are designed to stop would-be dictators will fail. Kagan writes:
Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.
In other words, Kagan writes, “unless something radical and unforeseen happens,” Trump can, and likely will, win. And it won’t be because of his supporters. It will be because traditional Republicans will fall in line, and too many Democrats are focused on Biden not being exactly what they want.
If you click on no other link from my piece this week, click on this one (here it is again). Read it. Be scared. Get angry. Make it clear to everyone you know the peril we are in.
Other Warnings About Authoritarianism
A couple of days after the Post ran the Kagan piece, the Editorial Board wrote about how journalists are being punished for calling out state corruption in Azerbaijan.
“Journalism and free expression are not crimes,” wrote the board, “as much as they discomfit the Azeri despot.”
The Washington Post Editorial Board did not, though, write anything on Trump’s attack on MSNBC, which he says is guilty of “election interference” for criticizing him. Trump called for “our so-called ‘government’ [to] come down hard on [MSNBC] and make them pay for their illegal political activity.”
Sure sounds like he’s calling for exactly what happened in Azerbaijan. And yet, none of the main news organizations - The Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR - called it out. None of the main journalism think tanks - Poynter, the Columbia Journalism Review - stood up for the free press.
This silence terrifies me.
Silence Breeds Obliviousness
In September, Brian Klaas wrote in The Atlantic that after Trump wrote that General Mark Milley committed treason, mocked Paul Pelosi, suggested shoplifters should be shot… his comments “barely made the news.
“Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know” what the former president wrote about Milley, Klass wrote, adding, “Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials, but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”
In his Substack, Klaas argues that we should surface all of Trump’s insanity, that as journalists we should not assume the rest of the country is seeing the same - and the same amount of - information we’re seeing. Klaas asks, “What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is…crickets?”
Yeah, this Guardian headline is a bit confusing. It’s an amplification of a Media Matters study on how much major news outlets covered Trump’s “vermin” remark compared with how much they covered Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” statement in 2016. The top three broadcast networks - which have vastly more viewers than cable networks - “gave 18 times more coverage to 2016 ‘deplorables’ remark; while top papers give it 29 times more.”
That’s right. Clinton called Trump’s white supremacist supporters “deplorable” and the press was all over it. But calling people who oppose him “vermin”? The same word Hitler used? Well, it’s just Trump being Trump.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, on November 12, laid out how the political press is treating Trump as a normal candidate, not a genuine threat to democracy. She also dug into that poll the Times did showing Trump leading Biden. You know, the one that came out just days before Democrats won big in the mid-term elections. Rubin has been writing a lot on the failures of the press to stand up for Democracy.
I have to think that the Times really wanted to prove Rubin’s point, when it published a piece by Michael Gold entitled, “Trump Wants Voters to See Biden as a Bigger Threat to Democracy.” The piece is about how Trump is turning around the accusations that HE is a threat to democracy to smear his opponent. It is, ostensibly, “reporting from the campaign trail,” but it is reporting Trump’s lies from the campaign trail. And it is taking what he is saying to a few voters in a room and amplifying it to the Times’ audience.
I want to reiterate this quote from Eric Umansky, former ProPublica deputy managing editor, after the 2016 election:
“We journalists need to get comfortable real quick w/ idea of being seen as fighting for something. And that something is democratic values.”
We have completely and utterly failed at that mission.
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