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Much of the Media Is Again Failing Americans

If Donald Trump wins re-election and American democracy ends, much of the blame and responsibility will fall on the mainstream media which continues to make the same mistakes - and perhaps even worse mistakes given what is now known about Trump - as were made in the lead up to the 2016 and 2020 elections.  Trump has never been a normal candidates and the media's continued false equivalency, desire for "horse race" reporting, and fear of exposing and calling out Trump's and MAGA's never ending lies is putting democracy and America's standing in the world at severe risk.  Would that more "journalists" had the courage for honest reporting and understood the importance of not acting as if we were in campaigns like in the 1980's or even 1990's.  A long piece at Salon looks at the failure of much of the media to do its job and to realize that it needs to be a bulwark against lies and open calls for fascism and worse.  The growth of the right wing media and its endless efforts to distort the truth has made the duty of the rest of the media to exposes lies and outright threats to democracy all the more urgent.  Here are column highlights:

The American news media is facing an extreme challenge as it prepares to celebrate itself tonight at the White House Correspondents' dinner. During normal times covering a presidential election is hard work. But the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis have made reporting and commenting about the news and current events even more difficult. How has the American mainstream news media as an institution met the challenge?

On one day the elite agenda-setting news media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post will publish excellent investigative reporting on subjects such as Donald Trump and his regime’s crimes, Jan. 6, and the authoritarian playbook of Project 2025 and Agenda 47. But as has been widely documented, in the interest of “balance” and “fairness” and a “diversity of opinion," those same elite media outlets will the next day feature op-eds and other commentary from Trumpists and MAGA people and others who oppose multiracial pluralistic democracy – the effect of which is to mainstream and normalize their anti-democratic beliefs.

“Many reporters across the traditional news media are struggling against institutional tics and timidities that make ‘balance’ a false idol.” The consequence: “The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo chamber.”

There is a focus on President Biden’s occasional lapses in memory – which mental health and other experts have concluded are normal for a man of his age. However, Donald Trump’s worsening and much more severe challenges in memory, speech, cognition, and behavior which may be indicative of an actual brain disease are often downplayed or ignored. Alternately, the mainstream news media tries to create a false equivalency between President Biden and Donald Trump’s challenges with memory and speech when they are in fact very different.

Slate magazine’s Alicia Montgomery recently reflected on her time working at NPR and how its leadership dismissed the mounting evidence that Donald Trump could win in 2016 and enforced a policy of normalizing his candidacy: For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warned newsroom leadership that we weren’t taking Trump and the possibility of his winning seriously enough. But top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he’d said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump’s strong poll numbers wouldn’t survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence.

Public opinion polls and other research show that the American people have low levels of trust in the news media. This is in part a function of how malign actors such as Donald Trump and others on the right have for decades used disinformation and other propaganda tools to systematically undermine faith in the news media and other democratic institutions as part of their authoritarian campaign to create an alternate reality where the truth and the facts no longer exist.

But there is another compelling explanation for these declining levels of trust: The mainstream news media as an institution has been criminally late in consistently sounding the alarm about Donald Trump and the existential dangers that he and the MAGA movement represent to the country.

On this, philosopher Jason Stanley, author of "How Fascism Works," told me in conversation here at Salon:  It's surreal. No amount of reality will change them. I'm shocked, by the way the media is reacting to every new claim that Trump is a fascist as if this were news. Those like me, you, and a select group of others have been saying for years that Trump was a potential fascist dictator and there is a movement behind him. They dismissed us and laughed at us. Now instead of turning to those of us who were accurate and sounding the alarm years ago, the media is turning to people, supposed experts, who only now are realizing that we're facing a fascist, social and political movement. Such people should not be the ones turned to by the news media to be talking about the near-term future of Trump and this fascist movement and the danger. Why? They have quite clearly demonstrated total unreliability.

Can the American mainstream news media fix itself?

Charles Sykes offers the following suggestions in his new essay at the Atlantic:

Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign? My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed…. The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)

Sykes concludes with a much-needed corrective about the dangers of political coverage as theater criticism:

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

Mark Jacob, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, has also been trying to hold the mainstream American news media to a higher standard in the Age of Trump. In a particularly sharp essay at his newsletter Stop the Presses, which merits being quoted at length, Jacob takes on the dictates of “neutrality” and “objectivity.”

Journalists aren’t bystanders in a democracy. Democracy relies on them to take action – to fact-check political lies, expose wrongdoing, explain the issues, and warn the public about the consequences of their votes.

Our political system cannot survive without an informed citizenry that’s equipped with shared, verified facts. That means journalists are not passive members of the audience – they’re supporting actors in the drama.

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The Constitution Will Not Save Us From Trump and the Far Right

The Founding Fathers are often depicted as all knowing and the architects of America's unique democratic system.  In reality, they were fallible men and the constitution they crafted filled with political compromises in order to get all of the original thirteen states to sign on.  Fast forward 200 plus years and these political compromises from over two centuries ago now threaten the continued existence of America as we have known. In particular, too much power is vested in small states through the grant of two U.S. Senators to states with populations smaller than many individual cities, the Electoral College that allows the loser of the popular vote to still win the presidency, and a Supreme Court too easily stacked and wholly unaccountable to the will of the majority of Americans.  Since these defects in the Constitution set the stage for and created the political peril the nation now faces, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the U.S. Constitution will not save us from the tyranny of a minority of the population and a possible autocracy that potentially lies ahead.  Indeed, the Constitution desperately needs amendments to thwart  the threats.  Here are column excerpts: 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.

For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.

It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it, “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.

In these Trump years, as polls have shown some Americans drifting away from those shared ideals, liberals are clinging even more tightly to the document as a symbol under threat.

A year and a half ago, for instance, when Mr. Trump called for the “termination” of existing election rules, liberals were understandably outraged. . . . . The problem is that these pledges of constitutional fealty can’t substitute for actually convincing the public of the importance of inclusive democracy.

Rallying around the Constitution means embracing the very text that causes these pathologies. Its rules strengthen the hand of those indifferent or even opposed to the principle of one person, one vote. After all, those rules smooth the path for a Trumpian right to gain power without winning over a majority.

The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.

We need new campaign finance laws and expanded voting rights. We need to end the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, combat gerrymandering and partisan election interference, adopt multi-member House districts and add new states like Washington, D.C. We need to reduce the power of the Senate . . .

Such reform requires pushing back against the extreme power of the Supreme Court through measures like judicial term limits and expansion of the size of the court. And an easier amendment process would give Americans the power to update their institutions and incorporate new rights into the document, rather than having to rely only on what judges decide.

No doubt these changes can seem politically unfeasible. But it would behoove Americans concerned about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump to take seriously such a comprehensive agenda, if for no other reason than because many on the right are already working on constitutional reforms of their own.

Groups like the Convention of States (which counts Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a vocal supporter) have succeeded in getting 19 of the 34 states required under Article V of the Constitution to agree to convene a new constitutional convention. The Convention of States package of potential changes includes giving “a simple majority of the states” the ability “to rescind actions by Congress, the President, or administrative agencies,” empowering Republican officials to nullify any policies they oppose, regardless of whether those policies enjoy vast national support.

These efforts will persist even if Mr. Trump is no longer on the political stage. And so long as liberals refuse to confront what needs to be done to fix the Constitution, his supporters and groups like the Convention of States will control that debate.

It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.

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The Republicans Who Want American Carnage

Today's Republican Party wants no solutions to many pressing problems as demonstrated by their killing of the bipartisan U.S. Senate border legislation that would have gone a long way to solve the situation at America's southern border.   Instead, as a whole the GOP wants chaos that it can use to frighten its aging white/evangelical base and perhaps some swing voters to the extent they exist in today's polarized political atmosphere.  This reality is all the more true now as the U.S. economy continues to perform well and crime is once again falling.  Hence the constant GOP whining about the border even though the sabotaged a solution and depiction of large cities as crime ridden hell holes. Once frightening part of the GOP agenda is to call for the violent suppression of protesters - other than right wing protesters, of course - all in the likely hope that the unrest will be exacerbated and provide more GOP talking points.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this GOP agenda, the current college campus protests and the carnage Republicans hope to generate.  Here are highlights:

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia.

What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime . . . . and with widespread civil-rights protests.

There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters.

[T]the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. . . . NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.

The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer.

As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

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