Even our most respected media outlets seem to have learned little or nothing since the MAGA termites began to gnaw our democratic woodwork.
Some of us have been warning, lo these last seven years, that we can no longer abide feckless superficial coverage, and that the old “objective” standards of false equivalence, of “on the one hand, on the other hand,” fail us at this perilous historic moment. But alas, even now, the same archaic impulses are still in play; as the eminent media analyst Jay Rosen points out, “Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.”
President Biden has been circling the globe lately – an historic meeting in Vietnam, a G20 summit in India, a 9/11 salute with U.S. troops in Alaska, hurricane damage tours in Florida and Hawaii – but The New York Times says that all this action merely “casts attention to his age.” And the news website Axios says: “Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both running basement-esque campaigns” (italics mine)…during the same time period when the president has been all over the frickin world.
Meanwhile, the mainstream press has been hyping a Wall Street Journal poll that shows Biden and Trump neck and neck in ’24…with scant or nonexistent mention of the fact, which news consumers may have wanted to know, that the Journal survey was co-conducted by a pollster who works for a super PAC that supports Trump. And, of course, there has been zip historical context – namely, the fact that polls conducted more than a year in advance of a presidential election have long been generally worthless (as I detailed back on Aug. 8).
Meanwhile, as the president Biden was on the last lap of his world tour, The Times decided to devote a big chunk of its Sunday front page to Hunter Biden (natch), and you had to read way down to the 35th paragraph to discover this germane tidbit: “No hard evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden personally participated in or profited from the business deals or used his office to benefit his son’s partners while he was vice president.” Nevertheless, here comes paragraph 36: “Still, Hunter Biden’s business dealings have raised concerns…”
I could go on. This past weekend, the Washington Post devoted major coverage to a Both Sides study conducted by some political scientists who’ve concluded that “today’s Republican and Democratic parties have evolved to a place where they emphasize difference, stoke fear and animosity, and incite conflict,” and that both parties “have gotten us to the highly undesirable and dangerous place in which we currently reside.” Why the Post would highlight such a finding is a mystery to me, given the incontrovertible fact that one party still believes in democracy and the other party is a personality cult bent on destroying democracy, led by a criminal defendant charged with 91 felonies.
The latest outbreak of Both Sideism has predictably sparked fresh fulminations from critics inside the media, but what can be said now that hasn’t been said many times before? Let’s go down memory lane:
“When one party openly declares that it no longer believes in democracy, when indeed it is working non-stop to destroy it, journalists can no longer take refuge in ‘neutrality’…Any journalist who’s remotely informed about what’s going on should be compelled to point it out in plain language. If arsonists are torching a house, and it’s burning in front of your eyes, you report it and identify the arsonists…In a national civic emergency, the mainstream media needs to be pro-democracy and pro-truth. That is not ‘bias.’ That is patriotism.”
I wrote that – two and a half years ago.
“‘Objective’ journalism at its most reductively banal seeks to ‘balance’ the unbalanceable…There are blessedly rare times in the life of this nation when journalists have found it necessary to step beyond their ‘objective’ roles and tell the unvarnished truth. Edward R. Murrow did it in 1954 when he slapped down Trump predecessor Joseph McCarthy. Walter Cronkite did it in 1968 when he returned from Vietnam and told viewers exactly what he’d learned, that the war was a lost farce. We are living such a moment today…We pull the wool over our eyes when we practice false equivalence. Conscience calls us to do better.”
I wrote that – seven years ago.
“Under the longstanding rules of the game, mainstream journalists are barred from stating what is incontrovertibly accurate about this historic asymmetric matchup…Their implicit mission is to place (Clinton and Trump) on the same plane…to artificially pump Trump full of the gravitas he doesn’t possess, a policy cipher who demeans women and minorities, and who’s currently the target of two fraud trials….
“If mainstream reporters eschew those self-evident truths, rest assured that Trump will play them for suckers. And voters will potentially pay the price.”
I wrote that – seven and a half years ago.
So it has all been said before. I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the Kurt Vonnegut character who said, “I’ve become unstuck in time.”
Will we pay the ultimate price – again?