On a podcast the other day, national political reporter Thomas Edsall analyzed the mounting threat of Republican authoritarianism and posed a great question:
“Trump and the Republican party have created a real dilemma for the media… A party of sedition is trying to (enact) rules that even when it loses, it wins… We have a different animal in the ballgame now. One side is dominated by a party that is willing to accept lies, that is delusional… a party that is on the verge of becoming something unseen in America, beyond the point of no return…When you have a party that is moving in this extreme fashion, how do we in the media describe it?”
Easy answer: Describe reality.
The old days of both sides false-balance journalism, the old days of writing “on the one hand, on the other hand,” the old days when both parties honored democracy by accepting the election results – those days are over. 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.”
Richard Tofel, founder of the investigative journalism website ProPublica, wrote recently that neutrality is an “attractive value” only “if you view public life as an endless series of fights between two sides distinguishable most importantly by the primary colors of their uniforms.” But all too often – and especially now – neutrality is merely “an appropriate pose for the uninformed.”
Any journalist who’s remotely informed about what’s going on in 2021 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. It’s not enough to say “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell hopes to win the chamber in 2022.” It’s factually accurate to simply say, “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, after voting to exonerate a president who inspired an anti-democratic coup attempt, hopes to win the chamber in 2022 and strengthen Republican vote-suppression efforts in 2024.”
In a national civic emergency, the mainstream media needs to be pro-democracy and pro-truth. That is not “bias.” That is patriotism.
The problem, however, is that too many journalists (especially the older, more seasoned ones) are stuck in the old paradigm. Jay Rosen, a media critic at New York University, said it well last week: The press is still too invested in “the game – ‘who are the winners and losers, who’s ahead, what’s the strategy?’ You can keep doing that right up until the point when democracy disintegrates.”
Copyright 2021 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.