Journalists Must Report the Crazy, Not Normalize It

David Atkins wrote last week:

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is.

This trend has been developing for decades, of course. Especially since the Nixon era, U.S. news media companies have striven mightily to avoid the label of bias at all costs. Of course, also since the Nixon era “bias” has been mostly defined by the political Right. But it’s been twenty years since Paul Krugman complained about news media’s, um, uncritical coverage of presidential candidate George W. Bush’s nonsensical economic proposals.

Partly this is a matter of marketing — insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”

It would take an encyclopedia to document all the ways journalists have under-reported damaging information about Trump while “normalizing” his bizarre behavior. I’ll pick just one example; see Aaron Rupar, Vox, NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media from January 15, 2020. Rupar points to NPR’s coverage of a rally in which Trump went on one of his signature incoherent tirades.

Describing Trump as he really is can make it seem as if a report is “anti-Trump” and that the reporter is trying to make the president look foolish.

But for media outlets that view themselves as above taking sides, attempts to provide a sober, “balanced” look at presidential speeches often end up normalizing things that are decidedly not normal.

A brief report about Trump’s Milwaukee speech that aired Wednesday morning on NPR illustrates this phenomenon. The anchor’s intro framed Trump’s at times disjointed ramblings as a normal political speech that “ranged widely,” …

…On Twitter, Georgetown University public affairs professor Don Moynihan noted that NPR’s report about the rally “mentioned specific topics like Iran and impeachment but carefully omit the insane stuff. This is one way the media strives to present Trump as a normal president.”

NPR is far from alone in struggling to cover Trump.

As I wrote following a previous Trump rally in Wisconsin last April, outlets including CBS, USA Today, the Associated Press, and the Hill failed to so much as mention in their reporting that Trump pushed dozens of lies and incendiary smears during his speech.

The irony is that the media is one of Trump’s foremost targets of abuse. He calls the press the “enemy of the people,” yet the very outlets he demeans regularly bend over backward to cover him in the most favorable possible light.

Of course, it’s also the case that if now news media uniformly began to describe Trump as he really is, many people would not believe them.  But it has to be done, or we are lost.

Dan Froomkin, after AG Bill Barr asked for the Michael Flynn charges to be dropped:

Autocrats don’t announce it publicly when they’re taking a step toward greater authoritarianism.

As long as there’s a free press, it’s up to journalists to call them out.

But even as Donald Trump and members of his administration have asserted greater and more unilateral executive power, our top news organizations have tended to interpret those moves narrowly and naively – giving too much credit to cover stories, marginalizing criticism as just so much partisan squabbling, and leaving the accurate, alarming description of what’s really going on to opinion writers.

Yesterday, Jay Rosen described a distinction between journalism that is political and journalism that is politicized. He argues that good journalists should not avoid taking political stands in service of the truth.

When the president is using you as a hate object in order to discredit the entire mainstream press in the eyes of his supporters so that your reporting and the reporting of all the people you compete with arrives pre-rejected, what good is “our job is to observe, not participate?” You are part of that system whether you like it or not. You either think your way out of it, or get incorporated into it.

The hard work is deciding where the properly political part of journalism ends, and its undue, unfair, unwise and risky politicization begins. But we don’t have a discussion like that. Instead we have media bias wielded like a baseball bat, and journalists who think they can serve the electorate better if they remove themselves from it.

Now we are met on an ugly and brutal battlefield: the 2020 campaign for president. How should American journalists approach it?

This is a good post, as is Froomkin’s, as is Rupar’s, and I suggest reading all of them to get the full gist of what they are saying.

David Atkins argues that it isn’t just Trump; it’s the entire Republican Party that no longer deserves to be “normalized.”

Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”)

Atkins goes on to describe the QANON cult and the widespread belief that Bill Gates is spreading COVID-19 so that he can microchip everyone.These things possibly didn’t originate with the Republican Party, but the party encourages and feeds on this nonsense as a way to keep true believing voters in the fold. Atkins continues,

It’s long past time for even the venerable pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to start calling this what it is, and stop normalizing it as standard partisanship. It is deeply dangerous in a democracy whose constitution functionally guarantees a two-party system, for one of those two parties to become a conspiracy cult.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the first step to fixing it is to call it what it is, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for institutions and journalism professionals who find that sort of language loaded with unprofessional bias. The truth is what it is, even if it requires rethinking the role of a responsible press in an era of white anxiety and mass social-media-fueled disinformation.

Just over the past few hours:

Trump, enraged because Twitter dared fact-check one of his tweets, this afternoon signed an executive order to punish social media companies:

The executive order targets companies granted liability protections through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Without congressional action, however, there are limits to what Trump can do with the executive order. The president said Thursday that he would indeed pursue legislation in addition to the order.

Attorney General William Barr, who also attended the signing, said the Justice Department would also seek to sue social media companies, saying the statute “has been stretched way beyond its original intention.”

Trump wants to sic lawsuits on companies that displease him. Ironically, Trump’s tweets about Joe Scarborough and Lori Klausutis may have left him vulnerable to civil suits. See also Greg Sargent, Trump’s assault on truth takes an ugly new turn.

Meanwhile, Trump retweeted a video that includes the line “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

A Pulitzer-winning cartoonist put the original copy of an anti-Trump cartoon up for sale on an online retail site. The Trump campaign bullied the retail site, Redbubble, into removing the cartoon. So much for free speech.

Heavily armed white nationalist “boogaloo” militia members have embedded themselves in the Minneapolis protests of the killing of George Floyd.

And, of course, in the midst of a deadly pandemic Trump has been pushing misinformation, suppressing safety guidelines, and discouraging by example the wearing of masks.

I have the impression that a lot of people who are not politics or media nerds genuinely believe that all news media are misreporting facts — generating “fake news” — in the service of their political agendas. Among long-established major media news outlets, that’s actually rare. The real fake news is happening because news media companies are afraid of telling the awful truth. But they have to start.

Update: Charles Pierce on today’s executive order —

Before discussing some of the eight gozillion ways this executive order is insane, let me state for the record to all Republican operatives and their clients: if you ever played the media-bias card for political advantage, openly or covertly, this is what you invited into our politics. Revolving on a spit in hell, Spiro Agnew knows this. It was always nonsense. It was always a bully’s tactic. And here we are now. …

… It should be noted that, as he was signing this, the president* was on Twitter attacking a specific employee of Twitter, throwing his name out to his pack of MAGA hyenas. It should be noted that this came after a month in which the president* used the electric Twitter machine to repeatedly imply that Joe Scarborough may have committed murder.

5 thoughts on “Journalists Must Report the Crazy, Not Normalize It

  1. Trump's defense, ever since he became the worlds ugliest cheerleader for the claim Obama isn't a citizen, has been.. "I'm just repeating what other people [always unnamed] are saying." His lawyers perhaps have advised him that this technique inoculates him from liability. 

    Which brings me to the question – WHY is Twitter liable for "just saying" that fact checking organizations can't find a shred of evidence to back up this statement to 80 million Twitter users. They made no accusation – the formula is the exact same as Trump's has been for years. Just sayin'.

  2. As I read all of this bullying of the media, and their unwillingness or unknowingness to know what to do – I am reminded of several things:

    1) the bully takes advantage of your incomprehension; you literally have to realize you're being bullied in order to respond effectively. Otherwise you continue to roll over. I learned this the hard way over many decades.

    2) I'm reminded of that chilling scene in "Handmaid's Tale" – shown on Hulu some months ago. One day, everything is normal, and then the hammer falls, and your banking cards no longer work, and your boss is telling you that you must leave. The old life is destroyed in a matter of minutes, although there were months and years of signs that this was coming.

    Everyone is coping with COVID-19, many have lost their jobs, meanwhile the hammer is coming down, day by day, and almost nobody is aware of it.  I suspect more people are afraid of Bill Gates and his microchips, if they think about such things at all.

  3. Agnotology stemmed from the Tobacco industries failure to stem the tide against smoking it is claimed, but the banning of DDT or asbestos could have goaded it.  The tobacco industry seemed to have sent the message to industry, and the never again attitude got entrenched.  I would think the anti-Ralph Nadar types helped in the development of the techniques, but at least automobile safety prevailed.  The denialism of climate change is certainly the front lines today, and we have evidence of techniques used to reality bend it.

    Yes PBS always gets duped.  Their has been research conducted as to their fair and balanced technique and how they can and are manipulated.  When you allow the rouge scientist to show up and present along side of the mainstream scientist the audience tends to give both equal weight according to solidly reviewed studies.  Some writers even claim the rouge scientists tend to be more believed, because they have lots of time to practice and are usually well paid by the potentially effected industry.   As I recall, even information  regarding who represents the mainstream and the extent of general agreement does not change audience perceptions.  Remember, the aim is to create doubt.  Just the fact that the audience has doubt is enough.  

    One can go on and on with this topic, but the Republican's new tactic to enter false facts into a debate is most concerning.  Voter fraud is one case, where a minute and insignificant number of cases have been used to justify much voter disenfranchisement and skews elections by the fraudulent presentation of an almost non[-existent problem.  I would expect a high number of citizens polled would rate voter fraud as a big election problem.  That has never been shown to be a fact.  

  4. Our MSM, in all of its forms, Newspapers, Magazines, Radio, TV, and now, the internet, has spent decades bending over backwards so as not to be called out for bias. 

    And who is it that they're afraid of being accused of bias by?  The liberals/Democrats?  No. 

    The vast, vast majority of the time, it's conservatives/Republicans who call out bias for any reporting that's not biased towards them.  They WANT bias.  But they want for that bias to lean in THEIR favor!

    To conservatives, neutral reporting has a a huge liberal bias!  Funny, that's true of facts, too. Facts also have a notably liberal bias.

    Enough!

    If any group has legitimate claims to call out bias against them, it's us:  Liberals, Progressives, Democrats.   

    In our MSM's attempts to not call the Republican spade a spade, they try to paint that spade as a gilded tool used only for digging for the truth.  But it's THE CONSERVATIVE'S version of the truth they want dug-up and displayed, not THE truth!

    Our "Fourth Estate" has, for decades, tried to provide cover for the Republican Party's slide into conspiratorial madness, Authoritarianism, Theocracy, Oligarchy, Kleptocracy, and Kakistocracy!

    Our Fourth Estate has failed America, and its form of representative democracy.

    That's why, at least for me, I believe that Net Neutrality is critical if we hope to survive tRUMP and his maladministration's attempts to turn America into Russia!  Because that's where I see us going if tRUMPism isn't crushed, and his army of MAGAts destroyed with it.  Unfortunately, while I hope the former is likely, the latter isn't.  The MAGAts will stick around as long as conservatives allow them to.  And who wants to destroy his own party's most valuable and loyal foot-soldiers?

    Oy.

    Our Fourth Estate makes me want to drink a fifth of vodka a day!

    No, make that a liter.

    OK, IN TRUTH:  A 1.75 LITER BOTTLE OF VODKA!  

    And 100 proof!  None of that wussy watered-down 80 proof nonsense!!!

     

    1
  5. And, of course, in the midst of a deadly pandemic Trump has been pushing misinformation, suppressing safety guidelines, and discouraging by example the wearing of masks.

    One of those overlooked Peak Trump moments came last week (or month, I can't even tell anymore) when someone asked Press Secretary Kayleigh Of Course Her Name Is Kayleigh whether Trump should wear a mask so as to lead by example and she replied that he was leading by example by telling everyone who comes to see him that they have to wear a mask.

Comments are closed.