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The media are haplessly 'normalizing' this nation's march towards fascism, and it needs to end [1]
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Date: 2023-09-02
It’s understandable how journalists accustomed to complacently chirping from their clean, sparkly corporate studios and blue-chip, high-rise newsrooms might have difficulty reconciling their six and seven-figure salaries and the well-manicured lawns of their toity suburban homes with the fact that the American Republic has entered the most dangerous period of its existence since the weeks preceding the Civil War. Because, hell, for the past eight years their reporting philosophy has served them well (although that nasty business at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, may have taken a few of them aback).
On the day of Donald Trump’s appearance in court for his fourth indictment, for example, CNN revisited, ad nauseum, its breathless OJ-esque, 2016 coverage of Trump’s plane landing in Atlanta, only this time with a camera trained on and off for nearly half an hour on an empty mobile stairway positioned forlornly against the plane’s exit door, as their panel jabbered on and on, waiting patiently for the object of their ratings fascination to alight down the steps. A few on the CNN panel described in lurid detail the “horrific” conditions at Fulton County jail, eager to seize on the amazing irony that Trump would soon be making his appearance in its filthy bowels, as if the man stood the slightest chance of being incarcerated on an even temporary basis (There was little substantive discussion about exactly how the jail came to be so appalling and under investigation by the DOJ, at least not in that segment). But, as it always is with Trump: the spectacle was the primary draw: yet another rendition of “let’s marvel again at the shiny object.”
The media in this country, from CNN’s fabulous Atlanta headquarters down to the mostly mundane drywall stage sets of local network news have continually treated the transformation of the Republican party into an abject, unthinking cult of Trump worship as if it’s yet another story, just part of the constant background hum of American politics that still can be both-sided into oblivion. If you’re waiting for an audible, collective gasp cognizant of the real implications when the Heritage Institution unveiled its sordid, detailed plan to dismantle the U.S. government upon the ascent of any Republican to the Oval office, you will, for the most part, wait in vain. Or if you were just waiting for a “eureka” moment of alarm to be passionately conveyed to the American people about just what the GOP intends to do to its political opponents should it attain Executive power, or even the now-routine, bizarre invective that spews out of the mouths of elected Republicans on a regular, constant basis you’d also be stymied, reduced to reading a few strident opinion pieces in the op-ed section of the New York Times or Washington Post.
That’s because covering the news in this country has now largely become a laborious exercise in normalizing one Trump outrage after another until a numbing pattern has set in. As a consequence of Trump successfully “flooding the zone with shit” (as onetime Trump Chief of Staff Stephen Bannon approvingly put it), the great mass of the American public really has no idea that the country they grew up in is now under existential threat, a threat that could be made manifest and turned into a terrifying reality by the outcome of one simple election, only a year away. That is, in a word, a disgrace. But it’s a predictable result of the reflexive, historical tendency by the media to treat and think of Americans as a good and decent people, perhaps with differing viewpoints, who must be “fairly” served, and thus giving less time, thought and emphasis to the disturbing totality of what has actually happened to nearly half the electorate over the past eight years.
This media slide into complacency is the subject of a column by the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who offers some good suggestions about how this moment in time really ought to be covered if the press wanted to actually do its job.
Rubin also felt a sense of deja vu, watching the media handle Trump’s latest indictment in Fulton County Georgia, the press’s reflexive “winner-loser” reaction to the Republican GOP presidential debate, which had occurred just the day before, and the release of Trump’s “mugshot” which hyperventilated the press later in the evening of his indictment.
This sort of coverages shocks but does not surprise. The media has whistled past the graveyard of democracy for eight years. You want to ask: Can’t they recognize this is not simply another election to be gamified in pursuit of clicks and audience ratings?
Her point is, none of this is “normal.” The fact that it hasn’t been normal for eight years is beside the point: it’s the progression, the constant devolution of the Republican party into a cult of fascism and the degradation that it’s foisted on our country that is being ignored.
As Rubin explains:
What would responsible media look like? The media could educate the public and defend democracy. Serious news outlets could examine Trump’s sickening similarity to strongmen such as Silvio Berlusconi, Viktor Orban and Benito Mussolini. (And yet, rarely, do we get discussions about how Trump’s abusive treatment of women, toxic masculinity and misogyny perfectly fit within the tradition of fascist leaders from Mussolini to Berlusconi to Moammar Gaddafi.) Reports could discuss how the MAGA movement tracks previous fascist movements that invariably deify a leader and revel in a cult of personality. The media could explain how the GOP has morphed into an anti-democratic party that deploys violence and appeals to white nationalism and nostalgia. Print, online and cable news could promote political literacy, helping voters understand how authoritarian movements cut deals with big business and religious fundamentalists to secure power. Instead of just reporting that Trump called the media or the judiciary biased, reporters should acknowledge that strongmen and their apologists degrade professional ethics — to discredit the truth.
She also targets the media’s casual normalization of Republican behavior over the past eight years:
Interviewers could routinely grill all Republicans about their party’s adherence to the “big lie,” demonization of law enforcement and support for congressional attempts to interfere with prosecution. And the media could seriously investigate how so many Americans have suspended logic, decency and devotion to the rule of law just as others around the world have fallen under the sway of demagogic leaders — rather than amplify their prejudices, conspiracies and anger.
Parenthetically she notes that while the media have fallen over themselves to try to “understand” Trump voters, little effort has been made to emphasize the implications of what such a movement portends in the context of our democracy: “Persisting to cast MAGA supporters as down-and-out working-class folks is misleading and condescending, and ignores the statistically significant correlation between Trump support and views on supposed persecution of White people, gender roles and Christian nationalism.” The fact that all of these are the classic and dangerous hallmarks of fascism gets short (if any) shrift from the media’s “horserace” coverage. Rubin quotes Will Bunch, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, as one of the few journalists who seems to appreciate the acute peril and urgency of what we as a country are now facing.
From Bunch’s Sept 1 op-ed:
These are the stakes: dueling visions for America — not Democratic or Republican, with parades and red, white, and blue balloons, but brutal fascism or flawed democracy. The news media needs to stop with the horse-race coverage of this modern-day March on Rome, stop digging incessantly for proof that both sides are guilty of the same sins, and stop thinking that a war for the imperiled survival of the American Experiment is some kind of inexplicable “tribalism.” … We need the media to see 2024 not as a traditional election but as an effort to mobilize a mass movement that would undo democracy and splatter America with more blood like what was shed Saturday in Jacksonville. We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst covered election in U.S. history, that it might also be the last.
The transformation of the Republican Party into a Trump-worshipping cult has brought us a year of book bannings, assaults on reproductive freedom, anti-trans hysteria, arrogant, now-routine disregard of the law, and a capitulation by our judiciary to flagrant partisanship and corruption. It has normalized partisan violence as a weapon against those who oppose it. It has turned election denial into a customary right of passage. None of this “just happened.” It is the consequence of an emergent, malignant fascist ethic that had metastasized below the surface of the GOP for decades and was catalyzed and reinvigorated by Donald Trump. And it is absolute poison to our democratic traditions.
As Rubin writes, it is long past time for all of those media not already co-opted by this fascist juggernaut to acknowledge that the 2024 election will actually decide the fate of our country. There is no more time for “false equivalences and feigned neutrality.”
..[A]s long as the mainstream media practices business-as-usual journalism, millions of voters will remain oblivious to the dire state of American democracy. And worse, Trump and his party will benefit from the bizarre insistence on treating neo-fascists and their apologists like normal politicians.
Rubin believes that the media are — mostly unwittingly — sleepwalking us into a country the majority of Americans should rightly fear. It’s a country with an ugly, authoritarian, and racist vision none of us would want our children to grow up in.
But those who once thrived by ignoring the reality that’s now appearing before their eyes need to face up to it and change course now, before it’s far too late. No, it won’t be easy. It will require many comfortable journalists to come face to face — in some cases, quite literally — with the monster they’ve allowed to gestate for eight years: The death threats, the harassment, all the rank evil that surfaces when fascists are forced out from under their rocks. Because fascists don’t take kindly to being called out. It makes them very, very angry, and as we well know, this group has its own, formidable media universe to strike back.
It’s a difficult responsibility. Unfortunately for them, taking any other course simply renders them complicit.
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