Author Name: Fairness and Accuracy in Media.
(C) Fairness and Accuracy in Media - FAIR.
This story was originally published on FAIR.org[1]
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 [2]

Media Need to Be Clear About Clear Efforts to Depose Democracy
Date: 2020-11-01 19:55:08+00:00
By ['Joshua Cho']


When the president of the United States has:

explicitly declared his intentions to withhold federal election funding from states that are trying to make it easier to vote during a pandemic;

appointed a major donor to his campaign with conflicts of interest to sabotage the US Postal Service—while stating that he opposes additional funding for the post office in order to prevent the opposition party from having universal mail-in voting;

claimed that the defeat of lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising voters is the “biggest risk” to his reelection bid;

deputized 50,000 “poll watchers” to intimidate people from voting across the country;

advised his supporters to commit the felony of double voting;

proposed postponing the 2020 elections;

preemptively cast election results into doubt by suggesting the results may not be legitimate; and

repeatedly refused to state whether he would concede the election in the event of a loss;

…then the evidence threshold has been more than satisfied for journalists to declare that he is trying to steal the 2020 election. Journalists and newsrooms have an obligation to report that the most powerful person in the country is trying to subvert the election and retain power illegitimately, and a failure to blow the whistle on a clear threat to democracy is journalistic malpractice.

Yet, while one can find several op-eds (e.g., The Week, 8/11/20; USA Today, 8/16/20) pointing out the obvious fact of President Donald Trump trying to steal the 2020 election, it appears to be taboo for journalists at the biggest newsrooms in the country to straightforwardly report that as a reality.

The ACLU’s Dale Ho (Vanity Fair, 6/14/20), an attorney fighting against GOP voter suppression lawsuits, has argued that, ultimately, lawyers cannot litigate their way out of Trump’s election theft efforts, and that a “news media fight” has to be waged to prepare US voters’ expectations. However, it’s hard for US citizens to prepare for it if the US media aren’t reporting it.

FAIR conducted a Nexis search for “Trump” + “election” + “steal” of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Times and USA Today from July 7 to September 7. Out of all the results pertaining to the election, there wasn’t a single article reporting that Trump is trying to steal the 2020 election.

The closest things one can find to corporate media plainly stating that Trump is attempting to commit election theft are various scenarios of how Trump could steal the election, columns asking what would happen if Trump refused to concede the election if he lost, or reports on Democratic Party politicians’ assertions about Trump’s intentions.

Democratic Party politicians like Beto O’Rourke (Houston Chronicle, 5/13/20) and Joe Biden (Washington Post, 7/23/20) are quoted warning that Trump will “do everything within his power” to deprive citizens of their choice, and that “this president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work.” However, corporate media also give space for Trump to air his accusations that it’s Democrats who are trying to commit election theft (Politico, 7/31/20; Fox News, 8/20/20; The Hill, 8/24/20), making this more “he said, she said” reporting, rather than an independent assessment of Trump’s plans and actions.

Trump has already stated he would “very quickly” suppress Election Night protests against his claims of victory—what he calls an “insurrection,” a term that outlets like The Hill (9/11/20) and Politico (9/11/20) bolster by calling protests against his claimed re-election “riots.”

Trump’s rhetoric seems to echo that of his longtime confidant (and convicted felon) Roger Stone’s advice that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to declare martial law to seize power if “cheating” costs him the election.

Trump is already notorious for cheating, lying and stealing, and has every motive to steal the election because he’s behind in the polls, and once he leaves office faces the possibility of prosecution for crimes he has already confessed to committing.

During this critical time, it’s important for US media not to propagate the myth of US exceptionalism, which often makes false accusations of “election theft” against Global South countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, and misleads Americans into thinking election theft “can’t happen” here because the US has more “legitimate” institutions. US elections have been stolen before, and it’s important to make sure another election isn’t stolen again.

Joshua Cho is a writer based in Virginia.


[1] Url: https://fair.org/home/media-need-to-be-clear-about-clear-efforts-to-depose-democracy/
[2] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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