What will it take for the mainstream media to recognize that bland journalism normalizes evil?
I ask this in the context of the recent news reports that the Trump regime is planning to launch a whole-scale campaign of kidnapping our undocumented friends and neighbors and rendering them to random third countries where they may face torture, persecution, or death.
It’s cruel. It’s unconscionable.
And yet the news reports lack any kind of tone. They lack any hint of revulsion.
Maybe these reporters think the facts alone will prompt strong feelings among their readers and viewers – and to some extent, they may be right.
But that revulsion is a key part of the news here, not something for a “critics say” paragraph buried deep inside.
If it’s an obvious outrage, that needs to be said somewhere near the top.
How It Played
The Washington Post broke the news Sunday about the administration’s intentions: “ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens.”
The lead paragraph from Maria Sacchetti, Carol D. Leonnig and Marianne LeVine was workmanlike:
Federal immigration officers may deport immigrants to countries other than their own, with as little as six hours’ notice, even if officials have not provided any assurances that the new arrivals will be safe from persecution or torture, a top official said in a memo.
But it wasn’t until the 10th paragraph that a critic was heard from, and even then only stating the obvious: “It puts thousands of lives at risk of persecution and torture.”
The normal, human reaction to something so vile should have been telegraphed much higher. Like maybe a second paragraph saying something like:
News of the plan — which appears to violate the constitution’s requirement for due process as well as its ban on cruel and unusual punishment — prompted immediate and widespread revulsion from immigration supporters. And it seems likely to further inflame the large majority of Americans who polls show have grown opposed to Trump’s increasingly brutal immigration tactics.
A New York Times article on Sunday, headlined “Trump Administration Poised to Ramp Up Deportations to Distant Countries,” was only marginally better than the Post’s.
Reporter Mattathias Schwartz initially focused on the fate of the eight migrants who were deported to dangerous and war-torn South Sudan on July 4, noting that none of them have been heard from since.
A critic was quoted in the sixth and seventh paragraphs, calling the new guidance “unlawful.”
But to Schwartz’s credit, he eventually introduced a key criticism of the plan: That “the lack of information about detainees sent to South Sudan and El Salvador has drawn charges from a group of independent experts appointed by the United Nations that the United States may be engaging in ‘enforced disappearance,’ state-sponsored abductions that are banned under international law.”
Indeed, the U.N. experts released an important statement last week in which they concluded that “International law is clear that no one shall be sent anywhere where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be in danger of being subjected to serious human rights violations such as torture, enforced disappearance or arbitrary deprivation of life.”
So it’s an apparent violation of international law, too.
To be clear, what’s so vile about this plan is not just the prospect of sending immigrants to third countries where they will be complete strangers and may not speak the language — although that’s pretty bad in itself.
It’s the avowed intention of delivering them into the custody of governments that make no promises that they won’t be tortured or killed.
That’s what the memo is about. In those cases, it gives immigrants either 24 hours – or six, in “exigent” circumstances – to raise legal concerns about their safety. Deportees being sent to countries that have given credible safety assurances get no notice at all.
They fully intend to send immigrants to hell. And that’s evil.
Another Criticism
Rebecca Solnit, who I consider one of the most perceptive and eloquent essayists of the moment, published another barnburner in her newsletter on Sunday, this one attacking the media: “Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning”. She wrote:
[T]he sedatives and distractions and dilutions delivered by big newspapers and networks are playing as big or bigger a role in the inadequate response to this crisis as are the outright propaganda and lies of rightwing media. I know that good journalists are eager to report the stories at legacy media corporations, but they don’t add up into a clear picture of where we are and where we’re heading.
And she took particular exception to the coverage of the third-country deportation plans – with her critique going beyond tone to a lack of comprehensiveness:
It’s solid reporting, and it does quote opponents to the policy, but this account of terrifyingly sadistic and unprecedented human rights abuses is delivered blandly. This story needs to be compounded with all the other ways immigrants are under attack, all the other cruelties and violations and unprecedented acts. That and the threats to deport citizens or strip them of their citizenship and the attacks on birthright citizenship underway add up to a major attack on the very idea of rights that was part of the eighteenth-century revolt against the form of authoritarianism known as monarchy and on the Bill of Rights.
I’m with Solnit. I believe bland coverage of Trump’s horrors has become a national sedative. We aren’t outraged about the eight people sent to South Sudan who then vanished. We now take for granted that hundreds of Venezuelans are being detained at a notorious prison in El Salvador know for inhumane conditions.
Will we soon all be as blasé as these reporters about potentially thousands of our neighbors being disappeared to countries where human rights are routinely violated?
I fear that we will. I fear that we have normalized evil.