U.S. news organizations have failed miserably to communicate to the American people the extent to which the January 6 attack on the Capitol was only one element of the organized, intentional and ongoing attempt by the Republican Party to overturn the results of a free, fair and proper election – a criminal, seditious conspiracy.
They have failed miserably to communicate what’s at stake in the midterm elections, and how the choice voters face in November is not simply between two parties, or a referendum on President Biden, or the economy, but is about either succumbing to or resisting a slide into autocracy and patriarchal theocracy.
And now, with the January 6 select congressional committee embarking on an effort to do job the media so miserably failed to do, I fear that our top newsroom leaders and political reporters will respond defensively and contemptuously, using partisan framing, both-sidesism, bad sports analogies, and theater-criticism analysis to marginalize and mock a sincere and desperately needed exercise in truth-telling.
I fear that the arbiters of our elite, corporate media will embrace Republican talking points about the committee’s motives and conduct. I fear they will engage in so-whatism about new revelations, casting them as old news that changes nothing. I fear they will downplay this, the single most important American story in decades, and the biggest political crime in the country’s history, in favor of other ongoing crises that, while hugely significant, in the greater scheme of things matter so much less. I fear they will get distracted by bad-faith actors flooding the zone with disinformation and diversions.
You can already see hints of the framing in the pre-hearing coverage.
It’s a political stunt:
Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, writing in the New York Times, wrote: “With their control of Congress hanging in the balance,” Democrats face an “uphill battle” to make a “broader case about why they deserve to stay in power.”
This paragraph just killed me:
Their task is to persuade voters that the Jan. 6 attack revealed bigger and more important issues at stake, including the Republican Party’s alignment with violent extremists and its decision to make adherence to the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen a test of membership.
Isn’t this exactly the media’s task?
It’s not going to change anyone’s mind:
In the Washington Post, Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner wrote that “the end result.. remains an open question,” because public opinion has ”long since hardened into competing blocs, making it difficult to break through, even with prime-time programming.”
No one will pay attention:
Here’s Bart Jansen writing for USA Today that “the challenge is whether the tick-tock sets off alarms or the viewing public simply hits the snooze button.”
What journalists should do instead
What journalists should do is embrace and amplify the committee’s attempt at truth-telling, contextualize them, and help make sure members of the public understand what happened and what they need to do about it.
Republicans have tried to turn Jan. 6 into a political issue – and, of course, the debate is undeniably along partisan lines. But the goal here — the goal journalists should share — is not partisan: It’s the truth.
That said, if anyone puts forth any evidence that contradicts the committee’s findings, then of course that should be taken seriously. But empty protestations that are unsupported by any facts whatsoever should be treated — and described — as such.
In fact, reporters who insist on covering “both sides” of the issue should be explicit. My proposed language:
Republican leaders are objecting to the hearings and trying to distract attention from them, but have yet to put forth a single piece of evidence that contradicts the committee’s emerging narrative or supports the Big Lie that, in fact, has become a central tenet of their party and a major theme of their campaigns to win back Congress in the 2022 midterm elections.
Journalists should seize this opportunity to sound the alarm, over and over again. Sure, they’ve missed so many earlier opportunities, but now is the time to overcome the corporate newsroom’s reverence for unflappability.
They should stop feeling obliged to attribute basic facts to “Democrats” or “some legal experts”. They need to understand that doing so actually cast doubt on facts that have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
That means, among other things, calling evidence of a criminal conspiracy what it is, not putting “criminal conspiracy” in quotes or at arms’ length.
Common sense tells you this was a conspiracy. Common sense tells you it was criminal. The evidence is overwhelming already. As a federal district court judge wrote in his ruling in a related civil case, “The illegality of the plan was obvious.” There’s simply no way that Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, trying to bully him into changing the state’s vote count, wasn’t a criminal act.
John Daniszewski, the standards editor at the Associated Press, wasn’t ready to officially liberate his reporters to take “criminal conspiracy” out of quote marks when I spoke to him on Monday. “I would say, for your credibility, if it’s anything that’s disputable, you should have attribution,” he told me.
But the AP famously determined years ago that climate change is not legitimately disputable, and other news organizations followed. “It has to be so overwhelming that no one could reasonably dispute it,” Daniszewski explained.
I begged him to consider the existence of a criminal conspiracy to steal the election in that same category. “I guess we’ll see how this plays out,” he said.
One legitimate caveat about the committee is that whether Trump and the other conspirators are held accountable will ultimately be decided not by them, but by the Justice Department. A central goal of the hearings is to make a powerful and compelling case and increase pressure on DOJ to indict, prosecute and convict them. But it’s unclear how much effect if any the hearings will have on Merrick Garland, who will make (or already has made) the ultimate decision.
As the committee reveals its findings, reporters should absolutely consider whether the narrative, or new revelations, strengthen a potential criminal case.
And if and when the case becomes even more overwhelming, reporters should then be asking: What possible reason other than politics isn’t DOJ going ahead with indictments?
The court of public opinion matters, too. In certain cases, the appropriate verdict is public horror, not criminal guilt.
Another obvious success would be if the hearings lead to reforms. “In the end, what you had with Watergate was a real window for democracy reform: A moment to strengthen and improve democracy,” said Jon Steinman, communications director for Protect Democracy.
Lawmakers in the 1970s put into place a series of post-Watergate laws including the Privacy Act, new FOIA rules, dramatic new limits on political contributions, campaign finance reporting requirements, new congressional ethics rules and a new independent counsel provisions.
The Democratic House in early 2021 approved a sweeping package of voting rights, election, ethics and campaign finance measures, but it died in the Senate.
Steinman is realistic: “I worry about getting that reform window open at all,” he said.
The long view
I spoke to Fred Wertheimer, who is in his 52nd year of trying to make government more responsive to the people. He started at Common Cause in 1971. He’s now the president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit he founded in 1997.
“The committee has a tough job ahead in breaking through with everything else that’s going on,” he said. “But, if they can break through, I think they can educate a significant number of Americans who don’t know this full story of exactly what happened. This wasn’t a single event on January 6, as we know. This was the front edge of a movement to replace democracy with autocracy.”
I told him what I was writing about.
“Your interest in how the media will respond to this is on point,” he told me.
I told him I was worried that news organizations would both-sides the story — that TV anchors, for instance, would tell their viewers something like “Democrats called it a criminal conspiracy, but Republicans said it was just an attempt to distract from Joe Biden’s terrible economy.”
“I can’t eliminate your worry,” he said.
“All the things you’re worrying about are going to happen. I can’t solve that for you. But I can tell you that what will move things for this country, at least potentially, is what happens to Trump as a result of this, and as a result of where the Justice Department comes down.”
That’s the thing, in a nutshell – what happens to Trump. Because if nothing happens to Trump (and let’s face it, how likely is it?), he will run in 2024, and unless Biden can turn public opinion around, Trump could win. And that’s exactly what the GOP is hoping for, which is why they will fight like they’ve never fought before.
The media has been very wishy-washy about the importance of the Jan. 6th events, as though they are afraid of what it all really means. I was astonished today to read an op-ed on WaPo by Colbert King which basically said the Democrats will sabotage their own case by making too much noise about it. A typical corporate media story totally ignoring the facts pointing to Trump and the GOP’s culpability in the case, and placing the onus on the Democrats.
The only people who care about the January 6th sideshow are “progressives.” Normal Americans, as opposed to the “progressives” who hate this country’s guts, are looking at gas prices. Frooimkin and his acolyes are rich Democrats whose answer to inflationn is to piss in the common man’s cornflakes. See you in November, fine young communists.
p.s.: If you think the defeat of your favorite terrorist D.A. is a one-off, you’re wrong.
The media’s reporting on the economy has also been terrible and seems deliberately designed to weaken Biden and the Democrats. Most in the media have clearly bought into the Republicans’ long-running anti-government fable that debt and government spending are inevitably inflationary. They are constantly implying — or saying outright — that it is Biden’s stimulus spending that had caused our high inflation. Unless the media believe Biden has some superpower they have to know that is a ridiculous explanation given the high inflation experienced across the developed world.
When Yellen said she was wrong in her expectations about inflation the media reported on just that part of her statement, not the fact that she also has made it clear that the stimulus spending contributed only a little to our current inflation. She has made it clear that what she didn’t foresee was the supply chain issues, the recent lockdowns in China and the spike in gas prices due to the Saudis deliberately restricting supply and to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As far as I know no one foresaw, those problems.
The media is also unwilling to tell us tha Yellen also made it clear that poor families would be much worse off without that spending and the incredibly strong job market we now have. I have see report after report about the high gasoline prices — usually showing California prices which are the highest by far — but rarely do the point out that our strong economic rebound also means most of those people have jobs.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/08/business/janet-yellen-stimulus-spending-inflation/index.html
The media cheerleads our support in Ukraine, something the majority of Americans also support but can’t be bothered to point out that higher gas prices is a sacrifice we have to make to hold Putin accountable.
Just as the Capitol was deliberately left undefended despite repeated warnings of violence–the threats were so public that even *I* knew about them–our democracy has been deliberately undefended from lies. The threats have been obvious since Rush Limbaugh was able to use the public airwaves to spread conspiracy theories. He was amplifying the Big Lie–including the lie that nothing happened on January 6th– up until almost the moment he died [1]:
“‘Yeah, I know they breached the doors and took some selfies.’ But, folks, really — just look at who was in Washington on January 6th! ‘These are Republicans, they don’t raise mayhem,’ Limbaugh scoffed. ‘They don’t know how. How many times have we sat here over 30 years bemoaning the fact that this is not what Republicans do?'”
There has been no real press, at least as envisioned in the First Amendment, for decades. There might be 500 channels on TV, but none of them is devoted to unions, even though something like 8% of workers still belong to one. The discussion of civics is so bad that we routinely bemoan the fact that so few Americans can name their own Senators, and how many Americans even know basic world geography, much less what these foreign nations who we help or harm are like? Guys with eighth grade educations 50 years ago knew more than many college-educated people today.
Lies have taken over because the press sees “alternative facts” as a way to generate controversy and therefore profit.
1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rush-limbaugh-dead-trump-ruined-america-1129222/
The great German political philosopher Hannah Arendt:
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,”
When that happens, people lose the capacity not only to act but even to think and judge. “And with such a people, you can then do what you please.”
I’ve lived long enough to see the decline of journalism from its noble role as the fourth estate and speaking truth to power to its current degraded form of “entertainment” and opinion masquerading as news. It’s obvious the MSM, especially cable news, is much more interested in keeping viewers in a constant state of outrage, fear, and frenzy since that is the fuel of ratings and money. Lots and lots of money. Paying personalities millions of dollars to keep up a fever pitch 24/7 is a huge business and requires huge profits. Yes, this country desperately needs an exercise in truth telling. I just don’t see it coming from the media.