A TIME OF RECKONING FOR US MEDIA
Very important article. Both-sides -ism is a great danger to our improvement as a society. When will they learn?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
thedsrnetwork.com /a-time-of-reckoning-for-us-media/
A Time of Reckoning for US Media
David Rothkopf 7-8 minutes 9/3/2022
Blaming the media is one of the laziest arguments you’ll find on Twitter. Which is saying something because Twitter was, it seems, designed from the ground up to be the birthplace of lazy arguments, a museum of lazy arguments and the final resting place for most lazy arguments.
But it is hard not to read an article like this one in the New York Times and not be triggered on many levels including but not limited to disgust, contempt and profound concern for its approach, content and execution.
The disgust comes both at the intellectual slackness and inherent dishonesty of the both sides approach. Arguing that there are “different realities” is the antithesis of making an objective effort to support the truth.
The GOP “reality” of thinking or at least arguing that Democrats are responsible for the threat to American democracy is steeped in lies, deflection, projection and founded in no facts of any kind whatsoever. On the contrary, it is like writing that we should listen to the arguments of arsonists that they care as much about the houses they are burning down as the people who are being made homeless or worse by the fires the arsonists start. It is saying the arsonists’ reality is somehow equivalent to that of their victims, that their arguments deserve the same credence. Americans believe many things. That does not mean reporters should be treating them all the same. Belief is not a component of truth.
Truth is what is, whether you believe it or not. The world is not flat. History is what actually happened. Conspiracy theories don’t become reality based on the number of adherents they win. Vaccines are better for fighting disease that household cleaning agents.
The contempt comes because the journalists involved know better. So, you ask, why does the Times (and why do other news organizations) do this over and over again? It has nothing to do with journalism, nothing to do with balance or fairness and everything to do with business.
That is where the profound concern comes in. Both sides-ing a sustained assault on democracy, freedom, decency, and truth obscures the real truth–that we are in danger. And worse, it increases the danger by validating those who are responsible for the threat we face. Only one party in America, the Republican Party, is responsible for the reality that our democracy is at risk. No Democrat nor the Democratic Party is responsible for that threat in any way. The division in our views does not alter that reality in the slightest.
This is just one article. But it is symptomatic of problems all of us who are news consumers see daily. I do not know, for example, what is happening at CNN. I read that there is an effort afoot to broaden its appeal by trafficking in false equivalencies and both-sidesism.
I do not know why @JohnJHarwood no longer works there. I have read the accounts. But when he and people like @brianstelter are let go and they have been known to regularly speak the truth about the political crises in which America finds itself, it is deeply disturbing.
It is just as disturbing as when CNN puts on the air the shills and mouthpieces of the right and offers them up as analysts and compounds the problem by failing to challenge their views that are based on rumor, innuendo, lies and ignorance. It is just as disturbing as when anchors on CNN seem to seek out ways to “add balance” by playing up “counter-narratives” that are based on the unsubstantiated or distorted murmurs of the GOP press machine or right-wing social media.
Was the fact that two Marines appeared behind Joe Biden when he gave an important speech on the profound and growing threats our democracy faces worthy of coloring their assessment of the speech, comparable in any way to the gravity of the President’s message or the moment?
Of course it was not. It was a complete fake story. Others, like @MuellerSheWrote to choose just one example, have explained that presidents are surrounded by signs of their office, their ties to the military.
It happens when they salute the military as they board Air Force One, when they walk past the Marine guards outside the White House, when they appear on the decks of aircraft carriers declaring “Mission Accomplished,” when they wear military style jackets.
Presidents abuse the setting when they stage campaign rallies as Trump did in using the military as props or sets. Biden appearing in front of the birthplace of our democracy to raise the fact-based, appropriately earnest alarm that democracy is at risk was not one of those times.
The decline of CNN into both-sidesism, pandering to an audience whose standards are set by the right-wing media establishment, who literally believe in “alternative facts” as well as conspiracy theories…while they provide excuses for seditionists, racists and other felons would be a terrible loss to journalism and toward this nation’s ability to apprehend the truth. That in turn would be yet another devastating blow to democracy. As Jefferson once wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” He did not say that because of a love doing crossword puzzles or reading the sports pages.
He said it because access to facts and fact-based analysis is the oxygen of democracy, of a successful society. It is the source of our wisdom. It is the basic ingredient of making the right decisions and choices in our lives.
Letting the political beliefs of viewers or readers shape the content provided by a media outlet is no more journalism (wherever those beliefs may fall on the political spectrum) than suggesting that because some people believe in it, superstition is the same as science.
At the same time suggesting that because a group of people believe something their beliefs are automatically of equivalent value to anything any other group of people believes is pernicious, the opposite of journalism, a path to greater misunderstanding of the world and worse.
Our democracy is at risk in part because our media is failing. Every rational voice with a platform–on social media, in newspapers, on TV–must speak up, make that clear, demand best practices. If not, unmoored from truth, we will soon lose the essence of what made the US great.
Tags
Who is online
384 visitors
This is the NYT article that is being criticized in the seeded article
www.nytimes.com /2022/09/02/us/politics/trump-biden-democracy.html
Democrats and Republicans Agree That Democracy Is in Danger
Peter Baker, Blake Hounshell 10-12 minutes 9/2/2022
Parties’ Divergent Realities Challenge Biden’s Defense of Democracy
Sept. 2, 2022, 8:19 p.m. ET Sept. 2, 2022
WASHINGTON — The good news is that deeply divided Americans agree on at least one thing. The bad news is they share the view that their nearly two-and-a-half-century-old democracy is in danger — and disagree drastically about who is threatening it.
In a remarkable consensus, a new Quinnipiac University poll found that 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans say that democracy is “in danger of collapse.” But one side blames former President Donald J. Trump and his “MAGA Republicans” while the other fingers President Biden and the “socialist Democrats.”
So when the president delivers a warning about the fate of democracy as he did on Thursday night, the public hears two vastly different messages, underscoring deep rifts in American society that make it an almost ungovernable moment in the nation’s history. Not only do Americans diverge sharply over important issues like abortion, immigration and the economy, they see the world in fundamentally different and incompatible ways.
“Sadly, we have gotten away from a common understanding that democracy is a process and does not necessarily guarantee the results your side wants, that even if your team loses an election, you can fight for your policies another day,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy globally and recently has expressed concern for it at home as well. “That’s a huge challenge for the president, but also for all politicians.”
The chasm between these two Americas makes Mr. Biden’s task all the more pronounced. While he once aspired to bridge that divide after he evicted Mr. Trump from the Oval Office, Mr. Biden has been surprised, according to advisers, at just how enduring his predecessor’s grip on the Republican Party has been.
And so, instead of bringing Americans together, the president’s goal has essentially evolved into making sure that the majority of the country that opposes Mr. Trump is fully alert to the threat that the former president still poses — and energized or scared enough to do something about it, most immediately in the upcoming midterm elections.
That calculation meant that Mr. Biden knew he would be hit for abandoning his stance as the president who would unite the country. With the legislative season basically over pending the election, he no longer needed to worry about offending Republican members of Congress he might need to pass bipartisan bills. Instead, he has communicated with voters much as he did in 2020, reaching out especially to suburban women and other key groups in swing states like Pennsylvania.
The Republicans’ reaction to Mr. Biden’s speech was remarkable. For years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone who disagreed with him — encouraging supporters to beat up protesters ; demanding that his rivals be arrested ; accusing critics of treason and even murder ; calling opponents “fascists” ; and retweeting a supporter saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.
“It’s unthinkable that a president would speak about half of Americans that way,” said Nikki Haley , who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. “Leaders protect the Constitution,” added Mike Pompeo , who was Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. “They don’t declare half of America to be enemies of the state like Joe Biden did last night.”
Aided by an eerie red speech backdrop, Republicans described Mr. Biden in dictatorial terms, as “if Mussolini and Hitler got together,” as Donald Trump Jr. put it .
When it comes to democracy in America, there is no real equivalence, of course. The elder Mr. Trump sought to use the power of his office to overturn a democratic election, pressuring state and local officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own vice president to disregard the will of the people to keep him in office. When that did not work, he riled up a crowd that stormed the Capitol , disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes and threatening to execute those standing in Mr. Trump’s way.
Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has continued to demand that the election be reversed and even suggested that he be reinstated as president, all based on lies he tells his supporters about what happened in 2020. He has forced Republican officeholders and candidates to embrace his false claims and sought to install election deniers in state positions where they can influence future vote counts.
When Mr. Trump’s supporters express fear for democracy with pollsters, it is not about those actions but about what Mr. Trump has told them about election integrity, even if what he says is wrong. They also see Mr. Biden’s administration as far too liberal, expanding government to the point that it will invariably restrain their own freedoms.
“There is a real difference in how the parties define democracy,” said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University and author of “Partisans,” a newly published history of the rise of conservative movement figures in the 1990s and their transformation of American politics.
“The Republican Party at the moment subscribes to a much narrower definition, as is evident in their support for everything from voter suppression to extensive gerrymandering to the right of Republican officials to overturn voter preferences in the certification process,” she added. “The Democratic Party favors not only a more inclusive voting system but more robust systems to support majoritarian politics.”
In crafting his speech to be delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia for a national audience, Mr. Biden struggled with the question of how to denounce those he deemed unconstitutional actors without disparaging everyone who disagreed with him, advisers said.
He stressed in the speech that he did not view all Republicans as “MAGA Republicans,” his term for Mr. Trump’s supporters. He tried to straddle that line again on Friday in response to a Fox News reporter who asked if he considered all of Mr. Trump’s supporters to be a threat to the country.
“I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Mr. Biden replied. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge when an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which we rule and count votes — that is a threat to democracy.”
But it was not clear if Mr. Biden would follow up his tough speech with any particular policy proposals. A day after the address, he hosted a round table with civil rights leaders at the White House to discuss issues related to democracy, including voting rights restrictions.
“We need a democracy that does not condone or allow or facilitate attacks on its own people, whether that be through voter suppression, whether that be what we saw during the Jan. 6 insurrection, whether that be through police-state violence or whether it be through white supremacy,” Damon Hewitt, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said afterward.
Democratic strategists have spent months quietly amassing research on how to brand the Republican Party as extremist during an election cycle when Mr. Trump is not on the ballot.
The project was the brainchild of Navin Nayak, the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the research arm of a Democratic-aligned think tank. Working with John D. Podesta, a former aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who was appointed Friday as a senior adviser to Mr. Biden , Mr. Nayak began with a key insight.
Republicans, the two men concluded, had been remarkably successful in defining the Democratic Party by its leftward-most pole. In recent years, that has been represented by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who helpfully for Republicans calls himself a “democratic socialist.”
Republican strategists seized on the word “socialist,” spending millions of dollars in television advertisements in places like Miami to appeal to Hispanic voters whose families had long and painful memories of leftist governments in Cuba and Venezuela. In the 2020 election, Republicans picked off enough Hispanics to put Florida out of reach for Mr. Biden.
This year, Democratic strategists aim to use the research Mr. Nayak commissioned from liberal polling firms and from SKDK, a public relations group known for its campaign work for Democratic clients, to define “MAGA Republicans” as the core of the Republican brand.
“It allows us to have a consistent story about Republicans no matter what the topic is,” Mr. Nayak said in an interview.
Anita Dunn, a founding partner at SKDK who is now on leave from the firm to serve as a senior adviser in the Biden White House, was a paid consultant on the project. Ms. Dunn and her staff developed mock 30-second television ads using Mr. Nayak’s research and tested them with voters. She did not respond to messages seeking comment on Friday.
With Mr. Trump driving daily headlines, Democratic strategists said they had an opportunity to link “MAGA Republicans” to a former president whose unpopularity has driven down the ratings of the overall party, giving them a chance to hold onto Congress and governorships in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“What we have is people who are directly linked to Jan. 6, and therefore using Jan. 6 in the campaign is yet another way to link them to extremism,” said Jefrey Pollock, the founding partner and the president of Global Strategy Group, one of two polling firms that conducted some of the research.
That is not a message, as the Quinnipiac poll indicated, that will resonate with everyone. The question is whether it will resonate with enough Americans to make a difference.
The US media continues to enable Trump by refusing to ignore him. By keeping a laser focus on Trump the left hopes to detract and deflect from their abysmal lack of rational leadership. But it's not working because the majority of sane and normal American voters have figured out the left's lies and deceptions and will get rid of them.
The US media enable his 2016 election with endless free coverage. The media has always loved Trump.
Trump cannot be ignored . Although he is clearly in trouble, both legally and maybe politically, he is also clearly still the leader of the Republican Party. When he says "jump", 90% of Republicans say "how high"? This is because they dont want the MAGA lunatics to single them out for defeat or ridicule.
We are a long long way from being rid of all this.
You'll have to provide credible proof of this. Feelings are not facts.
Clearly not by you or our media. You both keep empowering him.
Trump endorsed hundreds of candidates across the country. I havent heard of a single one of them turning down the endorsement.
“…or our media.”
With the fox leading the charge on the henhouse.
I remember CNN giving him more airtime in 2016.
Biden only accused Trump and MAGA of threatening democracy. Biden offered no explanation how Trump and MAGA threaten democracy. In fact, Trump and MAGA were only a prelude to a campaign speech about Biden and Biden's accomplishments. Biden only used Trump and MAGA as some sort of veiled threat that would have prevented Biden doing what Biden has deemed appropriate. Biden claimed that Trump could have denied the country of Biden's Presidency and that is the threat to democracy.
Biden, in the fashion of Democrats, attempted to redefine 'American democracy'. American democracy, according to Biden, only exists on election day. And the purpose of American democracy is to give political power to Democrats. Elections provide Democrats a mandate to do whatever Democrats deem appropriate. Dissent with Democrats a threat to democracy.
Biden used Independence Hall and Marine guards as a backdrop for a political campaign speech steeped in idealized nationalistic patriotism. Biden wasn't defending those symbols of democracy; Biden was cynically using those symbols of democracy to garner support for his autocratic political agenda. Biden presented a litany of his accomplishments. There was no mention of bipartisanship or the democratic process in that presentation.
Biden invites political violence by belittling, trivializing, and ignoring dissent. Biden has elevated dissent with his political agenda to the level of a threat to democracy. Biden attempted to drape an idealized nationalistic patriotism onto the Democratic party as some sort of shield against dissent. But the true and accurate history of the Democratic Party makes that demagoguery ring hollow. The reality is that a threat to Democrats is not a threat to democracy.
The article is about the media both sides-ism in the face of the MAGA threat to democracy.
That's not what I see. What I see is the media attempting to turn Biden into something he is not.
Trump rejected and challenged one and only one election out of many elections. Trump challenged the legitimacy of Biden's Presidency. Biden has contrived a narrative that challenging his legitimacy is a threat to democracy. The media is attempting to portray Biden as a strong and effective President to give credence to Biden's contrived political narrative. The facts do not support the media's portrayal of Biden or Biden's contrived political narrative.
Had Trump attempted to establish a one-party government then that would have been a threat to democracy. But that's not what Trump attempted. Trump posed (and still poses) a threat to Biden as a politician but not to Biden as a President. Trump is challenging Biden's political legitimacy to be President using the institutions of government and the political process. That's not a threat to democracy.
Dismiss it all you want donald and his supporters tried to overturn an election.
If they broke the law, then let's convict them.
If not, they're not a threat to democracy.
They are...
I guess you like to read between lines...
Also stating that just because someone is not convicted of something they are not a threat is ridiculous.
His comment. [Deleted]
That applies to one election out of many elections. That's why the charge is that Trump tried to overturn an election. Trump did not attempt to overturn all elections.
The Presidential election is not the only election in the country. If that were the case then the midterm elections this year aren't that important. Control of Congress is unimportant if only the Presidential election is about democracy.
I dont care what you "see". The term both sides or both sides-ism is mentioned five times in the seeded article.
This is the third short paragraph near the beginning of the article
Well isn't that a "slippery slope" you have begun descending a message that ALL elections need to be FCKD up for it to matter, as you seem to disregard the FACT, Trump and Cump have attempted to OVERTURN THE DULY ELECTED POTUS's RIGHTFUL ELECTION! Period, end of story. PATHETIC is defense of this, IN ANY FORM. WTF, only attempted to overturn the Presidential election.....What the FUCK ??????
Like Democrats did in 2000, 2004 and 2016. Democrats normalized the tactic and suddenly it's treason.
Isn't the intent for using the term 'both sides-ism' to lay the groundwork for only presenting one side? The both sides-ism argument is being presented against the backdrop of Biden using Marines as a symbolic prop to bolster Biden's political view of democracy. And the both sides-ism argument is being made to justify ignoring criticism of Biden.
Biden made a partisan political speech. That's the fact of the matter. Biden was addressing his bad poll numbers. Biden's motivation is too obvious to overlook. Biden only used a 'threat to democracy', according to his narrow view of democracy, as an excuse to present himself as a strong and effective President.
The reality is that Trump rejecting and challenging the legitimacy of Biden's election win is not a threat to democracy. Biden lied. And Biden attempted to convince the public his lie is truth by using Independence Hall and Marine guards as props.
Uh huh. The Dems storming the capitol and shitting in the offices was a sight to behold...s/
So according to Freewill my comment was trolling while the original comment that was trolling gets a pass...
I guess trolling is fine, calling out trolling is not in his mind.
It's also a 'slippery slope' to imply that democracy depends upon political government. If a meteorite wipes out Washington D.C. would that be the end of American democracy?
Had Trump succeeded in overturning the Presidential election are we to believe that state governments and the electorate would not have accepted the legitimacy of the Federal government? Are we to believe that controlling the Federal government determines whether or not American democracy works?
You know Democrats questioned the legitimacy of Presidential elections determined by the Electoral College. Democrats have called for elimination of the Electoral College because it is an undemocratic process (by their measure of democracy). If questioning the legitimacy of Presidential elections is a threat to democracy then Democrats are also a threat.
That's not what I said.
Their declaration of independence from the United States certainly was.
Nope. People are just full of excuses.
Then what else did you mean?
Conflating....
How does that 2020 image of Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington prove that Democrats declared independence from the United States?
Be specific.
I said if they have committed crime, they should be convicted. If they are operating within the laws established by our democratic processes, they are not a threat to democracy.
I'm sure you want to think so.
Oh look! Another article attempting to justify the suppression of any view that fails to adhere to leftist dogma.
That's not something you see every day.
Every couple of days, maybe, but surely not every day.
I really don't get this. It is one outlet criticizing another outlet about what is fair and balanced....
“It is one outlet criticizing another outlet about what is fair and balanced....”
’Fair and balanced’ is a but a hackneyed euphemism. It is about feeding the beast and generating revenue. Profits over profundity every.single.time.
And saddest of all, the disinformed , misinformed, and thus uninformed eat it up like manna from on high.