[The right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates
the pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the
integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem
remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots.]
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NEWSPAPERS WON’T CONNECT THE DOTS ON POSTAL SERVICE THREATS  
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Julie Hollar
May 4, 2020
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
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_ The right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates
the pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the
integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem
remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots. _

,

 

More than six weeks after a bill was introduced
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to require vote-by-mail to be available for the November 3 elections,
no federal steps have been taken to ensure a fair and free election in
the shadow of a pandemic that threatens people’s ability to access
the polls.

In fact, while some states scramble to put together vote-by-mail
plans—shouldering the financial burden themselves—others are doing
nothing, and New York went so far as to cancel its presidential
primary. Meanwhile, commenting on FOX & FRIENDS (3/30/20
[[link removed]])
about the Democratic vote-by-mail bill, Donald Trump said the quiet
part out loud:

The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting,
that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected
in this country again.

Now, with the US Postal Service reeling (like so many others) under
the economic impact of the pandemic, Trump has revived the right-wing
crusade to privatize all mail and package delivery, threatening to
refuse desperately needed aid for the Postal Service unless it
quadruples its rates, cuts service and guts its union—which provides
hundreds of thousands of secure middle-class jobs. Without federal
aid, the USPS will run out of money by September; adopting Trump’s
measures will effectively drive the USPS out of business, as
competitors undercut its rates (ATLANTIC, 4/24/20
[[link removed]]).


In either case, the Postal Service’s ability to handle a crush of
mail-in ballots in November would almost certainly be threatened. The
right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates the
pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the
integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem
remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots.

In the NEW YORK TIMES, Trump’s revitalized crusade against the
postal service has gone largely unremarked upon outside the opinion
section. On April 25, the story made it into the bottom of a “Virus
Briefing,” in which Trump’s “belief that AMAZON and other online
retailers have been profiting from low prices that have left it asking
for a government bailout” was not countered until the last
paragraph, which explained that the USPS “in fact…makes money from
its business with AMAZON, which is likely to shift to alternatives
such as UPS or FedEx if the Postal Service raised prices
substantially.”

Others didn’t bother at all with factchecking Trump’s central
claim about the postal service propping up AMAZON. THE HILL (4/24/20
[[link removed]]),
for example, headlined Trump’s subsequent remarks that he “would
never let our Post Office fail,” not explaining either how that
squares with his commitment to forcing massive rate hikes, or the fact
that the USPS’s relationship with AMAZON is actually a
revenue-generator for the service. And at the LA TIMES, the only brief
mention of the USPS issue in the print edition (4/25/20) noted without
comment that Trump “has berated the Postal Service for years,
claiming it is exploited by AMAZON and other e-commerce sites.”

The WASHINGTON POST (owned by AMAZON CEO Jeff Bezos) did put the story
of Trump’s threat to the Postal Service on its front page (4/24/20
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but reporters Lisa Rein and Jacob Bogage didn’t find room to mention
vote-by-mail in the entire story.

In response to Trump’s threats, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe
Biden (whose campaign urged supporters to the polls in primary
contests despite the threat of the coronavirus—FAIR.ORG, 3/28/20
[[link removed]],
4/6/20
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speculated that Trump might try to “kick back the election
somehow.” Biden suggested that Trump’s threat not to fund the
Postal Service suggests he is “trying to let the word out that
he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote.
That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”

Biden’s comments got press attention—but again, little connecting
of the dots. As virtually every report pointed out, Trump has not
threatened to postpone the election, nor would it be constitutional,
which makes Biden’s first suggestion less probable. But, just as
they did a month ago in the first wave of stories about threats to the
November election (FAIR.ORG, 3/23/20
[[link removed]]),
journalists continue to focus on reassuring the public about what
can’t go wrong (simply not holding an election) rather than digging
into what can (claiming the election results are illegitimate because
of security, fraud or delays, or simply making it impossible for
people to vote without putting their lives at risk).

Turn the page from the POST‘s page one story and you’d find a
report (4/24/20
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from Annie Linskey on Biden’s musings, which told the story as
nothing more than a partisan political squabble. Linskey quoted seven
partisan political sources (four Republicans and three Democrats,
including Biden and a Biden spokesperson), plus Amy Walter from the
COOK POLITICAL REPORT, who analyzed Biden’s remarks as a way to
rally his supporters. One reference to a concern of “voting
experts” (that “polling locations will be drastically reduced in
November if the virus returns and election workers become scarce”)
appeared in the third-to-last paragraph.

In a separate article that appeared only online, Colby Itkowitz
(WASHINGTON POST, 4/24/20
[[link removed]])
managed to speak to voting-rights experts, but still spent the first
half of the piece emphasizing that “the president has no power over
when America votes.” For those who made it that far, the piece was
one of the few places for readers to hear that there were other ways
for the president to keep people from the polls, including making
voting by mail difficult or using “emergency powers to keep people
in cities where outbreaks have been worse from going to polling places
in person, in the name of public health.” Nowhere was the legitimacy
of the election under those circumstances mentioned.

Meanwhile, at the NEW YORK TIMES (4/24/20
[[link removed]]),
Biden’s remarks appeared to raise hackles:

It was an extraordinary claim for the presumptive Democratic nominee
to make about an opponent, especially for Mr. Biden, a former vice
president and Washington veteran who prides himself on civility and
respect for American institutions, including and especially the
presidency.

Reporter Katie Glueck
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reassured readers that

Mr. Trump has not moved to delay the election, and Mr. Biden, who once
taught constitutional law, most likely knows as well as the voting
experts do that it would be exceedingly difficult
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to postpone the election and that the president does not have the
authority to unilaterally take such action.

When, later in the article, Glueck pivoted to note that “Mr. Biden
has also signaled that he is acutely aware of the roadblocks to voting
that Americans may face as an election unfolds amid a pandemic,”
she—like Linskey—presented those roadblocks through an almost
purely partisan lens. Glueck quoted Biden, two other Democratic
officials and pundit Jon Meacham
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that:

Taken together, there is a real concern among many Democrats that Mr.
Trump, who recently claimed “total” authority
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as president during the crisis before ceding some authority to the
governors, will pursue re-election ruthlessly and with no regard for
traditional norms.

Those concerns are obviously not confined to Democrats—they’re
shared by all who genuinely care about democratic institutions in this
country. Based on their coverage of the November election, and the
crucial political battles happening now that will determine whether
that election can happen freely and fairly, it’s safe to question
whether all the journalists who are meant to safeguard democracy
consider themselves part of that group.

JULIE HOLLAR [[link removed]] is the
managing editor of FAIR's magazine, Extra!. Her work received an award
from Project Censored [[link removed]] in 2005, and
she has been interviewed by such media outlets as the L.A. Times,
Agence France-Presse and the San Francisco Chronicle. A graduate of
Rice University, she has written for the Texas Observer
[[link removed]] and coordinated communications and
activism at the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. Hollar also
co-directed the 2006 documentary _Boy I Am [[link removed]]_
and was previously active in the Paper Tiger Television
[[link removed]] collective.

© 2020 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

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