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MEDIA BLAME LEFT FOR TRUMP VICTORY—RATHER THAN THEIR OWN FEAR-BASED
BUSINESS MODEL  
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Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas
November 7, 2024
FAIR
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_ To a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than
countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people
and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than
recognizing their own culpability. _

,

 

Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans,
but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that
they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with
fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our
higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution
has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that
are dangerous.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry
(PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, 12/27/21
[[link removed]]),
resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
[[link removed]] Politicians,
too, are aware of this brain hack (CONVERSATION, 1/11/19
[[link removed]])—and
no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President
Donald Trump (NEW YORK TIMES, 10/1/24
[[link removed]]).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed
so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the
Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially
opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

SCARY ISSUES

[Charts showing decline in violent and property crime since 1991
continuing under Biden administration]

_Corporate media rarely point, as this NEW YORK TIMES graphic
(7/24/24
[[link removed]])
did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to
fall during the Biden/Harris administration._

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human
interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better
life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report
on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless
migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat
(FAIR.ORG, 5/24/21
[[link removed]]).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an
audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be
undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the
percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only
slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in
2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in
2007 (Pew, 7/22/24
[[link removed]]; FAIR.ORG, 10/16/24
[[link removed]]).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media
alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to
do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents
in NBC‘s exit poll
[[link removed]] said
that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting
their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump
speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of
Washington, DC (WASHINGTON POST, 3/11/24
[[link removed]]).
“Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina
to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged,
beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because
corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime
(FAIR.ORG, 11/10/22
[[link removed]]).
It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in
the NEW YORK TIMES (7/24/24
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did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it
hit a four-decade low (FAIR.ORG, 7/26/24
[[link removed]]).

‘CLASSIC FEAR CAMPAIGN’

[Truthout: Republicans Spent Nearly $215M on TV Ads Attacking Trans
Rights This Election]

_Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (TRUTHOUT, 11/5/04
[[link removed]])
because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans
people._

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear
stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215
million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election
cycle,” TRUTHOUT (11/5/04
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reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on
ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NEWSHOUR, 11/2/24
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described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you
normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of
somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw
everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a
prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in
the NEW YORK TIMES (FAIR.ORG, 5/11/23
[[link removed]]). Rather
than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a
marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers,
the TIMES chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a
threat—focusing on  “whether trans people are receiving too many
rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR
noted.

‘ALIENATING VOTERS’ WITH ‘PROGRESSIVE AGENDA’

[NYT: America Makes a Perilous Choice]

_The NEW YORK TIMES (11/6/24
[[link removed]]) didn’t
want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed
[[link removed]] to
the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous
southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”_

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational
fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign,
corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the
left (FAIR.ORG, 11/5/21
[[link removed]]).
The NEW YORK TIMES editorial board (11/6/24
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diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too
long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election….
It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive
agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal
supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three
elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with
Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which
pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure,
even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious
faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must
be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering
a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans
and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the
country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The TIMES doesn’t say
which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so
alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely
on exit polls
[[link removed]]—that
Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The
“persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all
Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an
economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have
been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All
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a wealth tax
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a living minimum wage
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etc. In other words, if the Democrats _had_ adopted a progressive
agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that
vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which
has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed
Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or
“political correctness”) (FAIR.ORG, 11/20/16
[[link removed]]).
Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘DEMOCRATIC SELF-SABOTAGE’

At the WASHINGTON POST, columnist Matt Bai
[[link removed]]‘s
answer (11/6/24
[[link removed]])
to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part,
that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues
and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence
of that. (In a POST roundup
[[link removed]] of
columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her
party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of
oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as
being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.”
Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take
their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting
(FAIR.ORG, 9/18/24
[[link removed]]).

George Will
[[link removed]] (10/6/24
[[link removed]]),
a Never Trumper at the WASHINGTON POST, chalked up Harris’s loss
largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity
politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens
[[link removed]] (10/6/24
[[link removed]]),
one of the NEW YORK TIMES‘ set of Never Trumpers
[[link removed]],
likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward
progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens
argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social
engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first
complaint was “her choice of a progressive running
mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a
“dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to
various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights,
DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more
inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem:
It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that
Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive.
News articles (e.g., SLATE, 9/5/24
[[link removed]]; FORBES, 11/5/24
[[link removed]])
regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton,
for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic
background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘WARY AND ALIENATED’

[NYT: As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated]

_In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a NEW
YORK TIMES article (10/24/24
[[link removed]])
focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling
Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class
voters.”_

The TIMES‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from
progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article
(10/24/24
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headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and
Alienated.” In a rare example of the TIMES centering a left
perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and
Erica L. Green wrote:

In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned
four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman,
stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more
in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the
president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most
visible labor leaders.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like
small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum
wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the
board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any
member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently
about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not
broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of
economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that
largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based
narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is
infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

_Julie Hollar is FAIR’s senior analyst and managing editor. Julie
has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York._

_Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org, and has edited FAIR's print
publication EXTRA! since 1990. He is the co-author of The Way
Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, and co-editor
of The FAIR Reader. He was an investigative reporter for IN THESE
TIMES and managing editor of the WASHINGTON REPORT ON THE
HEMISPHERE. Born in Libertyville, Illinois, he has a poli sci degree
from Stanford. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson,
FAIR’s program director._

_What’s FAIR_

_FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging
corporate media bias, spin and misinformation. We work to invigorate
the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press
and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest,
minority and dissenting viewpoints. We expose neglected news stories
and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive
group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break
up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public
broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information._

* corporate media
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* fearmongering
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* Immigration
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* transphobia
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* crime rate
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