Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR's Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas about placing blame for Trump for the November 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: Horserace over substance, ignoring actual popular opinion that doesn't serve major-party talking points, top-down sourcing that ensures that those most harmed by social policies are not at the table when responses are discussed.
But there's also something about the role of elite media in this election that needs some illuminating as we try to move forward. My guests have just written the first of no doubt many pieces about media's role. I'm joined by FAIR’s senior analyst Julie Hollar from Brooklyn, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, both of you.
JJ: Well, Jim, the Washington Post's non-endorsement was a pretend silence that actually said a lot. But we know that most outlets would not stand up and yell, “Donald Trump is our guy.” So we have to think deeper than these once-in-four-years endorsements about how elite news media, still labeled liberal by very many, can grease the wheels of something like what just happened.
JN: Yeah, I do think that the non-endorsement was an important moment in the election. By saying, “We're not going to take a position between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” they're saying these are two acceptable positions that you can take. And, obviously, a lot of people took the Donald Trump position, so I think that did have more impact than the expected Kamala Harris endorsement would've had.
JJ: But when you look at the issues and the other things apart from the election per se, when you look at the way media covered particular issues, you found something that you found important.
JN: I think that there's an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don't think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
I think that media have long understood that fear is a great way to catch and hold an audience's attention, because we are really evolutionarily attuned to things that are dangerous. Our brains tell us to pay extra attention to those things. And so news media are prone to describe issues in terms of, “Here's something scary, here's something that's going to hurt you.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here's something that you should be afraid about. There's this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It's a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there's been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they're able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done--or sell clicks, I guess is what they're in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
JJ: And it built on years, also, of crime coverage. The way that immigration and crime were stirred up together, I think, is also part of that fear mongering that you're talking about.
JN: When you look at crime statistics, the striking thing is how much lower crime is now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It was at a much higher level than it is today, but that is not a story that is going to sell news to people. You want to sell people with the idea that, "You're in danger, read our news report to find out how."
And so even though crime is both historically down from earlier decades, and it's been down over the course of the Biden administration, that is not the story that people have been told. The story is that, “Here's some scary crimes, and what are we going to do about this crime crisis?” And, again, Donald Trump was able to use that picture, that had been painted by right-wing and centrist media alike, in order to present himself as this strong man who is going to do something about the criminal threat.
JJ: We can add to that: Truthoutreported, as you note, that "Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle." And that fits, too, with this, "There's something to be afraid of. There are people to be afraid of."
JN: Yeah, it is really striking that this was the big push in the closing days of the campaign; the Trump campaign was pumping their campaign funds into ads that presented this transgender threat. That was the thing that they thought was going to get people to vote.
Interestingly, a lot of the ads focused on the idea that Kamala Harris wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for federal prisoners. So it sort of ties in the trans threat and the crime threat, as trans criminals.... It's hard to construct a rational danger that is posed by the situation.
JH: I could be wrong, so delete that if I'm wrong. But….
JJ: I don't doubt it. Just for the reason that Jim's saying, it's hard to create a rational story around it. And the truth is, you don't have to. You just say a number of words that have been designated hot buttons, and if you can throw 'em all together, well, then, so much the better.
JN: And this is really an issue where the groundwork was laid by right-wing and centrist media alike. Fox News, trans threat stories are part of their bread and butter, but the New York Times has also done a great number of stories about the supposed threat trans youth pose. They're going to be getting into girls sports, or gender-affirming care is somehow going to snatch your child away from you.
These are stories that the supposedly liberal press has been hammering hard on, and so really given someone like Trump, who wants to demagogue these issues, a real platform to begin his harangue from, because you've already read about it in a supposedly authoritative source like the New York Times.
Julie Hollar: "You would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups."
JH: I wanted to underscore that. I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They're both this beleaguered, very small minority--although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them--but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who's really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all--and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it's pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around--well, I'm getting ahead of myself--and then blame the left for these losses, it's very angering.
JJ: I want to draw you out on that, because the New York Times itself came out swinging. They're pretty sure why Democrats lost, but you described their explanation as “mind boggling,” so just keep going with what you're saying there.
JH: So the editorial board put out their diagnosis of the Democrats' problem the day after the election. They had no doubts about this. They blamed it, in part, on the fact that it took, here I'm going to quote, “it took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters.”
They don't say exactly what progressive agenda this was. From a progressive perspective, it's hard to see very much progressivism in the Democratic agenda. But in the same paragraph, it goes on to talk about how Democrats have really struggled for the last three elections to find a persuasive message that Americans really can believe in, that they can't find a way to offer a vision to people to improve their lives.
This is the same paragraph where they're talking about this alienating progressive agenda, and when you look at the exit polls, it's very clear that the main driver, it seems, of the Trump vote, when you set aside the real core believers, this election was won because of the economy.
And if the Democrats are struggling to find a vision that appeals to voters, the progressive agenda is the agenda that appeals to voters. It's not in question. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, living minimum wage: all of these big, very popular progressive agenda items that the Democratic Party flirted with in the primaries four years ago, and has since really run pretty hard away from.
Harris had a few little economic agenda items that were somewhat progressive, like her anti–price gouging plan. She did have something about minimum wage, but, really, the big ticket items that people really want to see and could really make a big difference in their lives, those weren't the things that Kamala Harris was hitching her wagon to.
Jim Naureckas: "When Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them."
JN: And when Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them. They are very alert to any signs of economic radicalism, like universal healthcare. When Harris was talking to media, the repeateddemand that she re-renounce her former endorsement of Medicare for All was really striking. There was a suspicion that “you haven't really changed from the candidate in 2020, who was suggesting that we ought to pay for everybody's healthcare.” That is the kind of stance that that community finds very suspicious, and very nervous-making.
JJ: We only have a couple more minutes, and I do want you both to have an opportunity to talk about other takeaways. Obviously, this is a work in progress. We're just getting started here, but it seems as though asking for corporate news media to be self-aware, to actually take some accountability, to acknowledge that there's a relationship between what they report and how and what happens in the world. It seems like we're moving farther and farther from that, and I'm reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Now, you might say that more of media owners, more so than reporters, but it does just bring us back, doesn't it, to the fact of who owns and controls our news media, who they feel accountable to. And it's not us. The top-down problems that we're talking about, they're structural.
JN: Absolutely. If you have a media that is dominated by billionaires, you are going to get a different take on the problems facing the country than if you had democratic media that was answerable to the general public.
Going back to the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos refusing to let them endorse a candidate in the election, he's a guy who is one of the richest people on earth. His fortune is largely based on government contracts, and so he has a super strong interest in making sure that the president of the United States doesn't have a vendetta against him.
And he's got another strong interest in the fact that the Biden administration was pursuing antitrust claims against Amazon, which was very important. The amount of money taken from the public by Amazon's artificially increased prices is actually quite large, and has a lot to do with why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on Earth. And so having Harris not in the White House could be a real boon for his personal fortune.
And then you have Elon Musk, again, someone who depends heavily on government contracts, who has been promised a prominent role in a Trump administration, and he was using his takeover of Twitter to pump out election disinformation on a really wholesale scale. The claims about illegal immigrants voting was a nonstop flow on what he calls X now, in the weeks running up to the election.
And he's got tens of millions of people who are getting his stuff, and he's rigged the platform so that if you're on it, you're definitely going to hear from the boss. It is just a firehose of disinformation, coming from the owner himself of this centrally important social media platform.
JH: Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can't just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they're never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it's really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
JJ: We've been speaking with FAIR senior analyst, Julie Hollar, and FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. Thank you both, Julie and Jim, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: 
