[ The “mainstream media” that is so often accused of being
left-leaning is in fact painfully neutral and objective to a
fault...that fault being an addiction to false equivalences and an
inability and/or unwillingness to call a spade a spade.]
[[link removed]]

TOWARD A NEW POLITICAL JOURNALISM  
[[link removed]]

 

Robert Edwards
January 12, 2022
The King's Necktie
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ The “mainstream media” that is so often accused of being
left-leaning is in fact painfully neutral and objective to a
fault...that fault being an addiction to false equivalences and an
inability and/or unwillingness to call a spade a spade. _

Adolphe Menjou (left) and Pat O’Brien (center), and George E. Stone
in the original 1931 film version of The Front Page, directed by Lewis
Milestone.,

 

As I have stated over the past few weeks
[[link removed]],
going forward it is my intention to focus this blog on efforts we as
Americans can take
[[link removed]] to
combat the ongoing attempt by Big Lie Republicans to seize control of
the republic and establish a right wing autocracy. 

Because make no mistake: that is what is going on, and there has
hardly been an existential emergency of this magnitude for the United
States since the Second World War. And this one is in some ways worse,
as _the call is coming from inside the house_
[[link removed]]!
It’s one thing to be conquered by a authoritarian foreign power,
which, to be frank, the US did not come close to in the Forties,
because we stormed Normandy Beach and stopped that threat on European
shores, where the fascists had already wreaked plenty o’havoc. It is
another to willingly tear down your own 240-year-old democracy and
institute a homegrown autocracy
[[link removed]].
And to my knowledge, no such domestic Operation Overlord
[[link removed]] is in the works to
arrest that trend. 

In that regard, we have to go back to the Civil War to find a
comparable danger….and as Barton Gellman
[[link removed]] wrote
in a recent, widely-heralded piece for The Atlantic, even the sickness
at the core of the threat was not so sweeping. “Even Confederates
recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because
they knew they had lost.” What we are seeing now is an even more
basic rejection of the fundamentals of our democracy by tens of
millions of Americans, even if it has not spiraled into the same kind
of open warfare. Yet
[[link removed]]. 

So where to begin? There are untold fronts, all of them critical, but
let’s start with one of the simplest, which is all the news that’s
fit to print.

REF, ARE YOU BLIND????

In the 2016 presidential campaign, we saw that the media had no idea
how to deal with a demagogue like Donald Trump. 

As a pathologically dishonest and obscenely entitled real estate con
man, Trump had spent a lifetime lying and cheating with abandon and
impunity. When he turned to politics—largely to promote his brand,
and by all accounts without any real thought of winning anything—the
mainstream media seemed completely unprepared for how treat him. They
were like medieval lancers facing a modern army wielding tanks and
machine guns, incapable even of comprehending how to counter this new
weaponry. 

The press treated Trump with the same rules and decorum to which it
had subjected conventional politicians, laughably unaware that he
intended to run roughshod over every protocol, norm, and nicety under
the honor system that was American politics heretofore. He was a media
terrorist who made a laughingstock of the informal guidelines intended
to contain him, and indeed turned those norms into weapons that
further devalued real journalism and served his wrecking machine. By
the time the press realized that it could not control him, and that
they were unwittingly complicit in this atrocity, it was too late. 

Incredibly, many in the American media have yet to figure that out, as
the same attitude continues to bedevil us in the current crisis. 

The “mainstream media” that is so often accused of being
left-leaning is in fact painfully neutral and objective to a
fault….that fault being an addiction to false equivalences and an
inability and/or unwillingness to call a spade a spade. Why? I dunno.
Some benighted, misplaced obeisance to the great god Objectivity? An
innate desire to create drama, which is good for ratings? A simple
inability to respond to a wantonly deceitful political force that has
no respect for good faith, and wants to exploit the vulnerabilities of
those who practice it? 

Maybe it’s all of the above. Whatever it is, it’s abetting the
Republican cause and helping poison American democracy to death. 

In June 2016, even before Trump nailed down the GOP nomination, Eric
Alterman wrote a piece for The Nation titled “How False Equivalence
Is Distorting the 2016 Election Coverage
[[link removed]].”
In it, he made the sage observation that “The media’s need to
cover ‘both sides’ of every story makes no sense when one side has
little regard for the truth.” In some ways, that phenomenon has only
accelerated since then, but without any necessary adjustment by the
already-benighted media. 

Arguing that “false equivalence often appears to be the rule rather
than the exception,”_ _Alterman offered multiple examples, such as
the specious and facile comparisons between Donald Trump and Bernie
Sanders by highbrow pundits (They’re both outsiders!)…..the
WaPo’s coverage
[[link removed]] of
Mitch McConnell’s unconscionable blockade of Merrick Garland’s
nomination to the Supreme Court, and the Nadia Comaneci-level
gymnastics in which it engaged to try to demonstrate some sort of
Democratic equivalent…..and The New York Times’s
[[link removed]] implication
that Trump’s use of words like “bimbo,” “dog,” and “fat
pig” to refer to women was the moral equivalent of Hillary Clinton
alienating the coal industry by her support for clean energy jobs.

Of special note in our current moment of incipient right wing
insurgency, Alterman cited a Times story
[[link removed]] dated
March 13, 2016 detailing Trump’s repeated incitements to violence
among his supporters, with the qualifier that “Both sides are
fueling this.”  

Are they, though? When? And according to whom? 

The Times didn’t bother to say.

Alterman:

_These pathologies have long been with us. But they have reached a
crisis point in recent years, as conservatives have grown ever more
brazen in exploiting them, successfully shifting the boundaries of
political discourse well beyond what the rest of us recognize as
readily observable reality. This is but one of the dividends the right
enjoys from its long-term investment in “working the refs”—that
is, creating and supporting countless institutions whose purpose is to
harass members of the media to produce more sympathetic coverage of
their pet issues._

_As Weekly Standard senior writer Matt Labash told the website
JournalismJobs.com back in 2003, “The conservative media likes to
rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective….
It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too.”_

And I remind you: that was obvious to plenty of smart observers like
Eric _in 2016_! 

After all, it was way back in 2000—or as we used to call it, the
Year Two Thousand—that Paul Krugman famously quipped
[[link removed]]:
“If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat,
you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ‘Shape
of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.’” 

SHIT ROLLS DOWNHILL

Presciently, Alterman was even writing about the Fourth Estate’s
failures on the very specific issue of voting rights back in 2016,
citing a study by Media Matters that found “baseless complaints
about voter fraud were given the ‘he said/she said’ treatment in
the (New York) Times in 60 percent of the relevant stories published
in 2013 and 2015—a 10 percent increase over the previous two
years.” 

The paper’s own public editor at the time, Margaret Sullivan,
herself raised the issue of what Alterman calls “the paper’s
repeated failure to report the truth about this issue
[[link removed]],”
prompting the Times’s national editor Sam Sifton to argue that
“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper…. We need to state
what each side says.” Even if what one side says is total horseshit,
I guess. (Sifton “made this point regarding a story by Ethan
Bronner, who admitted to Sullivan that he was aware of ‘no known
evidence of in-person voter fraud.’”) 

That the media’s mandarins are defending their ill-conceived
mentality is not a coincidence. In that 2016 piece, Alterman also
wrote: “The refusal of so many in the media to adjudicate between
truth and falsehood is not a by-product of journalistic posturing.
Rather, it is at the very foundation of how those at the top define
the job.” 

In a brand new piece for The American Prospect titled “The Sins of
the Mainstream Media
[[link removed]],
Alterman writes of Fournierism, the ethos within the Fourth Estate
that, in the words of media critic Jay Rosen
[[link removed]],
valorizes “contempt for purists, the praise for moderates, and the
fuzzy pragmatism that is also called ‘bipartisanship.’” As
Alterman writes: “Fournierism underlies not only both-sides-do-it
journalism but also the political posturing of most of the prestigious
pundits and so-called experts who populate the nation’s op-ed pages
and Sunday roundtables.”

This toxic impulse is named for Ron Fournier, former Washington
bureau chief for the Associated Press, and Alterman offers a prime
example from the master himself, again turning on the GOP’s
unprecedented refusal even to meet with Merrick Garland in 2016:

_Fournier was briefly tempted to blame Republicans for what they were
doing, in thrall as they were to an “angry” base that was
“opposed to any accommodation with Democrats.” But don’t be
fooled: “The GOP isn’t the only party captive to its special
interests,” __Fournier insists_
[[link removed]]_.
If “the roles were reversed and a Republican sat in the Oval
Office,” the pundit felt certain that “Democrats would block the
lame duck’s nominee.” _

_Here you have the essence of Fournierism: If reality doesn’t
cooperate, you can always blame “both sides” in some alternate
universe._

(During the 2016 election Fournier was also a chief proponent of the
“both candidates are awful” fallacy. We see where that got us.)

GEORGE SANTAYANA, WHITE COURTESY PHONE

As I say, the media appears to have learned exactly bupkes in the last
six years. If I have to listen to Chuck Todd, or NPR, or CNN, or any
of the rest of the allegedly “left-leaning lamestream media”
uncritically give right wing voices a forum, even in the interest of
hearing all sides, I might go full Elvis on my TV. Yes, sunshine is
the best disinfectant, but it’s not sunshine when you just give
these Republican mouthpieces an audience of millions and let them spew
their lies unchallenged. Don’t they have their own network for that?

An anecdotal example. Note how the MSM has reported the job numbers
under Trump and under Biden, as originally called out by
MSNBC’s Ari Melber
[[link removed]]. In
February 2018, under Trump, the Associated Press reported
[[link removed]]: “US
employers added a robust 200,000 jobs in January.” In December 2021,
under Biden, that same Associated Press reported: “US employers
added a sluggish 210,000 jobs in November.” 

That’s  what you call MAGA Math, folks, in the same way that
Trump’s inaugural crowd
[[link removed]] was
bigger than Obama’s. 

Today the crime that is most blatantly benefitting from the “both
sides [[link removed]]”
treatment is the Republican attempt to put a chokehold the electoral
process. With a handful of notable exceptions, the US press continues
to be utterly incapable of responding, and once again is getting
played for suckers. 

In a recent piece by Dan Froomkin for Press Watch
[[link removed]], New
York Times reporter Nina Bernstein spoke openly of political reporters
and editors struggling “to accurately and sufficiently convey facts
about the Republican assault on voting rights and democracy
[[link removed]]. The fear of
taking sides is very obviously holding them back.” The result?
“The inadvertent normalization of existential threats to democracy
and public health by one party and its right-wing media echo
chamber.”

An example: Citing a poll it conducted in cooperation with the
University of Maryland, the Washington Post
[[link removed]] reported
that 69 percent of Trump voters believe Joe Biden was not legitimately
elected president. It then added: “Republicans’ rejection of
Biden’s victory is not novel. In a fall 2017 Post-UMD poll, 67
percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Hillary Clinton voters said
Trump was not legitimately elected president.”

What the Post DIDN’T say is that Donald Trump eagerly fanned those
flames delegitimizing his successor, while Hillary Clinton
graciously—and admirably—did the opposite. That is a shameful sin
of omission and a near-textbook case of “bothsidesism” and the
dangers of faux “objectivity” in the mainstream media.

Writing in the Washington Post recently, Jennifer Rubin
[[link removed]] laid
down an indictment of this phenomenon very well: 

_The mainstream media’s fixation with false equivalency between the
two political parties and fear of criticism from the right has led to
distorted coverage and misleading characterizations of the assault on
democracy._

_Only one party, the GOP, protects members who post violent,
outrageous material. Only one overwhelmingly opposed a bipartisan
commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection. Or tossed a party
member out of her leadership position for refusing to lie about the
Donald Trump-inspired effort to overturn the election. Or filibustered
debate on any voting rights reform (with the exception of a single
Republican senator from Alaska)._

_Part of the problem in identifying the source of the threat to
democracy stems from the mainstream media’s refusal to recognize
that we no longer live in a political world in which two political
parties engage within acceptable bounds of democracy._

Better still, Rubin has specific, concrete proposals for what the
media ought to be doing, and dire warnings about the cost of the
failure to do so:

_Why isn’t Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quizzed as
to how his party can take direction from a former president who
plotted to overthrow the election? Why isn’t every Trump-picked
candidate quizzed as to whether they buy the “big lie” of a stolen
election and asked to renounce violence? Will debate moderators
confront Republican candidates with questions as to whether President
Biden won the election and whether they would oppose state legislative
efforts to overturn the will of their voters by submitting an
alternative slate of presidential electors to the House in 2024?_

Also in the WaPo, that same aforementioned Margaret Sullivan who was
formerly the Times’ public editor, now a media columnist for the
Post, recently published a piece titled, “If American Democracy Is
Going to Survive, the Media Must Make This Crucial Shift
[[link removed]].” 

_For the most part, news organizations are not making
democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the
public. “We are losing our democracy day by day, and journalists are
individually aware of this, but media outlets are not centering this
as the story it should be,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of
autocracy and the author of “__Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present_
[[link removed]]_.”_

_But, in general, this pro-democracy coverage is not being
“centered” by the media writ large. It’s occasional, not
regular; it doesn’t appear to be part of an overall editorial plan
that fully recognizes just how much trouble we’re in._

_That must change. _

Calling the press out and keeping up the pressure can have an effect.
To his credit, Todd has gotten better, no doubt in response to this
kind of criticism
[[link removed]].
(NPR
[[link removed]] has
its own problems.) 

Sullivan acknowledges important articles like Gellman’s in The
Atlantic, an AP story headlined “‘Slow-Motion Insurrection’: How
GOP Seizes Election Power,” 
[[link removed]]and
a much-praised piece by Melissa Block on NPR on “the clear and
present danger of Trump’s enduring ‘Big Lie.” 
[[link removed]]However,
she calls for not merely more of this work but different kinds as
well, including “a new emphasis on those who are fighting to
preserve voting rights and defend democratic norms,” and begs for
“news leaders” to “show that you really mean it.” 

_Don’t be afraid to stand for something as basic to our mission as
voting rights, governmental checks and balances, and democratic
standards. In other words, shout it from the rooftops. Before it’s
too late._

FOXES AND CHICKENS

It is an article of faith in the right wing—and even much of
ordinary, apolitical America—that the MSM is left-leaning. When
confronted with the obvious, shameless bias of Fox, reactionaries will
first deny it—“Fair and balanced!”—then grudgingly say it is
no more biased than MSNBC, as if the two are co-equal offenders. Yet
another false equivalence.

MSNBC does not hide its ideological position. (Fox, risibly, tries
to.) But at the same time, MSNBC operates in the reality-based world,
while Fox happily swims in the sea of Kellyanne Conway-esque
alternative facts, facts that are bespoke to its needs at any given
moment and subject to change without notice as those needs evolve. Or
what side of the bed Donald Trump hauled his fat ass out of that
morning. 

There is no need to dignify the “opinion” celebrities-cum-carnival
barkers that anchor Fox’s prime time lineup by pretending that they
are real journalists. They themselves alternately embrace the label
when it suits them, and disavow it when it does not. The son of an
heiress to the Swanson TV dinner fortune, Tucker Carlson comes from a
family that for years fed America garbage in front of our televisions,
and he is keeping up the tradition.

(Fox takes pains to distinguish these malevolent infotainment clowns
from its traditional news division,  but that news division is
hardly much more objective….and indeed may be more dangerous in some
ways for its very veneer of faux
legitimacy. _Fahrenbalanst_ indeed.)

The net result is that the GOP has an entire propaganda empire at its
disposal—America’s most watched
[[link removed]] news
network, as it is fond of bragging—the center of an even larger
right wing mediasphere that includes the Sinclair
[[link removed]]behemoth,
ubiquitous talk radio, local outlets, and social media. The Dems have
nothing analogous. In that sense, the whole term “mainstream
media” is dead wrong. As the academic Nicco Mele
[[link removed]] points
out, as empirically measured by sheer, indisputable numbers, the
right’s dominance of the press is so vast that _it _truly is the
MSM.

Eric Alterman—damn, that guy is _good_!—wrote of the effect that
Fox has had on the Overton window of American politics: 

_Thanks, in part, to the willingness of most mainstream journalists to
treat Fox News as just another news source, right-wing ideologues have
shifted the political “center” closer to the conservative fringe
with every election. And so the Fournierists have moved rightward as
well. _

For that matter, the entire canard of the “left-leaning” media is
risible….as if allegedly liberal major media corporations like the
Washington Post, NBC, and CNN—owned by even bigger mega-corporations
like Amazon, Comcast, and AT&T, respectively—are somehow bastions of
Marxism who want to tear down the system. The proof of their
crypto-conservatism (and often not so crypto) is in their coverage,
which consistently reflects a center-right point of view. And that’s
at best. Dallas-based AT&T, in fact, is one of the major donors to
pro-Insurrectionist politicians
[[link removed]],
as well as the primary platform of the far right OANN
[[link removed]].

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record (kids: look it up),
the only reason that these conservative media outlets and right wing
politicians can pander like this is because there is a base to pander
to—simple supply and demand. There are tens of millions of our
fellow countrymen out there consumed with what we used to call John
Birchism (now: standard Republican orthodoxy) and the Big Lie
Republican Party would have been unable to grow and fester like it has
without them. Per Nicco Mele, they are not the majority, we are the
majority
[[link removed]],
but they exist in large enough numbers, and are fanatical enough, to
be incredibly useful to plutocrats and would-be authoritarians.

These people are almost beyond reasoning with because they have been
conditioned to disregard any facts that inconveniently clash with
their worldview there on Earth 2….and have willingly surrendered to
that mentality. A few years ago, I got into an argument online (always
a good use of one’s time) with a conservative woman who was peddling
some conspiracy theory or another. When I sent her a Snopes link
disproving her claims, she responded that she doesn’t read Snopes
because “I like to make up my own mind.”

Yes, and I don’t read weather reports because I like to decide for
myself what the temperature is.

It is this gullibility that Fox, Breitbart, and the rest of right wing
media exploits, and that we have to do a far better job of
countering. 

Of course, the culpability of the MSM for the poisoning of our
democracy is an old story compared to the Wild West of Facebook and
other social media companies, which represent a totally different kind
of threat, but that is a topic for another day. 

Still, it’s kind of silly that we’re even talking about so-called
“legacy media” given the extent to which its influence is waning
as the Age of Cronkite gives way to the Age of Zuckerberg. (Barf.) But
the Internet has not yet completely displaced the power of broadcast
and print news, particularly of the tabloid right wing variety, which
deftly uses the Internet as a force multiplier, or perhaps vice versa.

It’s ironic, though, to think of how similar Trump and Facebook
are. 

Once upon a time, in the Eighties, Donald Trump was just a vulgar real
estate developer, walking punchline for Spy magazine, and celebrity
wannabe best known for leching after teenaged Eastern European
models….not an aspiring tyrant with an army of violent followers who
posed an unprecedented threat to American democracy. You know, the
same way that once upon a time Facebook was a trivial diversion like
Tetris on your Palm Pilot, and not a malevolent multinational
juggernaut that was taking over the world by mining your brain like
the machines in _The Matrix_. 

It’s bitter but fitting that the two worked hand in hand so well, a
pair of jokes that turned into urgent, hair-on-fire dangers to
humankind.

D.I.Y.

As apostate Republican and Never Trumper Ron Filipkowski
[[link removed]] says,
“(T)he traditional media is constitutionally incapable of being a
counter to the alternative ecosystem the right-wing has constructed.
Our media is structured to report facts about the way the world
functions in a liberal society, not act as a counterweight to an
else-worlds propaganda machine.

(I assume he means liberal in the classical sense
[[link removed]], though as a fearless
Stephen Colbert joked/not-joked at the 2006 White House Correspondents
Dinner—without ever breaking character from his O’Reillyesque
“Colbert Report” alter ego—“reality has a well-known liberal
bias [[link removed]].”)

To that end, Democrats have to take up that role, and get a lot better
at marketing, advertising, and PR. (The folks at the Lincoln Project
[[link removed]]—not Democrats, but allies on the
Democratic side, and also the democratic one—are damned good at it.)
That shift will not come naturally, because as Jennifer Rubin noted,
Democrats seem “temperamentally unsuited to calling out their
opponents as anti-democratic or un-American. (How else would one
describe the cheering for an unpeaceful transfer of power?)” We are
also at the constant disadvantage of arguing for nuanced, humane
policies, as opposed to simplistic and often ill-conceived reptile
brain ones. That would present a big enough challenge even if
reactionaries weren’t also willing and eager to lie their asses off
on top of it.

So we have to let go of our Marquess of Queensbury thinking. 

An example:

Speaking on MSNBC a few weeks ago, the astute former US
Attorney Chuck Rosenberg
[[link removed]],
whom I deeply respect, addressed a series of incriminating tweets by
members of the Trump circle— including family members, Fox News
personalities, and Republican congressmembers—that the January
6th committee had made public. Rosenberg said that he wished the
committee would not release things like that piecemeal, but rather
keep them under wraps until its final report is ready. I understand
the prudence and professionalism of this civilized approach, but I
respectfully disagree. That’s precisely what the Mueller probe did
and it proved a grievous strategic mistake, ceding the media
battlespace to Team Trump for almost two years…..and then even
allowing Trump and Barr to spin the final report itself ahead of its
publication.  

This is a pre-2016 mindset that we have to get out of. Knowing that
Hannity, Ingraham, and even that walking Oedipal complex Don Jr. all
begged Trump to stop the Insurrection has already changed the national
conversation.  

I’m not a journalist per se. (Haters: That’s your cue. I’m not
gonna lob you softballs like that everyday.) I come out of
documentary, where we make no secret of having a point of view, even
if the viewing public is often confused about that distinction. If the
American media will not or cannot recognize the insidious Republican
game and shift its approach accordingly, the Democratic Party and
other opponents of GOP authoritarianism will have to take the
initiative. 

The only positive opportunity created by the longstanding right wing
war on the media (and on Truth full stop) is that it has so destroyed
public faith in journalism, and so inculcated a Putinist cynicism that
“everything is a lie,” that it has opened up space for overtly
partisan voices to take their case directly to the public, jaded
though that public may be, since all “news” is perceived as having
an agenda anyway. 

So be it, then: let us make the case that our agenda is preferable to
theirs.   

Writing in The xxxxxx, Filipkowski advocates this approach in a piece
called “How Democrats Can Win the Information War
[[link removed]],”
and bemoans the fact that the left has not already taken it up:

_Either Democrats fail to recognize what is happening, don’t
understand it, or think that a handful of PACs and White House press
conferences are sufficient to deal with it. Either way, they’re
wrong. The DNC’s “War Room” looks like a Victorian tea party
compared to what Republicans do on a daily basis. It is shocking to
watch both sides operate each day, and see how much more effective the
GOP is at messaging._

_If the Democratic party had even five intelligent, relentless,
full-time people working as a team to fight the right-wing
disinformation war, it would be more effective than all the
traditional media outlets combined. Again: It isn’t the media’s
job to fight partisan battles and the media as it currently exists
simply isn’t configured to fight bad-faith, malicious propaganda and
disinformation. But also, there are things that can be done by a
partisan political group that traditional media cannot, will not, and
should not do._

Like Rubin and Sullivan, Ron even gets into the weeds of how this
would work:

_What would this team do exactly? Generally, it must identify what is
being said and done on the right across multiple platforms, settings,
and venues. Their game plans for today, this week, this month, and
this year are all there, out in the open. Once you become aware of
disinformation, it can be proven false and countered immediately. And
then Democrats should take the fight directly to the right on their
own platforms. I believe that many of the people who have been turned
by lies can be won back with irrefutable truth—but the truth has to
be put right in front of them, meeting them where they are._

I am less convinced than Mr. Filipkowski that MAGA Nation will listen
to reason (they haven’t yet), and a lie famously goes round the
world while the truth is still putting its boots on. But I do think
his scheme will do some good with the squishy middle, to the extent it
still exists, and help counter the relentless right wing narrative.

The price of failure will be enormous. Jennifer Rubin again:

_As the Republican Party strays further from democratic norms and
standards of civil conduct, the refusal to pin blame on them for
erosion of democracy serves to provide cover for their illiberal
conduct and anti-democratic sentiments. A democracy that can no longer
recognize existential threats is in no position to defend itself
against shameless foes._

CLOUDS’ ILLUSIONS I RECALL

In  closing, let’s go back to 2016. Amid the untold damage done by
the MSM’s “both candidates suck!” coverage, Eric Alterman was
very clear-eyed about the two choices, and what was at stake:

_Journalistic abdications of responsibility are always harmful to
democracy, but reporters and pundits covering the 2016 campaign will
be doing the public a particularly grave disservice if they continue
to draw from the “both sides” playbook in the months leading up to
the November election. Now that Donald Trump has emerged as the
presumptive Republican nominee for president, some simple facts about
him and his campaign should be stated clearly and repeatedly, not
obfuscated or explained away or leavened into click bait. Trump is a
pathological liar and conspiracy theorist, a racist, misogynist, and
demagogic bully with a phantasmagoric policy platform and dangerously
authoritarian instincts. Hillary Clinton’s flaws and failures are
many, and they should not be discounted, either. But they are of an
entirely different order. Love her or hate her, at least we don’t
have to wonder whether she believes in democracy. When it comes to
sane and even semi-sensible policy proposals for America’s future in
the 2016 presidential election, there is only one side._

We will be writing a similar epitaph about 2022 and 2024 unless shit
changes. 

*
[[link removed]]
*
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*
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