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"It's Extra Problematic When the Implications Are the End of Democracy" Janine Jackson ([link removed])

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR's Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas for the October 21, 2022, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: Independent, challenging, far-ranging and fearless coverage of elections and the electoral process is one of journalists' core jobs at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

Issues in the upcoming midterm elections go as deep as the election process itself, with some Republican candidates suggesting that they won't accept results ([link removed]) that don't go their way, and that's along with the deep and disturbing threats posed by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Add to that the fact that the corporate media—source, unfortunately, of some of the most impactful journalism in this country—are themselves throttled by the same kinds of power players that call shots at both political parties, namely profit-driven corporations.

Joining us now to talk about elite media's midterm election coverage, we have FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas ([link removed]) in studio, and FAIR’s managing editor, Julie Hollar ([link removed]) , joining us by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome, the both of you, back to CounterSpin.

Jim Naureckas: Thanks for having me on.

Julie Hollar: Thanks, Janine.

JJ: So many questions, so many problems at so many levels. Let's just start with the reality that we have Republicans who are off the chain nightmarish. They want bad, inhumane things and they want to use institution-destroying processes to get them.

And then we have Democrats who are not just ineffectually countering that, but who are, many of them, up to the same stuff, beholden to the same status quo-supporting ([link removed]) , change-squashing actors ([link removed]) .

So that's the reality. And, Jim, it fits poorly, that reality fits poorly into corporate news media's standard election template, which is: Republicans versus Democrats, they're so different, and can't we find a happy medium?

Now, I'm not saying that media have never talked about the GOP's anti-democracy, or that they've never talked about donor power in both parties, but when it comes to elections, it just seems that they're still mainly using a template that was always inadequate, and now seems completely beside the point.

JN: Yeah. I liken it to trying to report on geography without acknowledging that the world is round. You know, if you wanted to have geography coverage that would not turn off flat earthers, so you sort of describe Australia as being on the other side of the world according to some people, because you don't want to turn off the part of your audience that subscribes to the flat earth theory.

And we really do have a political party that is dominated by a flat earth theory that the 2020 election was stolen, that Donald Trump really won, and that the electoral process should be rejiggered so that the people who they believe win elections should be declared the winners of elections, and not the people who actually get the most votes.

And that is literally the end of democracy, to have that political philosophy put into power, and how you have political coverage that treats that party as one side of a debate—you really can't do it and be coherent in any way.

You're misleading the public if you act like that philosophy is compatible with democracy. But that's what they're doing.
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Democracy is under threat, and corporate media spend many paragraphs wondering whether talking about that is a politically savvy move for Democrats (Washington Post, 10/2/22 ([link removed]) ).

JH: The way that they end up covering this stuff is always as a bank shot. I was looking at some recent coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and the Washington Post a couple weeks ago had this headline that was something along the lines of “Democrats Are Shifting to a Darker, More Apocalyptic Midterm Message" ([link removed]) —how the Democrats are shifting to talk about the dangers to democracy.

This is coming off of the Biden speech ([link removed]) about the MAGA threat and everything.

And the framing of the story is, "This is a messaging shift. What are the pros and the cons? What do the strategists think?" And it's so detached from the real world implications of it that it just hurts your brain.

I mean, the piece is pretty long, and the reporter does spend a paragraph or two acknowledging that most GOP candidates won't commit to accepting election results, that the party is actively attacking abortion rights.

But then the real focus of the story is this really detached strategy, which is what election coverage--FAIR has been covering election coverage ([link removed]) for many years, and it's just always: focus on strategy, focus on the horse race, focus on the messaging, and so little focus on the policy implications.

And it’s always a problem, but it's extra problematic when the implications are the end of democracy.

The New York Times, yesterday on the front page, they were reporting on a poll that they'd just done, and their headline ([link removed]) was, “Most Voters Say Democracy Under Threat, but Few Feel Urgency." It was, like, total victim-blaming.

They were reporting on this poll where they asked people about whether they thought democracy was under threat, and most people said yes. So then there was another part of the poll that asked what the top priority was for the election, like a top issue. And more people said something related to the economy or inflation, things like that, than said democracy. So the Times called people "apathetic" for not putting it as their top priority.

But first of all, for a lot of people, the economy right now is more immediately felt, right? The threat to democracy is something that feels a bit more in the future, whereas economic threats feel more immediate.

But I think it's also really important that we point out that media bear no small responsibility for how people prioritize things in elections—you know, what is important? Well, if the media are just telling you, “Well, Democrats say that there's a threat to democracy, and Republicans say there's a different kind of threat to democracy from Democrats,” this is media completely falling down on their responsibility to give people the information that they need to make informed choices about democracy.

JJ: Absolutely. Jim?

JN: The media are so unwilling to accept responsibility for the fact that their job is to inform the public about the broader trends in society, the things that you can't observe just by talking to your neighbors or looking out your front door. You rely on media outlets to gather information about what's happening and tell you about them.
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Violent crime rates are about half what they were in 1991, but at the Times (9/26/22 ([link removed]) ), that translates into "high crime rates"—because that's a GOP talking point.

And they are so often distorting the picture of reality. I think crime is a great example. You always see stories about the midterm politics, saying that Republicans are going to tie Democrats to the high crime rate ([link removed]) . The unquestioned assumption there is that there is now a high crime rate.

The fact is that crime went down last year, according to FBI statistics ([link removed]) . We're not in a crime wave. The crime is ebbing. And, historically, crime is at about half the rate that it was in 1991, which I don't think people look back on as a Road Warrior-like post-apocalyptic landscape.

And, historically, we’re seeing relatively low crime rates, but because Republicans would like to "tie Democrats to high crime rate," that is what the media are describing the crime rate as being.

And once that frame has been put into place, it's very hard to get out of it.

JH: And crime is also very clickbaity, right? Especially in the New York City tabloid news, it's just constant crime coverage ([link removed]) . It’s very easy for them to report on, just like reporting the police blotter.

Something that caught my attention a few weeks ago was the prison strike in Alabama ([link removed]) , which probably not that many CounterSpin listeners will have heard about, because it got so little coverage in national media.

But this prison strike went on for three weeks. It just ended, I think, yesterday, which would be Tuesday the 18th, I believe.

When you look into this story, it's mind-boggling. Alabama was sued by the DoJ, actually under Trump, for having unconstitutionally inhumane conditions in their entire state prison system.

The DoJ brought a lawsuit ([link removed]) against them because they were not changing. They had already been informed that this was unconstitutional, and they weren't changing it. They were sued. They still haven't done anything.

And prisoners actually were on strike for three weeks, a work stoppage. They don't get paid to work, but they stopped work for three weeks.

There was just virtually no media coverage of this. And I bring this up because Jim’s talking about crime, and you think about the impact ([link removed]) of the criminal justice system on the lives ([link removed]) of people ([link removed]) in this country, it's immense ([link removed]) . And you never hear stories about this.

You get a one-off here and there. The Times actually reported on the DoJ lawsuit a few years ago, and then you didn't hear from them again until there's a strike. They report ([link removed]) on it at the beginning of the strike, we don't hear any follow up on it.
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Corporate media drill into voters' heads that crime is a problem, but virtually never highlight the uniquely American problem of mass incarceration.

And I just try to imagine what kind of midterm coverage we would have in a media system where mass incarceration was treated as a problem ([link removed]) anywhere near as urgent as these imaginary crime waves that the media are hyping.

And think about the kinds of policy conversations that we could have, and the kinds of politicians who could actually have a shot at winning. I feel like our democratic possibilities are really constrained by the media narratives, the stories that media tell us about ourselves, the people that media talk to to tell us these stories about ourselves, and specifically, when we start talking about elections, what kind of policy conversations we can have.

JJ: That's absolutely what I was moving towards, Julie, because we have journalism that says that when it comes to elections, the job is to say what politicians are saying, and maybe their strategy for saying it, but the coverage is candidate A versus candidate B.

And if they don't mention something, well then, we're not going to talk about it, right? Because neither of the big party candidates mentioned it.

And I feel like we’ve come to expect that for election coverage, and as you're just pointing out, it's such a narrow definition of what this opportunity for reporting could look like, in terms of what we talk about.

And Matt Gertz from Media Matters was just pointing out that ([link removed]) Republicans have this not-at-all-veiled plan to gut Social Security and Medicare if they win Congress.

This is something that people care deeply about, that affects virtually everyone in the country. This is an important story, but if candidates don't talk about it, then reporters aren't going to talk about it, because it didn't come out of a candidate's mouth.

And it's such a narrow understanding of what electoral politics mean, and the opportunity for journalism that's offered by elections.

JN: There are huge issues that are going undiscussed, for the most part, in the campaign and in the campaign coverage, things that affect everybody vitally, but neither party sees them as political winners, and therefore they don't get talked about.

The Covid pandemic is one such issue. Neither party is making it a big part of their campaign, despite the fact that this is an ongoing pandemic that has killed a million Americans, continues to kill Americans, shows no sign of going away, and there's neither a strategy being advanced by the party in power, or a strategy suggested by the opposition party, to deal with this. It's just not being talked about.

Another issue that is getting weirdly little discussion in the campaign journalism is the Ukraine War, which the United States is putting vast resources into. It's basically a proxy war with the other major nuclear superpower on Earth, with the possibility of nuclear war being discussed inbizarrely casual terms ([link removed]) in the foreign policy opinion press. What are we doing to prevent a nuclear war from happening? That's not an issue that either party is really focusing on.

JJ: I wanted to say that I think listeners understand that there are always issues in play in an election, but at this point we're not talking about just issues, as life-changing as they may be.

We're talking about the process itself. We're talking about whether or not it matters when you go to vote, whether you have some say in how politicians treat your bodily autonomy, whether you have some say in how politicians vote on the possibility of nuclear war or the use of, I think it's now $16 billion or something, that the White House has spent on the Ukraine War.

Whether or not we have a process that allows us to have a say in what's being done in our name, that's what's on the ballot.

JN: There's a lot of talk about the January 6 insurrection. It's important to keep in mind what was going on there. That was an attempt to stop the House from certifying the 2020 presidential election.

We are now going to be choosing the House of Representatives that will preside over the 2024 presidential election. And the Republican ideology now is that the Republican Party should have blocked the certification of the 2020 election and declared victory for Donald Trump because of a sort of faith-based understanding that he was the rightful president and should have been named so.

So that is what we're putting the pieces in place, for that to be re-litigated in 2024, and that is, I would say, the most important thing at stake in the 2022 midterms.

JH: And when you think about January 6, and you think about the way that when we were covering the coverage ([link removed]) at the time, there was this sense like, “Wow, media are finally getting a little bit of a spine, and they're finally starting to call a spade a spade, and they're finally starting to really call out lies," and things like that.

And I think you're seeing, definitely seeing in recent months, that reverting back to the both-sidesism ([link removed]) . And I think that really, when Janine you ask this question of why, you think about what was happening in the Republican Party around January 6, where there was a real schism, and a lot of the leadership, the non-Trump leadership, was saying, “This is not OK. We can't do this.”

And then the momentum swung back towards Trump, and that suddenly became the mainstream of the party. And once that became the mainstream of the party, then with corporate media's insistence on giving credence to reporting both sides—the mainstream of the Democratic Party, the mainstream of the Republican Party—when the mainstream of the Republican Party became election denialists, it became virtually impossible for the media to continue to call them out forcefully in the way that they had just begun to do around January 6.

JJ: Let me ask you about another aspect. There's so many things to keep your eyes on, and yet money is always one of them.

There was a quote in the Guardian ([link removed]) from Chisun Lee from the Brennan Center—also, I would note, a long-ago CounterSpin co-host. But Lee said that, “It does seem to be getting worse,” that

outside spending in this federal midterm cycle is more than double the last midterm cycle. Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now we're seeing a troubling new trend…that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.

There's a way that corporate media are just not going to talk about the influence of corporate money and power in elections.

It's always as if, suddenly when we're talking about elections, it’s the school board and the posters and marches and ballot boxes. And the idea that donors have power is a story, but it's a separate story.

JN: You should always keep in mind, especially watching broadcast coverage or TV coverage of the elections, that elections are a huge, huge profit center for TV news.

The inflow of money to buy round-the-clock propaganda in support of one candidate or another, that money is going straight into the coffers of the corporations that own the TV news programs, and so they have no interest in turning that spigot off. It would be a financial disaster for them if there was some way found to keep mega-donors from pouring money into the political process.

JH: I would also like to point out that there are independent news outlets that are doing a really great job of digging up some of this information about the dark money donations both within the Democratic and the Republican parties. The Lever ([link removed]) is one of them.

That is one of the purposes of independent media. That should be the purpose of all media, of course, but that's one way in which independent media really do the job that media should be doing, of following the money and holding power to account.

JJ: All right then. We've been speaking with FAIR managing editor Julie Hollar and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas. Thank you both for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JN: It's been good to talk.

JH: It's always great to be here.


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