Early this summer, we found both the New York Times and the Washington Post, minimizing criticism of Trump’s incoherence and maximizing commentary on Biden’s “aging” until he stepped down altogether. Being considerably older than both candidates and in full intellectual fettle, I smelled ageism in this reportage. After all, Trump has always been garbled, and Biden has always had speech delivery issues related to his stutter.
Given the upwelling of support for the Harris/Walz ticket (including Republicans, Independents, and even prominent Conservatives), were our newspapers tipping the scales deliberately? Apparently not: even with the change in candidates, they still fail to raise red flags about Trump’s authoritarian threats to punish his enemies (“there will be blood”) and turn himself into a dictator (“on day one!”)
As a dedicated newspaper reader, I am disturbed that this happens in sections where I expect to find fact-based reportage rather than editorial opinion.
Robert Hubbell, an astute (and very worried) news analyst who publishes This Edition Newsletter on Substack, is alarmed that our most prominent news media is skewing rather than reporting the news.
On September 4, for example, after Harris laid out her specific economic policies in every speech she gave, Hubbell deplored how the “Media continues to pretend that Kamala Harris has not made specific policy proposals.”
On September 18, Hubbell noted that the New York Times “complained that her answers “often echoed her stump speech” — as if consistency and discipline in messaging is a bad thing. The Times instead gave top billing (in two articles) to Trump’s unpredictable and baseless promises in his appearance in Flint, Michigan.
False equivalence
In comparing Trump to Harris in this way, such reporting commits the fallacy of “false equivalence,” where two disparate items are assumed to be comparable when they aren’t.
As Hubbell puts it, “part of the media’s normalization of Trump is its comparison of “policy positions” between Harris and Trump. Who is the media kidding?
Trump’s only policy position is, “If I win, I get to stay out of prison.” Everything else that comes out of Trump’s mouth is designed to maximize his avoidance of prison.
When you compare a candidate who says that he plans to abolish basic constitutional norms to one working within the rules of electoral democracy, a presidential aspirant who has done everything in his power to undermine the rule of law to one who has spent her career as a California prosecutor and attorney general, your premise of equivalence falls apart.
Citizens in a democracy expect fact-based journalism, while subjects of authoritarian regimes experience non-stop journalistic mendacity and disinformation.
Writing in 1941, Orwell took comfort in the observation that:
“Everyone (in England) believes in their heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, that there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it as a theory.”
Alas for America in the 2020s, where a whole political party has swallowed the totalitarian ethos hook, line, and sinker.
Totalitarian states, as Orwell aptly observed in his famous futuristic novel 1984, promulgate lie after lie in their propaganda to convince their subjects that there is no such thing as factual truth. Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, brainwashes him into this mind frame: “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right…But I tell you, Winson, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.”
A similar premise underlies the academic theory of deconstruction that gained a foothold in our colleges and universities at the end of the last century, leaving many of my colleagues insisting that everything is “constructed” by some biased human being so that nothing is actually real.
Many contemporary reporters, exposed to this tradition, find no problem transforming the basic journalistic facts of who, what, when, where, why, and how into “narratives” that can veer dangerously from objectivity. And this even though, as America’s founders insisted, the democratic process is aborted without actual facts for the give-and-take of rational discussion and legislative deliberation.
Though it is clear that we Americans are largely responsible for the present lack of balanced reportage, there is some evidence that MAGA’s mendacity is getting some help from abroad.
As Robert Hubbell suggests, “We are stuck in a noisy, volatile information environment that is being actively manipulated by the MAGA disinformation machine and Russia” (bolding added). Russia is now spreading videos on fake news with the aim to undermine the Harriz-Walz campaign, Microsoft warns.
Sane-washing
When a deranged statement by Trump is reported as if it were comparable to Harris’s position on the subject, you have a journalist practice that some dub “sane-washing.”
For a fairly mild example, in the September 10 debate between Harris and Trump, the latter responded to a question about childcare by saying it would be paid for by tariffs on imported goods. Much of the media took this as a “policy” comparable to Harris’s. However, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell rightly called attention to Trump’s ignorance about how tariffs function economically as evidence that he lacks the intellectual capacity to be president.
Sane-washing is evident when journalists and commentators take incendiary untruths as “alternative positions” in a way that “paints over” wild and incoherent misinformation so that it can pass as “normal.”
“I am but mad north-north-west,” admits Hamlet. “When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Sane-washing implies an underlying insanity, but it seems to me that Trump throws the red meat of outrageous racism to his base as a deliberate strategy to divert attention from his policy failures.
On September 16, challenged to defend his insultingly racist “Haitians Eat Pets” narrative, vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance baldly admitted: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The “narrative” seized the news cycle, diverting attention from Trump’s failed debate and from Harris’s cogent plans to lower grocery prices, finance affordable housing, and expand health care to more Americans.
In an article in The Atlantic, freelance reporter Paul Farhi disagrees with the premise of “sane-washing,” attributing the accusation to two widespread public frustrations: “One is the sense that Trump gets away with saying things that would cause a weeklong media cycle, if any other politician said it.” Or, he must be crazy to say those things.
But we ignore what Trump says at our peril: Farhi warns us against getting so used to Trump’s (apparently demented) style that we miss dangerous pronouncements, as when he proposed shooting shoplifters on sight.
Secondly, “sane-washing” doesn’t work as an accusation unless you believe that proving that Trump is mentally ill will change voters’ minds about him. “The sane-washing charge channels the critic’s exasperation at the fact that something like half the electorate still intends to vote for Trump, despite nearly a decade of his schtick.”
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Journalism 101
Although shortsighted about who should qualify as a citizen, the founders of our country believed that the self-governance basic to democracy required access to facts so we could apply our reasoning capacities to informed discussion.
The basic rule of journalism is that an active and voting citizenry has to be informed. It wasn’t that newspapers shouldn’t hold opinions — from the beginning of the Republic, papers promulgated rabidly competing ideologies on their editorial pages — but opinion was one thing, and thoroughly investigative journalism another.
As Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, puts it in an article about “The Challenges of Reporting in an Election Year”:
“We may have different structures, different technologies, different approaches, different ethics. But skeptical inquiry into facts that have been obscured from the public is what we do. That is the business we’re in.”
The problem with reportage during this election season, as in Cobb’s subtitle, is that “disinformation and the dearth of local news may shape the way voters think about issues and pose a threat to democracy.”
- First in Cobb’s analysis is lack of trust in the media, which looms as a distant institution to so many who no longer have access to local newspapers whose reporters they know and hold personally answerable. He attributes “news deserts” all over the country to loss of advertising revenue for local print media.
- Secondly, Cobb pinpoints the glut of disinformation spewing from unvetted news sources since the 2016 American election. This “arises from the siloing of news consumers around dubious sources that simply echo their own preconceptions.”
- Thirdly, Cobb identifies a phenomenon called “the Trump bump” that explains why we find so many of the former president’s bizarre pronouncements on the front pages of our newspapers: These are alarming, and people want to hear about them. Basically, they sell newspapers, though, because they are reported along with other “facts,” they fall into the “false equivalence” and “sane-washing” fallacies.
Jelani Cobb’s solution to media desserts and disinformation is to encourage the development of a wide variety of innovative media sources:
“We need nonprofit papers. We need public media. We need large media. We need small, local, independent media. We need all kinds of different media structures.”
News and Voting in Michigan
As a confirmed news wonk, I couldn’t agree more with Cobb’s call for more media of every kind; my problem is that, neither in my suburban town nor my (very) rural northeast Michigan summer village, have I seen any signs of a news desert. In both places, however, I have found people who choose not to read about or participate in politics.
Here in the Detroit metropolitan area, we have the Detroit Free Press (moderate to liberal) and the Detroit News (moderate to conservative) and the Michigan Chronicle (African American) along with the online PlanetDetroit (leftish and green). And Bridge/Michigan (bipartisan). I get the County-wide newspaper, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
There is a local rag adequately covering several nearby communities, and our town produces a newspaper called Downtown by filling it with Real Estate Advertising that enables it to publish up to date political goings on and excellently researched long-form essays on important national subjects like climate change and sustainability. I watch MSNBC (very liberal) and Public Television (more balanced), and listen to a wide variety of local, national, and international radio stations.
What about access to the news in rural Michigan? My village in northwest Michigan was a long-time seat of rural poverty, but employment is improving and the Native American tribes are doing well with their casino earnings. The larger cities in the region — Traverse City and Cadillac — both produce good newspapers with national and international coverage; even smaller towns like Frankfort publish informative local newspapers. Most people have access to television, and, just this summer, we have all been equipped with improved fiber optics to enhance our broadband reception — free of charge.
In this context, it is astonishing to meet people who ignore political news entirely. Some local teens who have just registered to vote let me know that they consider my preoccupation with politics a quirky personal hobby. “That’s nice, but we’re more into soccer!” Even in a Presidential Election year I hear from my neighbors that “I don’t like either of them. There’s really no difference, so I’m not going to vote.”
On my get-out-the-vote phone project, I hear, “Don’t you understand, I don’t vote,” followed by an abrupt end to my call. Then there was the very polite lady who explained to me that she has never voted because her home is in the “kingdom of God,” not in this fallen world.
True, democracy requires an informed citizenry, but whether that citizenry participates in democracy or not is, in the end, a personal choice.
The people who tell me, “I don’t vote, I’m just not political,” live in the same rich media environment that I do but have made up their minds that the news is irrelevant to their lives. For whatever reason, they have freely renounced their political agency, which includes their say in what happens to them under the regimes they refuse to decide between.
Sometimes, at the end of my political activist tether, I find myself reminding them: “If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.”
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: A U.S. Soldier with the Alabama National Guard stands guard near the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2021. Cover Photo Credit: Matt Hecht.
