Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America
…America is entering its most important, pivotal year since 1860, and the U.S. media is doing a terrible job explaining what is actually happening. Too many of us — with our highfalutin poli-sci degrees and our dog-eared copies of the late Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes — are still covering elections like it’s the 20th century, as if the old touchstones like debates or a 30-second spot still matter.
What we are building toward on Nov. 5, 2024, might have the outward trappings of an election, but it is really a show of force. What we call the Republican Party is barely a political party in any sense of the word, but a dangerous antisocial movement that has embraced many of the tenets of fascism, from calls for violence to its dehumanizing of “others” — from desperate refugees at the border to transgender youth.
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But then it’s back to your regular programming, including a desperate desire to frame today’s clash in the context of long-lost 20th-century democratic norms, and to blame any transgressions on a mysterious “tribalism” that plagues “both sides.”
This weekend, the New York Times’ Peter Baker, an influential news analyst, noted on Twitter/X that in 1994 some 21% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats viewed the other party negatively, which has risen to 62% (GOP) and 54% (Dems). Baker was recommending a story condemning “tribalism,” when what we are really seeing here is the vitriol of an authoritarian movement and the increasing condemnation from those who are appalled by it.
American journalism has long been plagued by bad actors. William Randolph Hearst bamboozled the entire country into supporting war with Cuba, and supported Nazis prior to WWII. While there once was a time when broadcast journalism was free from the profit motive, they are almost all now devotees of corporate earnings, which fucks up story selection and even reporting slant, all to boost earnings over informing the American public responsibly. Money, private investment are both villains in this, choosing profit over an informed electorate.
Trump = Eyeballs. And profits.
What gets me is that, virtually after every election, the lead media actors wring their hands about doing better next time, not focusing on the ‘horse race’ so much, then do the EXACT SAME THING next time.
As noted American “journalism” gave up reporting decades ago and now focuses on, you guessed it, profit. Rupert Murdoch won, we lost, and the intense stupidity of the American electorate did the rest.
Just a reminder that the press whose freedom is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights was completely ideological. There was no such thing as press objectivity, something that only came into being after TV news was forced by its governmental charter to avoid bias.
This was followed shortly after by the decline of printed journalism, leading two-newspaper towns that had separate Democratic and Republican papers to merge into one paper. To avoid losing more subscribers, ideology was tamped down. This describes an eyeblink of journalistic history.
There is no such thing as an unbiased story. Even a strict recounting of nothing but factual material places those facts in a given order that will be influenced by bias and will influence others in turn.
When yearning for utopia, it pays to remember that the term is derived from the Greek “ou topos” – literally, “no place.”