So-called journalists share the blame for why this election that shouldn't be close is fueled by ignorance

 

Why isn't it a well known "fact" by the majority of the electorate that Donald Trump is incapable of rational, coherent thought? When asked for specific information about his “plans,” all Trump does is wander off into nonsensical tangents, usually to attack Biden or Harris, mainly about the “border," dumping more gasoline on the fire to fuel racism with demonizing and dehumanizing lies; do you think I like being the object of lies by ignorant people? Do you like being called a Nazi, which I think some of you have some (many) things in common with?

Trump has also revealed much about himself before as a “businessman,” when he shielded himself from his own incompetence by insuring that other people invested in his new business ventures, to insure they were the ones who lost their shirts, and not him, when those businesses inevitably went bankrupt.

This is a man who claims to stand with working people and the military, yet in private conversation he shows nothing but contempt for them; unlike them, he is of the “master race” who they must grovel before (if he thinks they did anything to deserve such "compensation"); after all, they are “suckers” and “losers” because some of them served in the military, or were not born into wealth, and didn't have a lot of "suckers" to do his dirty work for him, and thus end-up in prison (Michael Cohen, Allen Weisselberg) 

This is a man who doesn’t have a shred of moral or ethical principles of his own, thus easily led by "friendly" far-right fringe fanatics with their own "plans" for the country, who "love" his ignorance and petty, juvenile grievances, such as the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025) and the Federalist Society headed by Leonard Leo, which John Oliver talks about here...

 

 

...and fascists looking for a home, like Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn and Kash Patel. We see this time and time again when Trump cannot articulate a rationalization on any subject free of lies and personal attacks, and sends out his dangerously crazed dirty-workers to "articulate" what they plan on doing if Trump is elected again.

And in a country that is supposed to separate law from religious fundamentalism, we find ourselves increasingly ruled by judges who make decisions based not on the law, but on their “personal beliefs,” which they claim are inspired by their religion—apparently that of the anti-Christ, in the form of Trump. You see people with these "Don't Tread on Me" flags, yet it is the courts with Trump-installed judges and fascist governors and attorney generals in states like Florida and Texas that are the ones doing the "treading" on the freedom of speech, abortion and voting rights of those who oppose them.

And yet here we are, in an election that as late as 2012 would have been unthinkable that a man who is clearly a psychopath may yet again become president.

How did we get here? Marty Baron, former editor with the Boston Globe and Washington Post, offers one explanation. He condemns the mainstream media—meaning “liberal” news media outside of MSNBC—with engaging in so-called “fair” media coverage, which some say is in reality reaching for “false equivalency.” We saw that in the vice presidential debate, when the moderators forced Tim Walz to defend himself from what knew were lies told by Trump, and “explain” some fib he told about when he was in China at a particular time four decades ago.

Yet they allowed JD Vance to get away with the current Republican claim about the new revelations of crimes committed by Trump that clearly fell outside the far-right U.S. Supreme Court’s attempt to “immunize” him, by claiming that all happened “in the past,” and he was focused “on the future," whether or not that includes another January 6 riot if Trump loses. This while the cowardly Mike Johnson used the same line while George Stephanopolous showed him clips of Trump repeating his election conspiracies and lies during rallies; what  should have been done was also expose Johnson’s own history of supporting Trump’s election lies dating from 2020.

Baron, as reported by the Harvard Gazette, “argued that misunderstandings over objectivity stem from the incorrect belief that it amounts to neutrality,” and that “There are people who think they know the answers before they embark on the reporting, and I think that’s a problem for our profession. We do need to go into stories with an open mind with a recognition that we don’t know everything. In fact, we don’t know all that much, and we may not even know what we think we know. (Objectivity is not) on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand journalism,”

Baron observed that many journalists choose to engage in false “moral clarity” over “objectivity”—meaning any side, right or left, can claim to have the moral high ground, but what journalists should do is just “stick to the facts,” and be willing to change his or her opinion, based on the facts. Trump’s fact-free lies have no “moral equivalency” with that of Kamala Harris’ occasional elaborations of the facts, and should be treated by the media as such.  

M. Gessen of the New York Times also derided the mainstream media for putting facts and lies on equal footing. When doing so, “it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.” 

Gessen argues that the failure of most of media to do more to expose Trump and the people he will put in his administration if elected, and the placement of more far-right judges who “judge” by personal opinion and not by the law, will not only endanger democracy, but their own “free speech” to report the truth when they finally realize the danger they helped create by enabling Trump to get elected.

That enablement for what we saw in Germany in 1933 is apparently not clear to some people in the journalism business—despite the fact that we see the germ of it in states like Florida under DeSantis, and Texas under Abbott and Paxton—especially CNN and other “mainstream” news outlets who have a hard time learning that being “fair” to “both sides” when one side is clearly wrong doesn’t gain them more viewers or readers from one side, and loses those on the other. Either you are for democracy, or you are not. Gessen goes on

We, as journalists, do our absolute worst when we engage in a kind of false evenhandedness. What I think their thinking was — and I can only conjecture — but their thinking was probably: We have one candidate who is in the habit of lying, as is his running mate. Let’s find a way that we can show that we’re equally critical of both candidates. So before Vance even has to face a question about Jan. 6 or about whether Trump lost the 2020 election, let’s ask Walz why he lied about being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square. The idea that that is in any way comparable to the kinds of really malignant lies that Trump and Vance have been spreading intentionally. There is no equality here.

CNN reported on a “poll” that claims as many people believe Harris is “lying” as those who do Trump. Now why is that? It goes on and on, just as it did in a story about Walz’s “lie” about being in Hong Kong at a particular time, although to be honest, Walz would have done better to stay in this hemisphere to do his “philanthropic” work, which would put him in better stead with Hispanic voters, since he certainly isn’t going to win new voters with this China connection. 

OK, so CNN mentioned this thick document that Jack Smith released, but only mentions a few anecdotes that doesn’t give people a full picture of Trump’s crimes—as if videos of the January 6 rioters wasn’t enough to put an idea of it in people's heads.

Gessen also noted that even though a majority of people thought Harris won her debate over Trump, the media did not spend much time on what she said, but on what Trump (and subsequently Vance) said: 

But if you judge it in terms of its influence and think about who dominated the news cycle afterward, well, it was clearly Donald Trump and his lies, and Vance’s lies about Springfield, Ohio. I fear that we’re going to see even more of that now because Vance got his message out and it’s going to be Vance normalized, Vance validated, Vance quoted, Vance clipped, and we have another MAGA news cycle.

This is nothing “new,” of course. It is certainly what got Trump elected in 2016, after all. In PressWatch in 2019,  Dan Froomkin wrote “False equivalence fuels political journalism’s race to the bottom.” Journalists (and all you have to do to be one is “report” or have an “opinion”) seem to believe that you are “doing your job: if you present “both sides.” But Froomkin notes that in this divisive atmosphere fueled by Trump and far-right extremists (and we shouldn’t claim that they are “equivalent” to the so-called “far-left”) makes a mockery of the idea of covering “both sides” of a political argument:

That serves the public reasonably well when the two parties represent competing political philosophies — but share basic convictions and the same knowledge base. But when one party starts to espouse extremist views that are based neither in reality nor in the core values of an increasingly diverse United States, there is no balance.

Staying impartial – typically a journalistic virtue – results in a journalistic failure: False equivalence, which legendary Atlantic writer James Fallows describes as the “strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying ‘sides’ of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up.”

While Harris uses government statistics to bolster her claims—whether you choose to believe them or not, they at least have the façade of being actually “factual,” Trump engages in made-up numbers and claims that things were “great” when he was president (they most definitely were not), and “the worst ever” in the current administration, which most definitely is not true; frankly, I’m making more money that I ever have, even long past my “prime."

I’m sure there are a lot of people who can say the same thing—including Trump fundament-smoocher Elon Musk, who I think is a “closet” racist (born in South Africa) who likes to pass along racist “research” on X and doesn’t like people expressing their freedom of speech by calling out his “freedom of speech.” Tesla was sued for racial discrimination and harassment, but of course Musk doesn’t even have the self-control to say racism isn’t tolerated; he just says it is just another liberal “conspiracy” to deny him his “rights.”

The fact is that the far-right is exploiting the “need” for the “mainstream media” to be “neutral” for its own evil purposes, and let’s not be dishonest about this: theirs' is a white nationalist, xenophobic agenda (i.e. Abbott and Paxton in Texas) that fears loss of “power” and is being fueled by billionaires and corporations who have their own agendas that have nothing to do with helping working class people. We only need to look at what Trump did to help himself get richer, with tax cuts for people like himself and not for anyone else, and gutting regulations meant to keep people like him lawful and not injuring the lives of working people.

Trump has never done anything for working people, but pulls their attentions away from what he has (or has not) done—and the media has aided him in this; for example, in its failure to talk about the circumstances (I mean, the truthful ones) that brings migrants to this country. In that regard, I watched John Sayles’ 1997 film Men With Guns over the weekend, which at some point before the election I’ll do an overview of here. They are not treated as human beings, but only through scenes which portray them as subhuman objects, "vermin" in need of an "exterminator" like Trump—but for reasons Republicans and the far-right prefer to keep under wraps.

Social media scholar Danah Boyd points out what the far-right has managed to do to the country through the ignorance of many in the journalism business:

The stark reality is that we all got played. And we’re continuing to get played. Accusing journalists of bias makes them “twist themselves in knots to challenge such a critique. News organizations are profiling extremists as legitimate voices to perform a version of neutrality that is rooted in false equivalency. I hope you can hear what I’m saying. Because our democracy depends on you recognizing that you are being manipulated. Understanding the vulnerabilities in news media that manipulators see can help you strengthen your approach.

Some journalists (again, those outside of MSNBC, which tends to rely on reality and facts in its reporting and opinion) have awoken to the truth, although only on occasion when Trump's lies hit too close to home. A group of newspapers in North Carolina in a joint editorial communique condemned Trump’s lies about Hurricane Helene and the “Democratic” response to it:

This is not a situation to capitalize on for political gain. But former President Donald Trump has politicized the situation at every turn, spreading falsehoods and conspiracies that fracture the community instead of bringing it together…the worst examples" of this is a Truth Social post this week in which Trump claimed that the federal government and Democratic state officials were "going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas" in the aftermath of Helene.

There can be differences of “opinion” on “fixes” to common issues that affect everyone, especially working people. But Trump and those who enable him don’t have a “plan” to “fix” anything (except close the border, which will be a lie too, since farmers will still need migrant labor); they just have "plans" to blow things up, allowing Trump to play the vindictive “dictator,” and not just on “Day One.” 

So journalists think they have to be “fair” to Trump and Vance. Why? They are dangerous and need to be exposed. That is the simple truth. Harris and Walz at least have “plans” that are worthy of rational discussion.  Trump has been given ample time to be a rational human being, and he has failed utterly; he is incapable of it. He cannot lead, he is being led by fringe fanatics with a "plan" to succeed in using his stupidity and dementia to manipulate him for their own purposes against the country and the principles it allegedly still stands for.