'Spiritual,' 'Serene,' 'Chosen by God': An Assassination Attempt and the Death of Accountability Journalism
Good News, Bad News Special Edition for July 19, 2024. With 109 days left until Election Day we need political coverage that uplifts and defends democracy.
Every week until the election, we’ll compare our pro-democracy election coverage guidelines with ongoing election coverage to highlight which newsrooms are standing up for democracy and which are sleepwalking us towards a dictatorship. We hope this inspires you to make more informed choices about where you get your news and strengthens your resolve to join us in advocating for the pro-democracy media Americans need. And now…
Let me begin this week’s column by stating that I unequivocally reject all forms of political violence. No one should attempt to take the life of a candidate for U.S. president.
At the core of our democratic system is a promise to settle our differences with robust debate that culminates in a peaceful transition of power following free and fair elections. Our nation’s most perilous episodes have come when, as a people, we have given up on that promise.
The promise of journalism is to hold the powerful to account while informing the electorate of the facts and context necessary for us to make decisions in the best interest of our families and communities at the ballot box. Now, as our nation faces perhaps its most perilous moment—the potential end of our democracy—our most prominent journalists are giving up on that promise.
In a piece for The Guardian entitled, “‘Turning down the temperature’ shouldn’t mean silencing all criticism of Trump,” Margaret Sullivan wrote this week of “a broader movement to shut down criticism and accountability for Trump in the wake of the shooting.” She went on to write more about what turning down the temperature shouldn’t mean:
It shouldn’t mean transforming him into some mythic combination of martyr and hero. And it certainly shouldn’t mean that he gets a pass – a literal get-out-of-jail-free card – for his innumerable past misdeeds.
Unfortunately, our mainstream media, in its role as ultimate arbiter of belief and narrative, has simply ceased most criticism of Trump in the last five days. It has transformed the only president to ever attempt a coup—a man adjudicated to have raped someone—into a different person, a redeemed hero, basically because he and his surrogates say so. With instantly created myths (just add water!), it has forgotten the GOP’s embrace of Trump, its devotion to lies and extreme rhetoric—about elections, the LGBTQ+ community, Ukraine, climate, abortion, and the rule of law. Amidst unfounded talk of GOP pivots it has become clear the pivot is, in fact, being made by our national media, hell bent on avoiding holding the most extreme political party of my lifetime accountable.
Below is a chronicle of our mainstream media’s pivot away from the accountability journalism that’s needed more than ever if our nation is to prevent a fascist consolidation of power.
Newly Minted Myth #1: Donald Trump is Now a Serene Figure in The Midst of a Pivot Away From Hate and Diviseness
On Friday of last week mainstream newsrooms would have, without blinking, told you Trump is the most divisive figure in the last 50 years of American history. Just days later, he was being held up as a “serene” figure, according to MSNBC’s Katy Tur.
On July 15th, Axios founders Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen penned this:
In the piece, they wrote this:
I have no explanation for why the two founders of a major corporate news outlet would make up a fantasy like this about Trump, other than it’s what the Trump campaign asked Jim and Mike to do, and, being sympathetic to Trump—perhaps with a craven eye towards the sensationalism-driven profits they believe his next term would bring—they obliged. It’s nothing short of an assassination attempt being used as an excuse to craft a profit boosting narrative.
For readers who think that’s a wild accusation, see for yourself how Allen hammered his just invented “new tone” narrative in an interview with Don. Jr. the next day.
The narrative is presented:
Don Jr. proves incapable of playing along:
And, right back to lying about elections:
Allen: If former president Trump loses, it’ll be why?
Don Jr.: It’ll be why? Well, I’d say cheating.
The “new tone” was turning out to be bullshit.
The overt corporate media effort to utilize Trump’s attempted assassination to absolve him of decades of reprehensible behavior is seen even more clearly in The Daily Beast’s wholesale fabrication that Trump has become “spiritual.”
According to the Beast, Trump has “reportedly” grown spiritual. The quotation marks around ‘spiritual,’ imply that someone said this to Daily Beast reporter Mary Anne Akers. I searched for the word in the article so I could quickly see who made the remark. The search returned only one result…from the headline. Mary Ann Akers, her editors, and the Beast’s headline writers completely fabricated that ‘spiritual’ was said by anyone. I guess it’s too much to expect a Deputy Washington Bureau Chief and former Washington Post reporter to be honest with readers.
I can’t be surprised that the Post didn’t instill a sense of integrity in Akers. Here are some of the Post’s chosen frames.
In the shooting’s aftermath, Jonathan Martin of Politico assured readers that by surviving an assassination attempt Trump would “cement his legacy.” Legacy of what? Defrauding American voters to the tune of 34 felony convictions, causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths with his mishandling of the COVID pandemic, or his attempt to ban from American shores an entire global religion’s worth of people? Lying thousands of times about elections? Mocking Paul Pelosi’s more serious injuries when he was the victim of political violence? Making fun of a disabled reporter? Bragging about sexual assault? Barging into changing rooms to ogle nude children?
And here’s Jonathan Martin’s colleague, Natalie Allison, going H.A.M. on talking points fed to her by inveterate liars:
Not to be outdone, this was one of the New York Times’ frames:
Literally what political rebirth? Trump posted this on Truth Social on Tuesday, before half of these re-imaginings were even published.
Media’s purposeful whitewashing of the reality of Trump’s words and actions is an anti-democracy affront to the profession of journalism. There is no pivot and no new tone, only statements to that effect made to the press by Trump surrogates. That the press has run away with this narrative is a disgrace.
Newly Minted Myth #2: The Republican Party and Democratic Party are Equally to Blame for Violent Rhetoric
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Exhibit D:
Lost amidst the false media push about violent rhetoric on ‘both-sides’ is the accountability coverage voters require. Mainstream media is lessening the severity of Republican embrace of political violence by creating for viewers a false equivalence between the incessant pro-violence imagery and rhetoric of GOP politicians, and the necessary warnings leveled by the only major party committed to the survival of democracy.
As a reminder, this is the Republican party:
Greg Sargent brilliantly elaborated on this media failure in The New Republic.
Newly Minted Myth #3: J.D. Vance is a Normal Politician
Project 2025’s promise to destroy our rights and democracy, on the back of Trump’s election, did not disappear Saturday evening, but it disappeared from news coverage. It disappeared from being communicated as a pressing concern to Americans, in as much as it ever was.
J.D. Vance is all in on the horrors of Project 2025. Would viewers get that understanding after watching this from ABC News?
During the same evening of convention coverage, one ABC News guest, Julie Roginsky, attempted to provide some context of how morally reprehensible J.D. Vance is, and it apparently wasn’t well received by the narrative makers.
If a New York Times reader sees this…
…where are they getting the context that Vance endorses vigilante political violence? That he is all in for a national abortion ban? That he sides with Putin and is in the pocket of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel?
Here’s Vance on his admiration for killer Kyle Rittenhouse:
Here’s Vance turning the temperature on incendiary political rhetoric way, way up:
And just for fun, here’s all the times, before selling out completely, Vance criticized his now running mate. At one point, he called Trump America’s Hitler.
Newly Minted Myth #4: The Republican Party is United and Focused on Unifying America
Check out this obscene gaslighting from the NBC News crew. Savannah Guthrie basically lies to the American voter here:
With a straight face, Guthrie says it’s notable that there are no political grievances being expressed at the convention. Welker says, “it represents a shift.” She says the speeches are “toned down.”
Ok.
Here are some counter examples:
And here’s some stuff I guess they didn’t see from before the convention started:
Here’s the New York Times again making up that the GOP is unified:
And here’s Matt Gaetz fighting with Kevin McCarthy:
That certainly looks dysfunctional. Can you imagine what our national media would do if AOC confronted Nancy Pelosi like this?
Will the Press Recover?
The totality of our national media’s turnaround since Saturday’s horrific assassination attempt has been as breathtaking as it has been predictable. For years we’ve watched as extremist talking points, brayed with head-spinning frequency by provocateurs, have been laundered into the mainstream by an accommodating press. CRT, DEI, woke, and grooming are now easily comprehensible national buzzwords, the result of wall-to-wall coverage from major newsrooms quick to engage with the well-oiled right-wing media complex. This obeisance to the GOP line overshadows and limits the critical coverage warranted for real problems facing Americans, such as wealth inequality, impending climate disaster, labor and environmental issues, gun violence, Supreme Court corruption, foreign affairs, and so much more.
There is still time, millenia in campaign years, for the national press to pivot towards accountability journalism. However, this begs the question, were they ever doing it in the first place? And if the answer is “yes,” what’s the quality of that yes? Are voters being made aware, with the frequency and prominence required, of the threats to their lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness promised in Trump’s Project 2025 platform?
When Eric Trump is invited onto MSNBC, are they asking him about the ReAwaken America Tour, where he and Mike Flynn parade a bunch of “pastors” around the country to tell audiences that Democrats literally drink the blood of children? Or will they just let him deliver whatever talking points he wants?
Again, it’s a matter of frequency and prominence.
Does it matter that Daniel Dale appears on CNN to reveal that the Republican National Convention has so far featured a tsunami of lying if 90% of the rest of CNN’s coverage whitewashes those lies?
In my last column, I shared that in the week following the first presidential debate, the New York Times ran 192 stories on Biden’s performance. When you couple that stunning revelation with a peek at today’s Times coverage of the RNC, you have to wonder whether there’s any room leftover for substantive coverage of policy positions and the threats to democracy posed by the radical GOP. And, if any of that coverage peeks out from behind the veil of Trump/GOP normalization, does anybody have the attention span to see it? The mainstream press is making it so you have to go looking, very hard and at great time expense, to learn what’s really going on.
Are voters being informed of much of anything useful to their democratic decision making at all? In May it was revealed that a third of voters had heard nothing of Biden’s domestic spending initiatives.
If voter’s don’t know anything about what a candidate has done, and only know he is old, has the press done its job at all? If voter’s have heard about American inflation ad nauseam, but with far less frequency are given the context that we’ve faired better in post-pandemic recovery than most all other nations, is journalism in America functioning to inform the electorate, or push the narratives preferred by the wealthy people at the gears of that journalism?
As an example:
How many Americans have received information that allows them to compare the two candidates versus information that allows them to accept a narrative crafted for them?
And where is just…basic journalism? In the last three weeks since the debate, our press picked up on a story pushed by right-wing disinformers that Biden had Parkinson’s Disease. They demanded medical records and clamored for more information, based on a fake story.
A former president was almost assassinated, suffering a gunshot wound, and our national newsrooms haven’t been demanding to know the state of Trump’s injuries?
Ultimately, the new tone narrative, as anyone not in the business of pushing corporate media narratives could have predicted, was obliterated by Trump’s two-hour long acceptance speech last night.
After his latest diatribe of lies, grievance, and glowing regards for the “late, great Hannibal Lecter,” will newsrooms continue making willful decisions to whitewash Trump’s lack of fitness? After all, he’s been giving incoherent monologues for years at his rallies. Too often, the press has chosen to shield voters from the awful truth of his lunacy. It seems that at least CBS is willing to still carry his water:
Will media continue to filter out the lies in service to the Republican party?
Trump was lucky to survive the attack on him.
Without a functioning press, Americans will need all the luck in the world to preserve their democracy. Journalism, democracy’s immune system, is failing.
To paraphrase Orwell, the news media is withholding evidence from our eyes and ears. It may be their final act before the end of American democracy.
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