The American News Media Is Derelict In Its Duty To Warn Voters That Trump Is A Fascist

Bonnie Fuller writes the blog Your Body Your Choice and is a contributing writer to Courier Newsroom and Ms. Magazine covering reproductive freedom and political issues. She is the CEO of HollywoodLife.com and former Editor-in-Chief of US Weekly, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire & YM.

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Credit: David Maxwell/EPA, via Shutterstock VIA 

The publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post revealing how he was preparing for “a quiet war” against the press if Donald Trump is re-elected.

Sulzberger admitted that he and his colleagues have spent months studying how authoritarian leaders, including Trump’s favorite dictator, Viktor Orban of Hungary, have systematically destroyed their country’s independent media.

At the same time, Sulzberger does not think that Trump poses such a high risk to the survival of the free press that news organizations should “cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his re-election.”

I’m sure the Founding Fathers would disagree.

They believed the importance of a free press and free speech were so vital to the survival of a democratic American Republic that they protected it in the very first amendment to the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of people peaceably to assemble…”).

That’s why it’s so unnerving that today many journalists, including those at the New York Times, are choosing to abdicate their own right to ensure a free press can survive after the possible election of a dictator who menaces them as the “enemy of the people.”

But there’s another responsibility of the Fourth Estate that Sulzberger, as the leader of the country’s most prominent news organization, is abdicating today: The “duty to warn.”

And he’s not alone. His peers at most of America’s elite news organizations  - whether they are print, broadcast, or digital  - have also decided to treat the openly fascist leader of the Republican party as normal. Today’s journalists are blind to the trust that has been placed in them by the Founding Fathers.

They should be making daily warnings in their news reporting, headline-writing, top of the site or top of the newscast placements, and in their opinion sections, that Trump and his Project 2025 plans would end democracy and therefore impact every aspect of their lives.

As a result of this journalistic dereliction of duty, millions of mainstream media consumers still have no idea of what is in the “Project 2025” plan drafted by Trump allies. Many mainstream news organizations have done some excellent coverage of Project 2025 but, considering its likely apocalyptic effects, their coverage is a pittance. And it’s not explicit nor alarmist enough. Note to political reporters - Project 2025 is Trump and the GOP’s policy package. 

The public needs to be more effectively warned that, if elected, Trump plans to subvert and bypass Congress, disregard the rule of law, and explicitly treat more than half the country as his enemy. Yes, the small group of individuals who make up the New York Times Editorial Board has called Trump “unfit” in a handful of editorials and has endorsed Harris for president  - but those actions are far outweighed by the voluminous “both sides” “normalization” and “sanewashing” political coverage that permeates the Paper of Record. 

The top editors of leading news organizations should run giant tabloid - size headlines about the freedoms on Trump’s chopping block. Doing so would not be biased or partisan - it would be reporting reality. These include the freedom nationally to access abortion, contraception and IVF, the freedom of the press, the freedom to a non-Christian religious education, the freedom to marry who you love, the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water, the freedom to mitigate against climate change, the freedom from gun violence and the freedom to vote in future elections for  representatives of your choice.

And let’s not forget - Trump has repeatedly threatened that anyone who opposes him politically will be punished. So just like in Putin’s Russia, there will likely no longer be an American right to ever replace Trump once he is in power.

Considering all this, why are Sulzberger and other influential media leaders missing the biggest news story of their lifetimes? The biggest since America actually became an independent country: 

The end of American democracy.

Just in case they aren’t aware of what a fascist is, here’s a comprehensive definition from Robert Paxton, the highly regarded Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at the Department of History at Columbia University. 

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim - hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass - based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Media leaders need to stop failing in their responsibilities of leadership, and use the bullhorn of their platforms to link all of Trump’s fascistic characteristics together into compelling news and editorial stories which clearly demonstrate to Americans that he’s a fascist: his alliance with White “Christian” Nationalists, assertions to his mostly White followers that they are the “real Americans”, his dire declarations that America is a crime-infested “Third World hellhole”, his threats of violence, attacks on immigrants, migrants and political opponents as “vermin”, his attacks on Jews as “disloyal” and his hateful demonizing of people of color (including Kamala Harris), his misogynistic attacks on any woman who stands up to his bullying, and his efforts to subvert elections.

All of this is a part of a pattern that should be front page news. 

Seven hundred bi-partisan senior former national security and military leaders have described Trump as “unfit”, “ill-informed”, “vengeful” and “Impulsive” in their endorsement of Kamala Harris. They describe the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, as the alternative between democracy and authoritarianism.

These national security experts believe that they have “a duty to warn” the public about a second term under Donald Trump. They are doing their job.

Their warning should have been at the top of every evening newscast and the top of every news site.

The Founding Fathers knew that a free, unhindered, outspoken press was essential to a democracy and they feared the persuasive power of demagogues like Donald Trump. The free press was also meant to be an essential check on the behavior of political leaders to prevent tyranny. They didn’t want the press to stay ‘neutral’ when there was a clear and present danger to democracy. They imbued the press with the duty to warn.

As a case study of mainstream media failures, take the example of the Trump/Vance-concocted Springfield, Ohio pet-eating propaganda.

How many major news outlets have: 

(1) Clearly, prominently and repeatedly called out Trump and JD Vance for lying (instead of using less strong words like ‘mistruths’ or ‘unproven claims’) – about immigrants eating pets, the number of Haitians in Springfield and that they are “illegal”and spreading disease, or that VP Harris “waved a magic wand and made the Haitians legal.” 

(2) Pointed out that this episode is the latest in a pattern of Trump using outlandishly racist propaganda about immigrants - to advance his narrative and agenda. The completely fictional Springfield pet crisis has stopped the media from reporting on Project 2025, his disastrous debate performance, and the devastating news that women are dying from his state abortion bans.

(3) How many have questioned both Trump and Vance’s fitness to hold the country’s highest offices when they are willing to attack a small midwestern city, and even when presented with the facts that their lies led to bomb threats terrorizing the city, continued their lying?

This is exactly what fascists do - provoke violence against groups within the country that they consider “impure.”

The media doesn’t have to give up any of its “journalistic independence” when it tells the unvarnished truth and reality about Trump to their audiences. It is simply a fact that Trump and his agenda are the biggest internal threat to democracy that the country has ever faced.

If A.G. Sulzberger and other mainstream media leaders don’t believe that Trump is a fascist and that a fascist leading America isn’t an existential threat to the world - they are either frighteningly naive, timid or delusional. If they “follow the facts” about Trump and give their audiences the essential context they deserve, then they will be fulfilling their fundamental duty to inform and warn.