Are You Ready for Some Not-So-Tough Questions?
CBS’s Lesley Stahl started 60 Minutes’ pre-election interview with President Donald Trump (10/25/20) by asking, “Are you ready for some tough questions?” Note that this is not a tough question: The correct answer for any candidate is “yes.” Despite Trump’s hostile reaction, Stahl’s questions did not get all that much tougher, including such softballs as “Why do you want to be president again?” and “Can you characterize your supporters?” At one point, Stahl referred to Covid-19 and unemployment and remarked, “It’s like the gods have suddenly decided to conspire against you”—as if Trump bore no responsibility for the US’s disastrous coronavirus response, or for his decision to oppose further pandemic relief until after the election (Twitter, 10/6/20).
NPR Attributes Election Worries to ‘Extremists on Right and Left’
“With Election Day less than a week off now, anxiety is running high,” declared NPR’s David Greene (Morning Edition, 10/28/20). “Activists and extremists on both the right and left are worried the other side is going to somehow steal the election.” On the one hand, said Greene’s colleague Joel Rose, people on the right are “concerned about the integrity of mail-in ballots,” based on President Donald Trump “claiming, without evidence, that the system is rife with fraud.” On the other hand, the left fears a scenario where Trump “tries to end vote-counting prematurely” (which is, of course, exactly what went on to happen).
Describing this “distrust” on both sides to be a “toxic brew,” Morning Edition said the solution was “for political leaders on all sides to de-escalate tensions.”
AP’s Debate: How Quickly Should DoJ Move Against President’s Enemies?
Associated Press (10/8/20) reported that Trump was pushing for a Justice Department probe of the 2016 election led by US Attorney John Durham to announce arrests, preferably of “prominent Obama administration officials,” before the November 3 election. The Trump campaign, AP explained, had “banked on the Durham probe being finished before 2020 election to lend credibility to Trump’s claims that his own investigative agencies were working against him.”
How did AP headline this report of the president trying to turn the prosecutorial powers of the state against his enemies for political gain? With the bland “Trump, Barr at Odds Over Slow Pace of Durham Investigation.”
WaPo Op-Ed: Progressives Need to Reflect on Why They’re So Vengeful
Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote a Washington Post op-ed “Let History, Not Partisans, Prosecute Trump” (10/16/20), that argued against a truth commission in the wake of the Trump administration. Instead, she urged, Trump’s “wrongdoing…should be investigated by journalists, chronicled by historians and, in some instances, tried in ordinary courts.” “Many Trump critics will find this suggestion maddeningly insufficient,” Lepore acknowledged, while claiming that “the appetite for vengeance is a symptom of the same poison.” What was really needed, Lepore wrote, was
self-reflection, not only from Republicans but also from establishment Democrats and progressives and liberals and journalists and educators and activists and social media companies and, honestly, everyone.
This column was heralded as “eloquent” by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof (Twitter, 10/18/20), but FAIR’s Janine Jackson (11/13/20) likened it to similar calls to not prosecute perpetrators of torture, or bankers whose fraud caused the financial meltdown of 2008. “Erasing the real harms done to real people,” Jackson wrote, is “not ‘politic,’ or ‘pragmatic’—it’s perverse.”
You Actually Can’t Start Your Own Army
You often see news about self-proclaimed “militia” groups: armed paramilitary organizations that claim to be defending the public against assorted threats. But how often do you hear that such groups are by their nature illegal? As the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection’s Mary McCord told CounterSpin (10/9/20):
There is no authority under federal or state law for groups of armed individuals to sort of self-activate as a militia and undertake what are typically law enforcement functions. … All 50 states include provisions, either in their state constitutions or in state statutes, that bar private, unauthorized paramilitary activity.
Maybe Unfamiliarity Isn’t the Problem With Cops
Everyday NYPD officers have arrested me, pepper-sprayed me, hit me with batons, driven me around in a pitch black transport van while violently starting and stopping, insulted me, and threatened me with additional jail time if I didn’t provide biometric data I wasn’t required to.
—independent journalist John Knefel (Radio Dispatch), responding on Twitter (10/20/20) to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio issuing a “challenge to all of you in the media: Go talk to everyday officers.”
Youth Surged, Media Yawned
Voting by youth surged in the 2020 election—up an estimated 8 percentage points compared to 2016 (Vox, 11/9/20), and providing Joe Biden’s margin of victory in battleground states. Media’s interest in young voters, however, dropped sharply since the Democratic primaries. A study by Lauren Balser (FAIR.org, 11/3/20) found that 12 stories in the New York Times substantively discussed youth and the election from March through June—while only four stories did so from July 1 through October 26. And what coverage there was of youth sometimes left out their perspective, as with a Times article (10/8/20) on why young people don’t vote that didn’t quote any young non-voters.
Anonymous Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter Meets QAnon as Newest Members of Congress Arrive
—New York Times headline (11/13/20) equivalating a belief that Trump is fighting a cabal of devil-worshiping Democratic pedophiles with the belief that police shouldn’t murder Black people
