The GOP Threat to Democracy
“Trump Caused the Assault on the Capitol. He Must Be Removed,” declared the Washington Post editorial board (1/6/21) immediately after the January 6 insurrection. “Responsibility for this act of sedition lies squarely with the president, who has shown that his continued tenure in office poses a grave threat to US democracy,” they wrote. “He should be removed.”
It was a surprisingly forceful position. At the same time, imagine if the paper—and the rest of the establishment media—had taken the GOP’s threat to democracy seriously before it reached the point of the president inciting an armed insurrection on Capitol Hill (Extra!, 1-2/21). The assault on the vote counting was the logical outcome of years of the GOP casting aside institutional rules and norms with increasing boldness, as the press corps described this increasingly authoritarian behavior as “us[ing] all of the levers of his power” (FAIR.org, 10/15/20), and years of giving Trump and his allies space to make their bogus claims of election fraud (FAIR.org, 9/15/20). The media’s long history of both sides–ing the issue of purported election fraud (e.g., Extra!, 11-12/08) paved the way for Trump’s mythology that has seduced a breathtakingly—and dangerously—large proportion of the public.
The real test of corporate media is not whether they were able to forcefully condemn a president’s seditious acts, but whether they go back to business as usual now that Trump is out of office, pretending that the GOP, a disturbing number of whose members in Congress still pushed to overturn the election after the armed insurrection, is a democratic institution that can be counted on to restore faith in democracy.
Impeachment False Balance
In the wake of January 6, many in corporate media did display a new and refreshing ability to apply accurate labels to people and their behaviors (“sedition,” “incitement,” “white nationalists,” etc.) and to apportion blame based on reality, not a wished-for fantasy of balance.
But at the New York Times, longtime White House correspondent Peter Baker (1/13/21) proved incapable of escaping the magnetic pull of both sides–ism as he described the second impeachment of Donald Trump:
President Trump’s term is climaxing in violence and recrimination at a time when the country has fractured deeply and lost a sense of itself. Notions of truth and reality have been atomized. Faith in the system has eroded. Anger is the one common ground.
As if it were not enough that Mr. Trump became the only president impeached twice or that lawmakers were trying to remove him with days left in his term, Washington devolved into a miasma of suspicion and conflict.
The endless string of passive constructions dissolve all blame into a similar miasma. In fact, one faction of the country has been encouraged and enabled by Trump and his GOP supporters to embrace an increasingly vocal and emboldened fascism. That the New York Times‘ senior White House scribe cannot bring himself to distinguish between these things seems reason enough to disqualify him from his job.
Wonderboy Bezos
Papers across the country carried the news that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is stepping away from the CEO role. Readers of stories like AP‘s February 2 report heard once again the story of how what started in a Seattle garage is now one of the world’s most valuable companies, “worth” some $1.7 trillion, “swelling” Bezos’ own riches along the way.
You can read this story with a magnifying glass and find not a hint of the concurrent major news story: that the Federal Trade Commission had to force Amazon to pay some $62 million for stealing tips from their delivery drivers, nearly a third of their tips over a two-year period (Vice, 2/2/21).
Media reported the story—though headlines talked about “allegations,” when the story is about an FTC ruling, and about Amazon “with-holding” tips, when what they did was steal them. And by making wage theft and deception—besides Amazon‘s tax avoidance, dangerous workplaces and union busting—a separate story on a separate page from that of Wonderboy Bezos and the Company That Could, corporate media go out of their way to protect the narrative of the “self-made” magnate, his ungodly profits earnestly come by, and to resist what might be the natural tendency of readers to put what Jeff Bezos calls his “Amazon winnings” in the context of broader societal costs.
Deficit Hawks Fly Again
While media had little problem with the Trump tax cuts as they were happening (FAIR.org, 2/28/18), the party is now over, and it’s apparently time for austerity.
The Washington Post (1/14/21) led the fearmongering in a piece co-produced with ProPublica, warning that the “immense” debt was “approaching World War II levels,” but that “this time around, it will be much harder to dig ourselves out.” Fortune (1/14/21) went even further, claiming that the US is now in a similar debt position to Italy, “the most worrisome basket case among Europe’s major economies.” Not to be out-sensationalized, Business Insider (1/17/21) insisted that “America’s soaring national debt is a looming disaster.”
Rock-bottom interest rates make these debts particularly straightforward to pay off in the future. Without relief, we will see sustained decreases in living standards for ordinary Americans (Beat the Press, 1/13/21). Ultimately, however, that is the point of deficit hawkery: to scold and scare readers into accepting cuts to welfare and public services that are of no use to the wealthy.
