Both Sides-ing Our Way to Fascism

The Media Thumb on the 2024 Election Scale

It’s not your imagination; the mainstream media has dumbed down. Or worse.

(Don’t worry; you’ll figure out the lead graphic’s relevance if you read the story.)

The candidates of the Republican Party for the top jobs in the U.S. are spending their days piling one outrage upon another. It’s clear Trump/Vance are appealing to their base and regard the rest of the electorate as too stupid to care about what’s being said and done.

They’re getting an assist from mainstream media reporters, who fail to give voters proper context, and educate them about political reality.

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice just did a dandy job of taking apart the “fact check” mechanism used by conventional mass media at the Democratic National Convention, in an attempt to make themselves seem objective:

• Throughout the DNC, prominent “fact-checkers” filtered Trump’s remarks through a MAGA spin cycle. To be blunt, it’s shockingly poor journalism.

• The media’s “both sides” approach to fact-checking creates the false impression that Harris and Trump stretch the truth in equal measure, but Harris’s supposed rounding errors on Social Security or slight embellishments about job numbers are nowhere in the same universe as Trump’s pathological distortions and contempt for the truth. Nitpick Harris to death if you must, but stop treating convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and indicted coup plotter Trump like a traditional candidate rather than an existential threat to democracy. (Fact check: no exaggeration)

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Outrage about the Trump campaign recording a commercial at the Arlington National Cemetery has not abated. And the mainstream media hasn’t given it its due.

The Army (the agency responsible for the cemetery) felt obliged to issue a statement in defense of their employee charged with enforcement of the facility’s rules who was verbally and physically assaulted during the incident.

The Trump campaign’s initial response to news of the incident was to issue a statement disparaging the mental health of the cemetery employee. A campaign manager responded to the Army statement by re-airing the footage used in the commercial. 

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports

• The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. 

• As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that?

Yes, this was just another example of the arrogance of the Trump campaign that’s been normalized in the media for the last decade. On the scale of one to ten, it was probably a three, mostly because the law was broken. (The victim of the assault in question declined to press charges and does not want to be identified due to a fear of retribution.)

But, stop for a moment and consider what the coverage would have been if either or both of the Democrats’ top of the ticket candidates pulled a similar stunt?

I mean, come on. If Kamala Harris not including her high school McDonalds employment on a resume for a law clerk’s job warrants a headline, then it’s clear there’s a double standard at play.

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The DNC’s decision to invite non-traditional coverage of their nominating convention has paid off. Content creators at the DNC produced nearly 7,000 posts, resulting in nearly 400 million impressions, according to a Harris campaign official.

Once the convention ended, assorted mainstream media pundits reclaimed their whine about the nominee granting a one-on-one interview. So CNN’s Dana Bash got the job, and VP candidate Tim Walz joined in.

It was obvious from the chatter on social media that the Trump camp expected an interview conducted by a host with known conservative leanings to generate some sort of commentary critical of the Democratic candidates demeanor or advocacy.

Bash lived up to expectations, as only four questions weren’t asking for a response to a GOP attack or talking point. The candidates played it cool, giving milquetoast answers and smiling a lot. So this interview was considered a “win” for Democrats. Talk about lowered expectations.

Here’s Marcos at Daily Kos:

• However, this was a little… boring? There was nothing new here, no big revelations that we didn’t already know because Harris is already communicating all this to voters. It’s hard for the media to internalize this, but they don’t matter as much anymore. 

• If the media wants relevance, maybe stop claiming a “CNN EXCLUSIVE” to Trump’s reaction to a speech that hadn’t even aired.

• This was literally before the interview aired: 

  

  And maybe the media can stop pretending that Trump isn’t far more cognitively declined than Biden ever was: 

Trump: Some people don't eat bacon anymore. This was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. When it doesn't blow, we have a problem.

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Then there are the “undecided voter panels” being used by cable news networks. CNN’s Pennsylvania panel included Bryant Rosado, whose social media history makes it clear that he’s firmly in the MAGA camp.

As Parker Malloy at The New Republic noted, this is hardly the first time CNN has deceived the public:

• In December 2015, CNN aired a focus group of supposed Trump supporters, featuring a woman named Susan DeLemus. Her unhinged rant about President Obama went viral, but CNN failed to disclose a crucial detail: DeLemus was a sitting New Hampshire State Representative, having served two terms as a Republican. This detail makes it clear that she wasn’t just your average Republican voter, but that fact was left out of the segment.

• This wasn’t even the first time CNN had featured DeLemus without proper context. In July of the same year, she appeared in another Trump-focused focus group, again presented as just an average voter rather than a birther who once tried to keep Obama off the New Hampshire ballot.

• In September 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 featured five “conservative women from Florida” discussing sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh. Their dismissive attitudes shocked viewers, but journalist James Surowiecki soon revealed that at least three of these women were GOP political operatives or former Republican candidates.

And it’s not just CNN that plays this game.

This morning (!) MSNBC aired a "voter" panel in North Carolina where one of the six participants was identified as a Republican congressional candidate. Since the network ran with the premise that the panel was two each of mixed race Dems, Inds, Reps, it might have been sort-of fair….

…But this group was from North Carolina, where Black Republicans are often attention-seeking wackos. (witness their Lt. Governor) This guy basically claimed that Kamala Harris isn't black and he was shocked to learn she's black. Having successfully poisoned the discussion, he was admonished by the moderator. The network could have (it wasn’t hard) dug up that the guy is associated with the extreme Christian supremacist Nexus Mountain Network, which is backing candidates it believes will help them take over government at every level. But they didn’t.

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Finally, there’s the whole “horse race” metaphor that’s been overused to obscure the big picture issues in political analysis. I think we’ve all heard that we should ignore the polls, and that’s true as far as pushing back against complacency goes. 

Candidates and campaigns reduced to “leading by 2 points” leave electoral decision making without context. It’s not biased to say there are larger issues, even if reporters try to project a neutral tone.

Evidence of the existential nature of this years’ elections is all around us. 

Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance was interviewed on CNN this morning and was asked if the crude innuendo being employed by the Trump campaign was “lifting people up.”  His response included a defense of Trump as “a political candidate who isn’t stodgy and likes to tell some jokes…”

Har Har Har Har. Yup, repeating QAnon propaganda and suggesting that women rise through sexual favors is…. Rude and crude by any normal standard. 

So maybe this isn’t a normal election. And maybe it shouldn’t be reported that way.

Pssst: Here’s something you ought to see:

The Harris Effect - in the 13 states that have updated voter files since July 21st, we are seeing incredible surges in voter registration relative to the same time period in 2024, driven by women, voters of color, and young voters.

Among all voters in 13 key states, the voter registration rate for Black women is up more than 175% compared to the same period in 2020, data firm Target Smart found in its analysis. That’s nearly triple what it was four years ago.

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Friday Finds in the News World

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breaking: hillcrest town council dissolved! what's next? By Edgard Portela at essays from the heart & other things

• so, here we are. the hillcrest town council is taking its final bow. but don't start planning the funeral just yet, because like a phoenix rising from the ashes (or like cher coming out of retirement for the 17th time), something new is emerging.

enter: the hillcrest neighborhood association

• ladies, gentlemen, and fabulous beings beyond the binary, allow me to introduce you to the hillcrest neighborhood association (HNA). it's like the town council's cooler, more organized younger sibling who actually remembers to return your texts and always brings the best dish to potlucks.

• the HNA isn't just a rebrand or a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling structure. it's a complete rebuild from the ground up, with a foundation strong enough to support all our community's dreams, schemes, and really good drag shows.

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Confiscate Their Money - Taxing billionaires out of existence must become a mainstream idea. By Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

• What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them? They can still own multiple mansions and a private jet and buy any material thing they want and leave a fortune behind when they die that will take care of their family for generations. 

• As a practical matter of day to day life, they lose nothing. All they really lose is the ability to unduly influence the rest of us. They lose (some of) their ability to act like gods. They are less able to buy governments and exert their will regardless of laws and change cities to suit their whims and generally make all of the other humans on earth into bit players in a play that they write every day entitled “My Own Personal Preferences.” 

• They are forced—ever so slightly!—to live in a world in which a single person cannot just, you know, purchase an entire island for the purpose of building himself an apocalypse bunker, or spend $44 billion to fuck up an important social media platform in order to force more people to read his corny jokes. All of these people would still be fabulously rich. All of them could still live lives of unimaginable luxury. But the situation in which five billionaires have more wealth than billions of other people on earth combined would be mitigated.

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August 29, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American

• Another major story from yesterday is that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment. 

• This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: “This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti–money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can't overstate how important this is. What a feat.” 

• ​​After the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans, who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.