Democrats’ Justified Growing Frustration with An Irresponsible News Media

“He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists
and criminals,” Beto O’Rourke said of Trump.

The mainstream media's false equivalency in news coverage during the 2016 presidential election helped elect Donald Trump.  Sadly, the problem continues and belatedly Democrats are beginning to call out lazy and irresponsible journalists and media outlets. There is ZERO equivalence between Trump/GOP lies and fact, data and science based Democrat  positions, yet one would rarely get that message from even outlets like the New York Times that fail to take on outright lies and/or continue to broadcast untrue propaganda.  If one is a responsible journalist, you do NOT merely parrot a lie or hate speech and never call out the individual lying or disseminating false and/or racist statements. The Founding Fathers saw the free press as the bulwark of protection against dishonest politicians and policies, yet too much of the media has failed to fulfill its critical role in safeguarding both the truth and democracy itself. A piece in Politico looks at the long overdue backlash against an often complicit media.   Here are excerpts:

A liberal backlash against the news media’s coverage of Donald Trump and the 2020 race was already brewing when the New York Times published a five-word headline Monday night summarizing the president’s reaction to the mass shootings over the weekend: “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.”

“Unbelievable,” steamed Beto O’Rourke. “That’s not what happened,” wrote Kirsten Gillibrand. “Lives literally depend on you doing better,” Cory Booker tweeted.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said senior editors quickly recognized problems with the original headline Monday night and rewrote it. “The fact that Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker didn’t like it didn’t influence me,” Baquet said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t need the entire political field to tell me we wrote a bad headline. It was evident.”

Still, the furious response capped an outpouring of frustration lately from 2020 candidates, Democratic strategists and left-leaning columnists over everything from CNN’s handling of last week’s primary debate to coverage of race and white supremacists to the years-old gripe that news organizations are too willing to amplify Trump’s words.

O’Rourke channeled that discontent best Sunday with an exasperated reaction to a reporter’s question about what Trump could do in response to the deaths of 22 people in El Paso at the hands of a suspected white nationalist.

“He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals,” O’Rourke responded. “Members of the press, what the fuck?”

Neera Tanden, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, told POLITICO that O’Rourke “spoke for millions of liberals” with those three words.

“If you’re thinking, ‘Can Trump make this better?’ you’re absolving him of his role in this, and it makes people think you don’t get it,” Tanden said.

Democrats and progressives expressed some frustration with the media in 2016, claiming that journalists neglected Sen. Bernie Sanders early on and that they were obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails. And Democrats are quick to distinguish their critique of the news media from that of the right, especially Trump’s attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people.” O’Rourke, for one, has told crowds that the media is not the “enemy,” and nearly every Democratic campaign has vowed to bring back White House press briefings if elected.

Still, the critique of the news media is cropping up more as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, including during the primary debates hosted by CNN. And it has the potential to hurt the news business’ reputation with a large chunk of the electorate, just as Republican voters became less inclined to trust the mainstream media after years of candidates decrying what they viewed as liberal bias.

“A vast swath of Democratic voters are pretty angry at the media,” . . . . They see a media obsessed with Trump voters who like his rhetoric and little interest in those targeted by his rhetoric. I think Beto's comments spoke to a feeling that media as currently constructed is not up to the moment we are living in." Brian Fallon, who served as deputy press secretary for Clinton’s 2016 campaign and is now executive director of progressive organization Demand Justice, told POLITICO on Monday afternoon that “a lot of Democrats are understandably exasperated about the broken state of the media in the age of Trump.” “Instead of the media standing up against his lies, we get thought pieces about whether the truth really matters anymore,” he continued. “Instead of calling out Trump's racism, we see headline writers engaged in acrobatics designed to achieve some false measure of objectivity.”

On Monday night, Fallon was one of the prominent progressive critics to pounce on the Times’s initial headline choice about Trump’s press conference on the shootings. Editor Baquet "cares more about being seen as impartial by diehard supporters of Donald Trump than he does about faithfully representing what is happening in American politics,” Fallon tweeted.

Some liberal Times subscribers, however, disagree. The hashtag #CancelNYT was trending Tuesday morning. Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Sen. Harry Reid, said on Twitter that he was going to do just that.

“I resisted for a long time but I’m cancelling my NYT subscription today,” he tweeted. “Great reporters but terrible editorial judgment on headlines and social media, which is all most people read. It can’t be the paper of record anymore if it doesn’t accurately report the news.”

Appeasing Trump and/or his base is NOT what a responsible journalist does. Instead, exposing lies and racist and misogynist fear mongering is what needs to be done.