How the Mainstream Media Enabled, Normalized and Empowered Donald Trump

I have long been critical of the mainstream media and how it uses false equivalency, a desire to appear neutral, and worse yet, its cowardice at calling out liars to empower liars and, in the case of Donald Trump, fascists in the realm of politics.  Donald Trump has always been a narcissistic liar and long viewed himself above the law.  Just ask the City of New York where he routinely flouted the law in his real estate development or look to his high end developments where he laundered dirty Russian money through real estate purchases and sales. By refusing to call Trump a liar and failing to do deep dives on his criminality the mainstream media enabled him and normalized unacceptable behavior.  But Trump is not the only beneficiary of media timidity and false equivalency.  Much of the right, including lying Republican politicians and Christofascists, continues to be allowed to degrade public discourse and make a mockery of truth and morality.   Many in the media expressed shock at the sacking of the U.S. Capitol yet they had helped set the stage for it occurrence.  Until the media ceases its fixation on false equivalency and neutrality and begins to call out lies - generally from Republicans - in a straight forward and consistent manner, things will not improve as the need to. A lie is a lie and should never be allowed to pose as merely a differing opinion.  A piece in Salon looks at how the media helped get us to where we now find ourselves.  Here are highlights:

By largely refusing to join Democrats in voting to impeach Donald Trump, House Republicans sent several messages to their followers, the American people and the world more generally. These include:

• Right-wing political violence is acceptable in the United States — as long as it advances the goals and objectives of the Republican Party and right-wing movement.
• Coup attempts and other efforts to subvert elections or usurp democratic outcomes are now acceptable — if pursued by Republicans and members of the far right against their enemies.
• The United States is no longer the world's leading democracy. If American fascism continues to thrive — Trump won at least 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 — the country's liberal democracy (however imperfect) is in danger of degenerating into what political scientists have described as "competitive authoritarianism," "inverted totalitarianism" or "managed democracy."

In all, the Republican Party has shown once again that it is the most dangerous political organization in the United States and the world.

Many leading voices among the mainstream American news media have spent the last few weeks and months (and for that matter years) downplaying the obvious threat of a coup and other political violence by Donald Trump and his followers.

When the Trump-inspired coup plot was put into action last Wednesday, those same voices in the mainstream news media suddenly shifted their language and tone, emulating those writers, thinkers and activists they had previously — and in some instances very recently — mocked, marginalized, denounced and sought to silence.

Watching this happen is like hearing a movie soundtrack being changed, without interruption, from the wistful chords of a romantic comedy to the thunderous crescendos of an action spectacle.

During last week's siege of the U.S. Capitol, the "hope peddlers" and other professional centrists abruptly appropriated the language of "the Resistance," spontaneously finding last-minute courage to tell the truth about Trump's presidency and his movement. Now those same public voices are pretending they never denied the real dangers of Trumpism and American fascism, playing their new role as imposter defenders of democracy. 

Such a shift in speech, tone and thought is patently insincere: it is the worst sort of cowardice and self-serving behavior, driven by the fear that history will remember one's errors. There are also great financial and reputational incentives in pretending to have been correct all along, when in fact those public voices were repeatedly and fabulously wrong.

As part of this sudden rewrite of history, those in the mainstream news media who denied the obvious reality of Trump's imminent coup (which could have been foretold before he took office in 2017) are also claiming that "we" were all victims of a "failure of imagination" and that "it was impossible to think such a thing could happen" in America.

With such claims, mainstream journalists are adopting a version of the royal first-person plural, speaking of how "we" have finally woken up to the dangers of Donald Trump, or saying that "we" have ignored" the dangers of right-wing extremism in the United States for too long.

In the world as it actually exists, Black and brown Americans have long understood that Donald Trump and his movement are an existential threat to the United States. Because of their personal or historical experience there are other individuals and groups, such as Muslims, Jewish people and recent immigrants and refugees [and gays], who also possess similar insights and instincts.

Many liberals, and progressives of all races, are also aware that Trumpism represents an extreme threat to democracy and American society. And of course, there are a select few public voices who, at considerable personal risk, have spent the last few years sounding the alarm about the rise of American fascism.

When prominent pundits, journalists and others in that sphere make the specious claim that Trump's coup attack and other examples of right-wing terrorism are "unthinkable," they are really pursuing a reclamation project for the reputation and authority of the mainstream media, in an era when that institution has consistently failed to defend democracy.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media is not likely to learn from its errors, or to consider how it enabled, normalized and empowered Donald Trump and his neofascist movement. What should of course happen in the aftermath of Trump's presidency is an ambitious recommitment to advocacy journalism and to holding government accountable, as well as a commitment to diversify America's newsrooms in terms of race, class, geography, professional and educational backgrounds and other meaningful criteria. In that world, the mainstream media would also come to grips with the principle that neutrality is not the same as objectivity.

To wit: It is objectively true that Donald Trump is a public menace. But the hope peddlers, professional centrists and stenographers of current events will inevitably present such facts as opinions demanding "balance" from "both sides" in an equation built on false equivalence.

Such obsolete rules and norms will also inevitably be used as cudgels by the mainstream news media against Joe Biden's administration and the Democratic Party. This will only further embolden the Republican Party and its anti-human and anti-democratic agenda.

Ultimately, because the mainstream news media failed so dramatically in its response to Donald Trump, it will overcompensate through Janus-faced vigilance toward the Biden administration and the liberal or progressive agenda more generally. When this happens — and it is happening already: see Lesley Stahl's interview with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on last Sunday's "60 Minutes" — American democracy will suffer more damage, succumbing still further to the poison of authoritarianism.

Let's also not forget the media's contortions to explain Trump's as a phenomenon of the economic worries of working and low educated Americans when in reality there was always one prime motivating factor: Racism and white Christian Americans' desire to remain the ruling class.