Covering the Republican assault on American democracy

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/voting_rights_bills_democracy_media.php

ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY—amid the typical stories about marches, political speeches, and lawmakers and corporations that have no business quoting King doing so (and being called out for it)—an impending Senate debate on voting protections loomed large in the news cycle, even as its outcome appeared preordained. Senators will today take up a pair of bills, both of which already passed in the House, that enjoy overwhelming support among Senate Democrats but will not pass a Republican filibuster unless Democrats move unanimously to sidestep it, something that senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin (them again) have said they won’t do. In a bid to pressure recalcitrant politicians into reversing course, members of King’s family led a march and convened a news conference in Washington, DC, and also spoke to members of the media separately. The family “cut through the usual lofty invocations to make a specific ask,” Politico’s Eugene Daniels writes: “No celebration without legislation.”

It’s not just senators who are coming under increased scrutiny as the fight to preserve America’s democracy heats up—the political press is, too. The debate as to whether major news organizations are doing enough to communicate the threat and fight back against it isn’t new, but seems to have taken on fresh urgency since the anniversary, two weeks ago, of the insurrection—and the reviews have, for the most part, been mixed at best, very bad at worst. Margaret Sullivan, a media critic at the Washington Post, concluded that while many individual journalists have contributed impressive coverage of the insurrection and ongoing Republican subversion, their employers are mostly “not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public” as a strategic editorial priority; Sullivan’s colleague Perry Bacon Jr., argued, meanwhile, that many outlets are “now defining ‘democracy’ as a core coverage area,” but added that this coverage isn’t always sharply framed and that it could be even more prominent, particularly on widely watched local and national TV network newscasts. The press critic Dan Froomkin, for his part, was more scathing still: “Top editors and reporters,” he wrote, have effectively responded to columns like Sullivan’s and Bacon’s “by giving us all the finger.”

Froomkin was referring, specifically, to coverage of last week’s congressional wrangling over the voting rights bills, arguing that political reporters largely framed them as they would “any other partisan dogfight—without any sense of urgency, without crucial context, and without even explaining what’s in the bills in question.” There have been other specific criticisms of this coverage, too. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, also of the Post, wrote that many reporters have come to accept unanimous Republican opposition to federal voting rights protections “as a natural, unalterable, indelibly baked-in backstop condition of political life,” and thus don’t often bother to hold them accountable for it, instead obsessing over Democratic infighting; Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, cited this trend as evidence that the press continues to prize political “savviness” over integrity in public life, while Wesley Lowery observed that he knows “in deep detail what Manchin/Sinema’s issues” with the bills are but “can’t say the same for the 50 GOP senators.” And various observers pointed out, in a similar vein, that the impending failure of the bills has too often been viewed primarily through the lens of President Biden’s political standing, holding him responsible for Republican obstructionism. Numerous prominent journalists fussed, for example, over Biden’s divisive “tone” after he asked in a recent speech whether senators are on the side of King or segregationists like George Wallace.

In addition to such criticism, observers have offered suggestions as to how the press as a whole might cover threats to democracy better. Rosen and others have long called for news organizations to overtly state their institutional commitment to democracy; Sullivan argued, in her recent column, that outlets should consider putting their coverage of election subversion outside their paywalls, while also emphasizing the stories of people who are fighting to reinvigorate democratic processes. Some outlets are trying to do that themselves: noting recently that media “navel-gazing…rarely results in productive reform,” Tony Marcano, the managing editor of KPCC and LAist in Southern California, explained how his newsroom is working to refocus its politics coverage, rebranding the beat as “Civics and Democracy” and instructing reporters to move beyond electoral horse races and partisan talking points to “examine who gets listened to, and why, and provide a guide to anyone who wants to more fully participate in civic life.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, meanwhile, explained that it is taking a “citizens agenda” approach to a local mayoral election, asking voters what issues they want candidates to address.

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