Trump as a threat to democracy
Journalists, from Sweden to America, in search of how to cover him
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“Journalism is important, and doing it right is crucial.”
Margaret Sullivan in American Crisis:
And not only in America, as I quickly noted when I recently arrived in my old hometown Stockholm, a city of around a million people with five daily newspapers and where the U.S. election campaign is covered intensely, even too intensely, some argue.
Just a week in the Stockholm papers: RFK Jr’s candidacy; the Swedish pop group ABBA’s no to the Trump campaign playing their music; the upcoming Harris/Trump debate, the Federal Reserve on the interest rate; the best pod casts on U.S. politics, Harris’s and Walz’s interview with CNN, repercussions for anti-Trump Republicans; and a main editorial in the daily Dagens Nyheter.
So I had high hopes at a panel debate with journalists at the Publicist Club as I stepped off the train from Denmark. But, alas, it never took off, mired instead in internal squabbles and lacking the urgency in America about what’s at stake: the future of American democracy. It never reflected the sentiments of one panel member that this year’s election was not normal but was more business as usual: balance in the coverage, objectivity, fairness.
Like in the United States, there is a debate in Sweden about “both-sides” in journalism but, also, about one-sidedness, as one reporter resigned from her paper citing lack of fairness (on Trump) in the coverage. Emotions run high.
Karin Eriksson, Washington correspondent for Dagens Nyheter, commented on Facebook:
“As I understand it, there is now a discussion in Sweden about whether it is reasonable to describe Trump as a threat to democracy. Everyone makes their choices, but if I start from the period I covered: we are talking about a politician who spent many months in advance painting the 2020 presidential election as rigged, who against his better knowledge refused to admit defeat, who exerted pressure on election officials in the states (for example in Georgia, where he only wanted to find 11,780 votes), hired lawyers who came up with conspiracy theories about voting machines... When none of this worked, the Trump camp chose to concoct a plot with fake electors. And when that attempt also failed, they concocted another crazy theory about Vice President Mike Pence's ability to stop Biden as president. The storming was just the final act.”
For America’s leading media critic, Margaret Sullivan, writing in her newsletter American Crisis that what is going on today in American politics is not normal but, actually, an existential crisis, and “the media should treat it as such.”
“Let’s not repeat 2016 and ask ourselves whether to take Trump “literally or seriously,” she writes. “Let’s instead quote the poet Maya Angelou who said: ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ I fervently wish that the news media would take Trump seriously when it comes to his apparent scorn for voting, for fair elections and for democratic norms.”
For Margaret Sullivan, the question of “both-sides” — that is reporting that seeks equalize the unequal, all in the name of supposed fairness — is a “false equivalence,” and she urges editors and reporters to take Trump’s authoritarian desires “very seriously.”
Yale professor, Timothy Snyder, in Thinking about…, sees “both-sidesism” as “the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause is this odd behavior is ownership of media companies. Another is fear.”
He goes on:
“Both-sidesism passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tend to take it for granted. But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal.”
For the retired conservative judge and staunch Republican, J. Michael Luttig, once seriously considered for the U.S. Supreme Court, the choice is clear and he has thrown his support behind the Harris/Walz ticket:
“In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her policy views are vastly different from my own but I am indifferent in. this election on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all American should be.”
Sullivan thinks Luttig is “exactly right.” Trump is an “existential danger to American democracy as January 6 proved beyond a doubt.”
Sullivan likes to quote journalism professor Jay Rosen at New York University, who has said that what is important is “not the odds, but the stakes.” In other words, focus not on the horse race, not on the polls, not on speculation, but on real information.
However, nearly ten years after Trump first started to run for president, the American media has still not figured out how to cover him, Sullivan writes. This includes the New York Times, the country’s leading newspaper, whose “politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.“
However, Sullivan laments, they (NYT) don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.”
“Journalism is important, and doing it right is crucial.” Indeed.
Great piece. I completely agree with you. Without context and background, facts don't hold water.