Each of us has been a journalist for more than 40 years. We are old enough to remember the racism of George Wallace, the crimes of Richard Nixon, and the stupidity that squandered vast amounts of blood and treasure in Vietnam and Iraq. But nothing prepared us for the wholesale criminality of this administration, or a president for whom “cruelty is the point,” in Adam Serwer’s memorable phrase.
Not since the Civil War has the nation suffered such prolonged, vicious, and effective assaults on all the mechanisms that have given the republic a pulse for 244 years. In just a few days we will learn if there is enough strength left in our democracy’s arteries to allow its revival.
If the Republicans and their Russian allies can’t pull off a hidden hack of the voter tabulations in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan, right now there is a reasonable chance that the decency and intelligence of Joe Biden will prevail over the breathtaking mendacity of his opponent.
The uneven performance of many Washington reporters during the current administration has reminded us that there have been previous moments of crisis when the press has actually risen to the occasion. At the height of the civil rights movement, the vast majority of American newspapers made no secret of their position–and most great papers were on the side of justice. During the war in Vietnam, when faced with the inescapable facts on the ground, especially after the winter 1968 Tet Offensive American journalists stopped pretending there was a balancing “truth” about the possibility of winning the war.
There have also been notable failures by the press. For decades the coverage of climate change was too susceptible to the anti-scientific propaganda of the fossil fuel industry—and even now it is still too delicate in its coverage of the looming disaster. When President George W. Bush pretended that waterboarding was not torture, The New York Times newsroom (but not the editorial page) stopped using the word, because the president’s crooked lawyers had issued “formal opinions” and were arguing in court that “enhanced interrogation” was the appropriate term. The endless quest for “balance” has also warped the coverage of racism, abortion, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.
We are not talking about expressing personal opinions and turning news articles into editorials, or being partisan tools like Fox News. This is about having the courage to say what is true and what is false. Bob Woodward, who is famously reluctant to judge anything, said he offered his conclusion in his recent book that Donald Trump is not qualified to be president because that truth is inescapable. A satirical article in The Onion sounded perfectly plausible when it jokingly quoted Woodward as saying that he might have released the Trump tapes sooner “if we lived in a world where ironclad evidence of the president’s dishonesty would lead to repercussions—but we don’t.”
We inhabit a world where the attorney general blatantly lies about a special prosecutor’s investigation of a president, and just 10 months later the impeachment of the huckster-in-chief is no longer even a subject for most of the reporters covering him. After a re-election campaign conducted during a pandemic that he inflamed with lies spread through gleefully cooperative social media, nearly 40 percent still approve of the way he “handled” this medical apocalypse.
A summer that began when Trump used an ad hoc federal police force to assault citizens of color who were protesting against racist police violence, just so he could pose with a Bible to feign divine backing for his repression, ended with a fall when journalists were still adopting solemn tones to ask him if there is systemic racism in the United States.
Even if we finally back away from the abyss, we will still need to challenge the three big forces that brought America so much closer to brutal authoritarianism than either of us imagined possible: the corporate theft of America’s wealth from the middle class; the rise of the amoral digital highwaymen; and the mindless pursuits of “balance” and “innovation” in journalism. And, as Trevor Noah said in June, in the midst of demands for action that all Americans should have already heeded: “Racism is like the corn syrup of society. It’s in everything.”
The Transfer of Wealth
Underlying and aggravating just about every fundamental problem America faces is the vast transfer of wealth that began in 1970: an astonishing $50 trillion taken from the bottom 90 percent and given to the top 1 percent. The right-wing propaganda spewed by phony “think tanks” funded with billions from Charles Koch and his allies has been so successful that most Americans have no idea what tax rates were like during the great postwar boom years between 1945 and 1973. When computer executive Michael Dell was asked at Davos in 2019 about the advisability of a 70 percent marginal income tax rate, he was famously skeptical that anyone could “name a country where that’s worked...Ever.” MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson shot back, “The United States.” From the 1930s through the 1960s, the top tax rate averaged about 70 percent and at times it was as high as 95 percent. As Pete Buttigieg points out in his new book, Trust: “Even with historically high tax rates... the period of economic expansion came to be viewed as a golden age of capitalism.”
The recent Rand Study that identified that $50 trillion theft calculated that if the more equitable income distribution that prevailed from 1945 through 1974 had merely continued, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in 2018 alone. That is nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every single month. Every single year.
This obscene transfer of wealth, coupled with the effects of Citizens United v. FEC, hasn’t just undone all the post-Watergate reforms that were enacted to limit the power of dark money. It has enabled the outright purchase of the Republican Party by the plutocracy. Mitch McConnell’s vicious pranksters don’t even bother to disguise their purpose anymore.
With millions of unemployed, hospitals underfinanced, transit systems and state and local governments going broke, and thousands of business from theaters and restaurants to department stores disappearing, the Republican Senate can’t even be bothered to enact another COVID relief bill—days before an election. But give them the chance to cement the fascist coup the billionaires have been working toward for four decades, and a Supreme Court justice can be confirmed in the blink of an eye. As Jane Mayer said, “The court fight is just the latest chapter in a 50-year battle to roll back every public interest regulation that constrained corporate power.”
Below and above the worst racism from the White House since Woodrow Wilson, the homophobia and the trans bashing, the children in cages, the wished-for destruction of NATO, and the absurd pantomime with Kim Jong-Un, the first purpose of this administration is theft.
As the Lincoln Project’s devastating attacks on Trump have reminded us, only Republicans have enough taste for the jugular to treat these people with the harshness they have earned. Republican consultant turned never-Trumper Rick Wilson wrote that the Trump administration is “a hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and crony capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious … The degree to which this president has monetized the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.”
Wilson called Trump’s tax cut a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies.” Trump has surrounded himself with Wall Street alumni “who have behaved with weapons-grade venality … and Master of the Dick affects. They were there … only for the tax bill. Nothing else ever mattered to any of them.”
Just this month we learned that the Trump administration privately warned its biggest donors that the pandemic was about to tank the economy, even as it was publicly proclaiming the virus was nothing but a left-wing Democratic hoax.
False Equivalency
It’s not as though no one saw this coming. Back in 1981, the grandfather of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, declared that the “new right” was using the “muscle of religion toward political ends,” adding: “The uncompromising position of these groups... could tear apart the very spirit of our representative system if they gain sufficient strength.”
Trump’s evisceration of the few remaining principles Republicans still pretended to have has made the sluggish response of much of the press, especially network TV reporters, all the more disastrous. (Kristen Welker’s moderation of the second presidential debate was a happy exception.)
In 2020 the investigative reporting of The New York Times about Trump’s finances is a big improvement over its performance in 2016. Back then, besides the paper’s idiotic obsession with Hillary’s e-mails, eight days before the election, the Times published the the single most irresponsible story of the year, which said law enforcement officials had been unable to find “any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government” and “the hacking into Democratic emails... was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” Since then, one special prosecutor, a Republican-controlled Senate committee, and at least six books have eviscerated both of those conclusions.
Most of the media still behaves as if there were two political parties equally interested in the national welfare, even though one of them is now devoted exclusively to the welfare of the top 1 percent. As Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann were the first to point out in 2012: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts….and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
“When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. ‘Both sides do it’ or ‘There is plenty of blame to go around’ are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias.”
By the time Donald Trump was elected, the steady erosion of the value of truth in American politics had been going on for decades, but Trump’s victory created a challenge of a new order of magnitude to the media’s notion of “objectivity” in news coverage. Trump’s rise to office rendered objectivity not just quaint, but obsolete—and even dangerous.
Social Media
The roots of the social media nightmare go back to 1996, when Mark Zuckerberg turned 12 years old. That year, President Bill Clinton and a Republican majority in Congress caved into demands from a new industry, completely misread the power of a new technology and the amorality of its emerging leaders, and made a gigantic blunder.
It was all in a single sentence in what was popularly called the Internet Decency Act of 1996. In Section 230, the United States let the new online media off the hook for pretty much anything they wanted to do, as long as they pretended they wouldn’t “be evil.” It said: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
That also applied to “access software providers” who enable users to “pick choose, analyze or digest content; or transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize or translate content.” As a result, Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, and others may disseminate anything and enable others to do so without any responsibility for its truthfulness or its impact.
The 1996 law called the internet a place that would benefit “all Americans” because it was was “unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” In the years before the great tech crash, there was heady optimism about the web’s ability to democratize knowledge. In 1997, Wired magazine gushed: “Where conventional politics is suffused with ideology, the digital world is obsessed with facts... the Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics.”
But these services never existed to serve the public good. They exist to make money, by allowing anyone to exploit their power for any reason. Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian software genius, at first believed social media would democratize the world. In 2010, he helped organize the Arab Spring protests online, using the new platforms to collect and direct supporters. At the time, he later recalled in a 2018 paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein media center, it seemed that “no longer would the rich and powerful have a monopoly on public attention. Power would reside with the people.”
But the forces of repression quickly understood that the same technology that allowed citizens to organize could also be used to find and suppress the protesters. Now, Ghonim said: “Barely a day goes by without another exposé on the adverse effects of social media—empowerment of extreme groups, hardening of echo chambers, dissemination of polarizing disinformation, fostering of emotional and mental instability.”
The culprits are secret algorithms designed to maximize “engagement” by users, who are not Facebook or Google or Twitter’s customers, but rather its product. We exist to allow the social media to mine our private lives and predict behavior that can then be sold to advertisers and anyone else (including domestic terror groups and the Kremlin).
Ghonim said the solution is the one most fiercely resisted by the digital robber barons: transparency. “It is no longer acceptable to blindly build products, which carry huge implications for society, without accompanying transparency,” he wrote.
There have been halting attempts at accountability. In 2010, Google started facing multiple lawsuits and regulatory actions for stealing private data like passwords and email addresses from millions of home W-Fi networks with the cars it used to map the world for Google Street View. Google, which could suck up every click you made and every search you entered on every device you own, claimed it was not aware that it was—oops—stealing vast amounts of your personal data. A few lawsuits for invasion of privacy have been settled for sums trivial for Google. But now, astonishingly, even Bill Barr’s Justice Department has decided it’s time to rein in Google by filing a new antitrust lawsuit.
Increasingly under siege, Zuckerberg and his colleagues piously talk about free speech and how hard it is to find all that nasty, racist, sexist, violent propaganda that creates huge profits. But Facebook helps crazy people find each other with lightning speed. Because controversy had been monetized, anyone who clicked on an item about Pizzagate was directed to hundreds of other Pizzagate items by those nefarious algorithms. The terrorists who plotted to murder Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan organized through Facebook, like the armed mob who occupied the Michigan statehouse (with Trump’s rabid encouragement) because they don’t like wearing face masks.
Last August Facebook finally banned the right-wing terrorists known collectively as “boogaloo” after they had been linked to the murders of a federal security guard, and a sheriff’s deputy in California, among others. Facebook had helped them organize, as it had helped the men who plotted to kill Gov. Whitmer, and the groups who encouraged armed vigilantes to take to the streets in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
In early 2020, The Guardian reported, the Network Contagion Research Institute had mapped the spread of “boogaloo” propaganda on Facebook. The software Zuckerberg created to “give people the power to build community” recognized that—aha—these people were really into violent insurrection! So Facebook “started sending us ads for the boogaloo,” said the institute’s co-founder, Joel Finkelstein. “Buy a boogaloo bag. Get a boogaloo AK-47 inscription on your gun.”
Or as Sacha Baron Cohen explained to Maureen Dowd, “If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
Meanwhile, many of the major news organizations had bought into the rhetoric of free speech and grass-roots democracy. They also linked their financial futures to the social media companies.
Reporters pushed onto Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms by bosses chasing “young readers” began squabbling in public, and frequently undermining confidence in their profession. At the same time reporters are often so much franker in their tweets than in their stories that the latter seem sanitized.
Trump has used Twitter to control the news media and promote chaos more successfully than any other American politician. The media magnifies the impact of every tweet. They are quoted in whole and in part multiple times in multiple articles. Then news organizations embed an often-clickable image of the tweet in the article. Why? Mostly because they have been taught by Google, Facebook, and others that linking outward into the electronic abyss is more important economically than the truth.
Fact-checking does almost nothing. By last July, the running tally of the president’s lies by The Washington Post had passed 20,000, but as the media columnist Margaret Sullivan has observed, “More and more, fact-checkers seem to be trying to bail out an ancient, rusty, and sinking freighter with the energetic use of measuring cups and thimbles.”
Repeating the lies in an article and adding the embedded tweet feeds them to the algorithms, which repeat them yet again to people who believe them and “learn” from each interaction how to do it better, just as they are designed to do. Blatantly political organs like Fox News use the algorithms to deliberately amplify the lies and hate speech of Trump and his supporters. The more one-sided, outraged, and polarizing a post is, the more likely it is to entice the formulas.
After the would-be killers of Whitmer and another group had used Facebook to recruit members, Facebook crowed that it had helped the FBI to find them and to infiltrate their Facebook groups. But why can’t Facebook exercise more control over those groups before they organize an act of domestic terrorism?
BuzzFeed News reported on Aug. 6 that Facebook had fired a senior engineer after he collected evidence that the company was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content. Astoundingly, the article said Zuckerberg defended the status of Breitbart News as a trusted “Facebook News Partner” despite its unquestionable record of lying on behalf of Trump. A recent Breitbart post peddling lies about the pandemic got 14 million views before it was removed.
It also took Zuckerberg until this month to finally ban Holocaust-denying posts.
Section 230 and other parts of the law that grant the digital giants a free hand must be changed, but not the way Donald Trump would like to change them. He wants to amend the law so he can punish Twitter and Facebook for “censoring” his lies. But this is not a First Amendment issue. The law needs to be changed so that those companies can be held accountable not only for failing to block damaging lies, racism, and incitement to violence, but also for vastly magnifying them through those loathsome algorithms. At the very minimum, they must be subject to transparency.
Fox and the Right-Wing Media
All of the news media use the social networks to make money, promote their work, and recruit new readers–adding to the cacophony and sharing responsibility for the promotion of all kinds of hatred in our society.
But nobody does it like the right-wing media, which are organized around a single mission.
Fox, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and their thousands of imitators work full-time to stoke fear and resentment among a shrinking minority of mostly White Americans on the far right. The endless barrage of lies and conspiracy theories are all focused on The Big Lie on which the Republican Party depends to retain its power: the notion that the top 1 percent is innocent in that $50 trillion heist, while people of color abetted by white liberals are the real thieves they need to hate.
Fox, which is on cable, not the anemically regulated airwaves, is free of most government oversight (And years before Fox was founded, the Reagan administration had abolished the broadcast Fairness Doctrine, which means that broadcast networks like the right-wing Sinclair system can be even more irresponsible than Fox.) Fox became the most watched cable news network by doing what Facebook does on a much vaster scale. Fox peddled polarizing content designed to inspire fear and anger in a targeted group. Its founder, Roger Ailes, knew about the power of targeted media from his years helping Republican candidates buy direct mail and radio–which before the social media explosion were two of the most powerful forms of direct marketing.
Right-wing radio hosts like Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Alex Jones, and Glenn Beck took things to a new level with their eagerness to lie for their political patrons and to adhere to rigid ideological and religious lines. Some of them, and some Fox News hosts like the now-disgraced Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Maria Bartiromo, have become literal or de facto members of the Trump administration and his campaigns. Steve Bannon put his his media company, Breitbart News, at the service of Donald Trump and then became his campaign manager and then White House adviser. Trump gave big jobs to other loyal right-wingers who have freely spun the revolving door between Fox News and the executive branch. Most of them lacked any talent other than catching Trump’s eye by defending him on Fox.
Right-wing media expertly exploited the social media formulas far more quickly than many legitimate news organizations, and Facebook instantly shared their work with the right, receptive audience. The groups make a nice profit from the exchange, and Facebook, of course, reaps billions.
Now more than ever, Fox News is a direct arm of the Trump campaign. After the president emerged from the hospital with a case of COVID-19 about which we still know almost nothing, Fox News continued to donate hours of valuable airtime to the president’s re-election by airing phone calls from him full of lies about the virus and most other subjects.
The barrage of misinformation and disinformation on television and the internet, most of it fostered by the right, has created the kind of society that propagandists through history have dreamed of: a place where truth no longer exists as something one can verify or even should pursue.
Too often, other news organizations report on these absurd displays on cable television as if they were bona fide news. They may fact check the lies and half-truths, but only after repeating them in headlines and in lead paragraphs–and, of course, making sure it all goes out on their own social media channels. Then they turn to the same people for comment on the same events.
For the cable networks, it is mostly about money. Most talking head guests cost nothing, or very little by TV standards. Reporting is expensive. But they also know that noise brings attention on social media and with advertisers, boosting viewership.
The common excuses from the news media are “fairness” or “balance,” but there is nothing in either of those principles that ever required a news organization to repeat transparent lies. When Elon Musk shot his ego into orbit with two astronauts aboard, did any news group turn to the Flat Earth Society for comment in the second paragraph?
Another argument is that people need to know what the other side is thinking. This became especially problematic after the 2016 elections when “mainstream” news organizations decided that they had missed the possibility of a Trump victory because they hadn’t aired enough conservative ideas. The result was an explosion of stories about what Trump voters think, almost none of which mentioned they are a steadily shrinking minority in America.
Never mind that this idea of listening to the other side generally only applies to people on the left hearing from people on the right, or Black people hearing from White people, or women hearing from men. The notion that the controlling political and social classes need a bigger platform and more airtime is ridiculous.
The New York Times did not serve any genuine journalistic purpose by publishing a lying, racist screed by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, to acquaint its liberal readers with the lunatic right.
Sometimes, a brave host on CNN or MSNBC will kick a lying Trump aide off the air after a while, but by then there are plenty of quotes the Trump-controlled media can spread, and the lies will be repeated in articles about the host ending the program.
If Biden wins and the Democrats actually retain the House and retake the Senate, the challenges for the news media will not magically disappear. Trump has driven the GOP so far to the right that even its remnant is likely to be as uninterested in governing as it is now. The reality of a Biden administration and the prospect that a person of mixed race, a woman no less, might succeed him will feed the forces of racism and repression just as powerfully as Barack Obama’s presidency did.
Even if we now begin to recover from our four-year-old national nervous breakdown, American media will still need to transform the way they cover the most important issues of our time, from income inequality, the legacies of slavery and Native American genocide, to the unceasing effort of corporations to control every level of government. And without a brake on the chaos created by digital kleptocrats—including a rebirth of regulation and antitrust enforcement—no profound reform will be possible.
Andrew Rosenthal is a former assistant managing editor and editorial page editor of The New York Times. Charles Kaiser is a book critic for The Guardian (U.S.) and the author of three books.
