Media Maelstrom: Enough already, mainstream journalists, with adopting right-wing framing!
ABC, The New York Times provide bad examples in recent weeks
When the writer Eric Boehlert died suddenly last year, we lost an important and brave voice in the media-criticism world. Boehlert, among his many virtues, was fearless and perceptive about pointing out the foibles of the mainstream press at a time when American democracy was (as it still is) threatened by rampant misinformation and the loss of a common grounding in basic reality and truth.
There are, of course, still some very smart media critics out there (though there are fewer and fewer public editors or ombudsmen, who ply their trade inside news organizations, as I did at the New York Times from 2012 to 2016.) Check out the work of Jay Rosen, Erik Wemple, Parker Molloy, Soledad O’Brien, Dan Froomkin, Jack Shafer and Matthew Gertz for particularly good examples.
But I thought I’d add my voice here, calling attention to some of the most egregious examples of poor judgment or false equivalence or scared-of-their-own-shadows framing. For now, this media criticism will alternate (roughly) with my American Crisis podcast episodes, and you can identify them by the words “Media Maelstrom” in the headline.
My criticism comes in two flavors, mostly. There is the straight-up propaganda you see in the right-wing media, with the worst offender being Fox News, so often unhinged from reality as it obsesses about supposed “culture wars” issues — an obsession which often amounts to persecuting poor people, LGBTQ+ people, or immigrants in the name of stomping out “wokeness.” It’s a whole worldview. Turn on Fox News for five minutes and see for yourself. Or chat with your Uncle Frank, if you know what I mean.
That variety is damaging but easy to recognize. More insidious is the way the mainstream press (often accused of leaning left) happily adopts the language and framing of the right. Though they’d never admit it, they do this in order to ward off charges, from the right, of being unfair. The result: what I call performative neutrality, which does a subtler form of damage.
Take ABC News’ recent glowing — almost cheerleading — coverage of the “Moms for Liberty” confab in Philadelphia, which featured speakers including the anti-Muslim activist Katharine Gorka and North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who referred to homosexuality as “filth.” In The Hill, the American Studies scholar Glenn Altschuler outlined why Moms for Liberty must be seen an extremist organization. He writes that prominent members have close ties to the Proud Boys and QAnon, and that one “Moms” chapter’s newsletter admiringly quoted Hitler.
ABC News, under fire after publication, toughened up the tone of its cheerleader-like piece with its description of “fired-up moms” whose enthusiasm was “almost bouncing off the walls.” But before that, the Hofstra journalism school dean Mark Lukasiewicz took aim, calling it a “textbook how-not-to-journalism lesson,” noting the story’s description of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for example, as a “Parents Rights Warrior.” As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Knight chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, aptly put it: “Mainstream media continues to … show how inept they are at reporting on radicalized white women.”
Here’s another one — the recent New York Times story that carried the headline: “Republicans Are Divided on Impeaching Biden as Panel Begins New Inquiry.” Literally, true, yes; but the headline and much of the story seem to accept that there’s some reason for a proposed impeachment other than rank political gamesmanship. As the Cornell University historian Lawrence Glickman observed: “The set up is that the GOP is ‘divided’ about impeaching Biden, rather than pointing out in the lede the elementary reality that they have no basis for doing so.”
The story considers efforts to impeach Biden for his border policies — or, hey, if that doesn’t work, perhaps for supposed financial corruption. It’s not until the eighth paragraph that we hear of the House Oversight Committee panel looking into the latter; that panel “has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden despite months of scrutiny…”
Not much there. But if you glanced at the headline and read the top of the story, you might be led to think otherwise. This is the august New York Times, after all, which must be taken seriously.
My advice as you read and listen and watch: Engage in critical thinking. Compare and contrast your media sources. Don’t share thoughtlessly on social media. And send me your best examples of media that fails to serve the public interest.
Thanks to all my subscribers. Whether you have a free or paid subscription, your interest is deeply appreciated. I’m donating net proceeds for the first month to Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.