As former president Donald Trump — a twice impeached, four-time indicted convicted felon also held liable for sexual assault and who incited a coup attempt — campaigns for re-election in 2024, he charges that any election result other than victory will be evidence of fraud and a rigged process. At the same time, 140 of Trump’s former staffers contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump administration, with plans to replace thousands of federal civil servants with loyalists, employing the military to crack down on dissent and round up millions of migrants for mass deportation.
Although it’s evident that Trump’s tyrannical agenda and his well-documented pathological lying poses an existential threat to U.S. democracy, America’s corporate news media all too often softens or sidelines their reporting on this threat, concerned that they’ll be accused of partisan coverage. But a coalition of more than three dozen civil rights, consumer rights and journalism organizations led by the media democracy group Free Press, are calling on news outlets to accurately and unapologetically report on the threats to democracy during the remainder of the 2024 U.S. election campaign.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights with Free Press, who talks about the coalition’s goals, which include recommending six practices the media should adhere to in their coverage of the election and during moments of crisis.
NORA BENAVIDEZ: Well, you know, this coalition came together because in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, some pundits and politicians made pretty big public calls for the media to refrain from covering Trump’s views: “Mounting authoritarianism in the United States” and to sort of walk things back. The attitude was, “Let’s cool it down. Let’s calm down. You know, lower the temperature on how media is covering threats to democracy.”
And this coalition came about because Free Press felt that that was a very dangerous request. The idea that news outlets should reject their own journalistic duty to acquiesce to other figures and particularly to those that are trying to thwart people’s engagement in our democracy.
So we brought together over three dozen organizations, journalists, high-level individuals in the United States to urge media executives and news outlets to do six things this election cycle.
And mostly, I mean, what the big takeaway here is we are in an era of manipulation. People don’t have the same set of facts that others, loved ones, colleagues do. And the media has a very powerful role that can help shape our discourse, our conversation, and our understanding of events of the day. And we urge media outlets to pledge that their news companies will take up that task.
We’re in these very contentious times, Scott, and we need what I call information integrity. We need people to protect and name things.
So I’m happy to go through the things that we recommend. You know, we pulled the coalition together. We’ve been working with news outlets on the messaging and we’re going to be doing trainings throughout the fall with journalists and newsrooms on how to implement these demands.
SCOTT HARRIS: Nora, I wondered if you would summarize some of the six best practices the media should adhere to during moments of crisis and threats to U.S. democracy, especially in this period of the U.S. election. And I know there’s been a lot said about calling out disinformation, stopping a false equivalence and “both sides-ism.” I’m sure a lot of that’s covered in your six points here.
NORA BENAVIDEZ: It’s hard to list out six things and make them sound exciting, but I’ll really try.
You know, the first and most important I think, issue is how journalists and newsrooms commit to naming authoritarian and autocratic rhetoric. There’s really a trend right now to kind of brush off threats of the effort to delegitimize our democratic process.
That’s not fun to cover. And so everyone makes light of it. We’ve seen Elon Musk make jokes about, you know, the rule of law and authoritarianism. That is no laughing matter. And so I think that journalists and newsrooms have to commit to naming, pointing out for audiences what this rhetoric looks like.
This is the kind of rhetoric that dehumanizes minority groups. We are seeing this in the rhetoric around immigrants.
Rhetoric that would flout the rule of law. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, the sort of blasé comments from Trump that people would never have to vote again if he wins. That’s a dangerous, dangerous comment. That’s an example of how we need clear coverage around why that’s dangerous.
So first and foremost, I would say the number one place is that journalists and newsrooms have to really identify what that looks like.
And then of course, as you mentioned, you know, false claims are everywhere. False claims are about what the price of toilet paper looks like. And so we really need journalists who make sure to cross-check information, fact check, double check.
And part of that is because it’s really hard to walk back a lie for audiences once they hear it.
You know, the more times the lie is repeated, even in casual references, the harder it is to debunk that lie. And so I think journalists need to name when something is a lie.
Many in the media were reticent to do that specifically around Donald Trump in 2015. You know, and they said, “Well, he refers to alternative facts. And these are opinions.”
I think that journalists have to be more rigorous. Remind audiences that misinformation is real, that lies said by big, influential figures have dangerous consequences.
The third piece I would mention is how audiences think about the impact of the story. Headlines matter. Images in the links matter. The sources that journalists quote. It’s sort of this odd note.
It’s like if you can get an audience to look beyond just the headline or the lead. We need journalists who practice caution and care, carefully selecting what they cover, how they describe it.
When a lie is even casually repeated and framed in ways that viewers then make their own assumptions, that itself can lead people to have incorrect assumptions about facts.
For more information, visit FreePress’ website at freepress.net, Democracy Is Coalition at www.democracyis.net, Democracy Is Coalition – Media at www.democracyis.net/media, Democracy Is Coalition – Tech at www.democracyis.net/tech.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Nora Benavidez (21:55) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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