As both the Democratic and Republican parties end their primary season and certified their preordained nominees for president, U.S. corporate media has largely normalized their coverage of the campaign, despite Donald Trump’s divisive platform pledging to impose an authoritarian regime should he win in November.
Speaking at rallies and during friendly right-wing media interviews, Trump talks about being a dictator on Day One of his presidency, proposes deploying the military against Americans opposed to his policies, purging the federal workforce of anyone not loyal to him and implementing the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Trump, who faces 91 felony charges in 4 court cases, quotes Hitler, praises authoritarian leaders, claims immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and labels his political opponents a “vermin.” Like many of his Republican allies, Trump embraces political violence and praises the violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists he incited to attack the Capitol as “heroes and patriots.”
Yet, as is often the case with U.S. corporate media, many reporters and editors are on the defensive against charges that they’re the “liberal media,” so they regularly frame their coverage of the election campaign with false equivalence and both-sides-ism, telling the same old Democrats vs. Republicans story. This timid reporting thus normalizes Donald Trump’s agenda to demolish the nation’s democratic institutions. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Rick Perlstein, journalist, conservative movement historian and New York Times bestselling author, who criticizes U.S. corporate media coverage of the 2024 presidential election campaign as riven by journalistic malpractice.
RICK PERLSTEIN: The easiest way to describe the way what I call the agenda-setting elite political journalists, I’m talking about the people who the rest of the journalists look to for cues. The way to describe the way they’re covering the 2024 election is that they’re covering it exactly as if it were the 1996 election.
They’re using very ossified, very rigid genre conventions that have been in place for a very long time, even though they don’t describe the reality we’re actually facing. Because of the march towards authoritarianism of the Republican party, “both sides” journalism — and I say this very adamantly and try to get it across in every interview — is biased towards the Republicans, because if you think about it, if you’re kind of honor-bound to give equal sides an equal respect to both what the Republicans do and the Democrats and one side habitually and institutionally lies, cheats and steals and the other side, for all their flaws, kind of well, this is one of their flaws behave like Boy Scouts, right? And you’re saying that they’re both equally responsible for the problem, then you’re biased towards the side that lies, cheats and steals.
SCOTT HARRIS: I think it was last week I was listening to an NPR interview on threats to democracy and the person they had on I think was, you know, very knowledgeable and had some strong points of view about the threats to democracy. And they went through the issues of gerrymandering, voter suppression, threats of election results being subverted, supermajority legislatures removing long-held powers from governors, overturning results of referendum votes.
The problem with this interview was she did not mention the Republican party once as being the culprit in most, if not all, of these issues of threats to democracy.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah, they have a synonym for the Republican party on National Public Radio. It’s Congress, right? They always say, you know, Congress is blocking X. Or Congress is, you know, log-jammed or Congress can’t move any legislation or Congress is increasingly extreme.
You know, I mean, this is really getting to the point of “You’re a Soviet citizen and you’re reading Pravda,” where you literally cannot approach reality with reporting like this. It does not describe the world that’s all around us.
The First Amendment was created in order to create a space for journalism as a civic institution. Not as a business. One of the first laws that Congress passed also in the 18th century — subsidized postage for newspapers. It was almost impossible for them to go out of business.
And so these guys are supposedly originalists. Yeah, I’d like to go back to those original principles because quite frankly, unless you’re informing citizens in what they need to know to (exercise) their duties and obligations as citizens, then you’re really not doing journalism as it was meant to be done in a free society.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I have one final question for you and has to do with the important question of how media should be covering this election. What’s your view of what media could do to improve their coverage in these next seven months?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, I think that there has to be a lot more discussion of policy. You know, there’s always good journalism. It’s like what I.F. Stone used to say. The New York Times is a great newspaper because you never know what page you’ll find a front page story, right? There’s always people who kind of sneak in really good stuff. But the people who are the agenda setters, you know, the people who set the narrative tend to follow these morbid routines that I’ve described.
So, what they need to do is move the critical stuff that they bury onto the front page. You know, tell the truth as they see it without fear or favor and devil take the hindmost. That’s always a good principle. If one candidate is kind of sane and responsible and the other is, you know, insane and irresponsible, if you say that you’re describing reality, you’re not being biased.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Rick Perlstein (25:33) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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