Covering the Republican assault on American democracy – Columbia Journalism Review

On Martin Luther King Jr. Dayamid the typical stories about marches, political speeches, and lawmakers and corporations that have no business quoting King doing so (and being called out for it)an impending Senate debate on voting protections loomed large in the news cycle, even as its outcome appeared preordained. Senators will today take up a pair of bills, both of which already passed in the House, that enjoy overwhelming support among Senate Democrats but will not pass a Republican filibuster unless Democrats move unanimously to sidestep it, something that senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin (them again) have said they wont do. In a bid to pressure recalcitrant politicians into reversing course, members of Kings family led a march and convened a news conference in Washington, DC, and also spoke to members of the media separately. The family cut through the usual lofty invocations to make a specific ask, Politicos Eugene Daniels writes: No celebration without legislation.

Its not just senators who are coming under increased scrutiny as the fight to preserve Americas democracy heats upthe political press is, too. The debate as to whether major news organizations are doing enough to communicate the threat and fight back against it isnt new, but seems to have taken on fresh urgency since the anniversary, two weeks ago, of the insurrectionand the reviews have, for the most part, been mixed at best, very bad at worst. Margaret Sullivan, a media critic at the Washington Post, concluded that while many individual journalists have contributed impressive coverage of the insurrection and ongoing Republican subversion, their employers are mostly not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public as a strategic editorial priority; Sullivans colleague Perry Bacon Jr., argued, meanwhile, that many outlets are now defining democracy as a core coverage area, but added that this coverage isnt always sharply framed and that it could be even more prominent, particularly on widely watched local and national TV network newscasts. The press critic Dan Froomkin, for his part, was more scathing still: Top editors and reporters, he wrote, have effectively responded to columns like Sullivans and Bacons by giving us all the finger.

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Froomkin was referring, specifically, to coverage of last weeks congressional wrangling over the voting rights bills, arguing that political reporters largely framed them as they would any other partisan dogfightwithout any sense of urgency, without crucial context, and without even explaining whats in the bills in question. There have been other specific criticisms of this coverage, too. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, also of the Post, wrote that many reporters have come to accept unanimous Republican opposition to federal voting rights protections as a natural, unalterable, indelibly baked-in backstop condition of political life, and thus dont often bother to hold them accountable for it, instead obsessing over Democratic infighting; Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, cited this trend as evidence that the press continues to prize political savviness over integrity in public life, while Wesley Lowery observed that he knows in deep detail what Manchin/Sinemas issues with the bills are but cant say the same for the 50 GOP senators. And various observers pointed out, in a similar vein, that the impending failure of the bills has too often been viewed primarily through the lens of President Bidens political standing, holding him responsible for Republican obstructionism. Numerous prominent journalists fussed, for example, over Bidens divisive tone after he asked in a recent speech whether senators are on the side of King or segregationists like George Wallace.

In addition to such criticism, observers have offered suggestions as to how the press as a whole might cover threats to democracy better. Rosen and others have long called for news organizations to overtly state their institutional commitment to democracy; Sullivan argued, in her recent column, that outlets should consider putting their coverage of election subversion outside their paywalls, while also emphasizing the stories of people who are fighting to reinvigorate democratic processes. Some outlets are trying to do that themselves: noting recently that media navel-gazingrarely results in productive reform, Tony Marcano, the managing editor of KPCC and LAist in Southern California, explained how his newsroom is working to refocus its politics coverage, rebranding the beat as Civics and Democracy and instructing reporters to move beyond electoral horse races and partisan talking points to examine who gets listened to, and why, and provide a guide to anyone who wants to more fully participate in civic life. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, meanwhile, explained that it is taking a citizens agenda approach to a local mayoral election, asking voters what issues they want candidates to address.

We cant just sit back and wait for the national news organizations based in Washington and New York to shift their focus, Marcano wrote of the reset at KPCC/LAist. It has to start locally to drive home the relevance of the threat. Local newsrooms do indeed have a crucial role to play; they are in some ways the medias first line of defense here, since so much Republican election subversion involves local-level rules and offices, with adherents of the Big Lie running for previously obscure posts with direct oversight of vote counting and certification. But national newsrooms must urgently shift their focus, too. There has already been a lot of good national-level coverage of these local maneuvers, but whenever threats to democracy become a really dominant national story, the coverage is usually organized around national-level story lines: the insurrection and probe thereof, federal voting rights bills, what Biden is saying, and so on. These stories are urgent and, in the case of the bills at least, have a necessary local component, since the federal legislation is a response to state-level laws. But, as Froomkin notes, the local specifics have often been downplayed. More broadly, as Bacon notes, the traditional division of focus between national and local outlets simply doesnt work here. Republican operatives rely on quietly moving institutional chips into place below the level of the national spotlight. But they cant do this quietly if the national spotlight finds them.

The compelling criticisms outlined above are, to my mind, less about increasing the volume of democracy-subversion coveragewere seeing a lot of it at the moment, even if there could still be morethan a hard reset in the culture of much political journalism, which is a harder ask. One part of this, as Ive written many times here, is to stop muddying lines of accountability and to get away from covering politics as a game, as outlets like KPCC/LAist are trying to do. Another imperative is not only to inject more existential urgency across the board, but also to marshal it with greater care; well-placed, genuinely sharp explanatory scrutiny can often do more good than setting your hair on fire on cable news night after night. We also need to see democracy not as a beat or story, but as a principle undergirding all our coverage, since democracy itself is the principle undergirding public life. Its ridiculous, as Ive written before, to cover future elections as normal races when the rules are being warped. But my point here is broader. The climate crisis is a democracy story, as is social policy. Yet Bidens stalled legislation in these areas is often covered separately from his voting legislation; as competing, not complementary, priorities.

Over the long weekend, a Trump rally in Arizona loomed in the news cycle. Thankfully, it didnt achieve the saturation-level coverage of Trump rallies pasteven Fox didnt carry it livebut it nonetheless sparked no little content and punditry. The bulk of this, that I saw, centered on Trump himself, but as Waldman points out in the Post, the much bigger story out of the event should have been the parade of Arizona politicians who came to pay tribute to him, including Kari Lake, a TV anchor turned Big Liespewing gubernatorial candidate, and Mark Finchem, a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theorist who was in DC on January 6 and now wants to oversee Arizonas elections as a Trump-endorsed candidate for secretary of state. As Waldman notes, you probably havent heard of Finchem, but it is almost impossible to exaggerate what a fanatic he is. If Lake, Finchem, or anyone else of their ilk gets elected in Novemberand thats the first your readers are hearing of themyoure probably doing something wrong.

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TOP IMAGE: Several hundred activists march in Washington on Jan. 17, 2022, a holiday honoring civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., urging Senate action to pass a bill to protect voters from racial discrimination. (Kyodo via AP Images) ==Kyodo

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Covering the Republican assault on American democracy - Columbia Journalism Review