Tag: mainstream media

Is Criticizing Joe Biden a Danger to Democracy?

This week, President Joe Biden hopped onto Zoom in an effort to shepherd the world along the path to stronger global democracy, during a two-day summit with other world leaders. He’ll be making his case, however, amid growing concerns about democracy here at home. On Monday, The Atlantic’s dedicated doomscroll provider, Barton Gellman, unleashed his latest flurry of frets, warning that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” His masthead-mate, George Packer, followed up with a piece that urged readers to imagine democracy’s unthinkable demise in order to stave it off.

Whether we like it or not, there is reason to be gravely concerned. But against this backdrop, an interesting debate has broken out about the press’s role in protecting our too-fragile institutions and raveled civic fabric from a Trumpian assault—and whether the media, in an effort to support democracy, must unflinchingly support Biden, as well.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made considerable waves with a column that rather lustily accused the media of offering President Biden worse coverage than President Trump. At first blush, this might seem impossible, if only because Trump’s actions—through corruption, incompetence, and the need to constantly battle the media—made it almost impossible to cover him favorably. Milbank, however, marshaled some statistics from data analytics experts, who combed through hundreds of thousands of articles to provide a detailed “sentiment analysis” supporting his thesis that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as—and for a time worse than—the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”

But Milbank’s most provocative idea posited that the media needed to be “partisan” in the service of democracy. “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”

Not everyone took this message well. Politico’s Ryan Lizza responded to Milbank on Twitter: “No respectable model of salvaging democratic norms would include badgering journalists to write only positive stories about the most powerful person in the world.”

Lizza is correct. Blind fealty to heads of state is the hallmark of dictatorships, not democracies. 

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MSNBC’s Heilemann Claims ’30 Million People Right Now’ Ready to Take Up Arms for Trump

MSNBC network national affairs analyst John Heilemann said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there were “30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms” for former President Donald Trump.

Anchor Chuck Todd said, “I want to read what Bart Gellman wrote in the cover story for The Atlantic. Some might say it is hyperbolic, but John Heilemann, I’m curious if you think it is? The headline is Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun. ‘Trump and his party convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans, that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that the made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at their polls, that tyranny usurped their government and that violence is a legitimate response.’ Hyperbolic or fact?”

Heilemann said, “Fact, I think. The strength of that Gellman piece is it lays out this extraordinary reality that there is this research that shows something like 8% and maybe as many as 12% that say Joe Biden was illegitimate and violence is an appropriate tool to removing him and restoring Donald Trump. That’s between 20 and 30 million people. That’s a mass movement in America in favor of political violence, which is a new thing. We’ve been political violence before, lynching many things over the course of time that African-Americans have suffered, but this is 30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms.”

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CNN Staffer Charged with Enticing Women and Their Underage Daughters to Engage in Sexual Activity

A CNN employee was charged Friday on three counts that he used a facility of interstate commerce to abuse underage girls.

Officials said a grand jury in Vermont indicted 44-year-old Stamford, Connecticut resident John Griffin of attempting to entice the girls to engage in sexual activity. He appeared in New Haven federal court via Zoom, where Judge Robert Spector said he would file an order requesting his transfer to Connecticut.

“According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” according to the Department of Justice statement on the case.

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CNN Uses Pearl Harbor Anniversary To Warn of Second Civil War

CNN’s John Avlon joined CNN Tonight host Michael Smerconish on Tuesday for another of of his pretentious “reality check” segments. This particular instance involved using the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor to hype the possibility of a second civil war.

Coming out of a commercial, Smerconish suggested that 2021 is not that different than 1941, “Today marks 80 years since the infamous surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a day that would change the course of our nation’s history. Just as the strength of our democracy was tested then, we find ourselves yet again in a different but just as dangerous war on truth and democracy and science.”

He then tossed things over to Avlon, who continued with this theme, and without any self-awareness declared:

Over the past six years, America has endured sustained assaults on truth, democracy, and science. Leading to reduced trust in our institutions and each other. Those breaches don’t heal overnight. It has a downstream effect, tainting a rising generation with a sense of pessimism. And perhaps the most stark snapshot of that came from a new poll of young people age 18 to 29 conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics. It shows that a majority believe that our democracy is at risk. And who could blame them, after seeing a president lie about election results, incite an insurrection, and then see one party follow him into la la land. 

Getting further and further away from any credible Pearl Harbor analogy, Avlon reported: “…when it comes to the science of confronting climate crisis, Republicans are clearly on the back foot when it comes to young Americans. A solid 55% say that the federal government is not doing enough to combat climate change, which includes 68% of folks with a college degree and 50% without. A small slice, just 14%, think the feds are doing too much. Which lines up with the do-nothing climate change denial of Donald Trump.”

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