Eric Boehlert: Stop calling the Arizona charade an "audit"

[babylonsister]

https://pressrun.media/p/stop-calling-the-arizona-charade

Stop calling the Arizona charade an “audit”
It's a "fraudit"
Eric Boehlert


Now in its seventh week, the pointless review of two million ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous outpost, has not only emerged as a dishonest, partisan circus, it’s also a blueprint for how right-wing conspiracists want to treat future GOP election losses. Along the way, they’re deliberately destroying faith in the democratic process.

As the “fraudits” spread to other states, and as it becomes clear that hard-core Republican fanatics will stop at nothing in their pursuit of overturning the 2020 election, it’s imperative the press undertake a course correction and stop calling these partisan sham events “audits.” They’re not going away and the press needs a better, more exact way to describe them. By adopting GOP “audit” language, journalists are doing the right wing’s bidding and undermining confidence in U.S. elections.

Once again, the GOP’s radical and dangerous behavior in the age of Trump ought to prompt news outlets to change the language they use to cover American politics. There is no precedent for a former U.S. president to barnstorm the country insisting his election loss was fraudulent and claiming “Indians” were paid to vote in 2020. And there’s no precedent for the mockery that’s being made out of ballot-counting in Arizona, a charade that even local Republican election officials have dismissed as a “grift disguised as an audit.”

The question is, how does the media cover the Grand Canyon State’s slow-motion train wreck? By using “audit” without including qualifiers, such as “so-called,” “alleged,” or “absurd,” the press lends an undeserved air of legitimacy to the clown proceedings. The language use becomes especially problematic when “audit” is deployed in headlines, which is what most people end up reading, instead of the body of the article. A New York Times front-page, print headline yesterday read, “Arizona’s Vote Audit Is Scorned. Republicans Press On, Anyway.”

snip//

By contrast, NPR took a smart approach with a recent headline, putting the word in quotation marks to signal the dubious nature of the Arizona sham: “Experts Call It A 'Clown Show' But Arizona 'Audit' Is A Disinformation Blueprint.” And a recent CNN report referred to the Arizona effort as a “so-called audit” and a “partisan ballot review.”

Another good description for the ongoing shenanigans might be an “unofficial review,” since the ballot exercise carries no legal weight and cannot change the vote outcome. “Partisan inquisition” is also an accurate offering, as well as “boondoggle,” “charade,” “farce,” and “sham.” Using those terms means journalists would have to stand up to Republicans and not be afraid of “liberal media bias” cries that would certainly follow.

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https://pressrun.media/p/stop-calling-the-arizona-charade

[bearsfootball516]

1. It's a charade.

[Initech]

2. I think the term you're looking for is "clusterfuck".

Or maybe "circular firing squad". Eventually they will step in it...

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. This is a circus and not an audit