Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

[elleng]

By
Margaret Sullivan

Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.

In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.

Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.

Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.'>>>

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/journalist-both-sides-politics-trump/2021/07/27/c3afd1f8-eee0-11eb-81d2-ffae0f931b8f_story.html?

[BeckyDem]

1. Ornstein and Mann did sound the alarm but I am not sure who will step up.

There are so few cons who are honest about Trump and 1/6. But these two did spell it out and when you look at it from that vantage point, it's not hard to see why red states are not getting vaccinated. Very hard to imagine the GOP ever going back to someone similar to Eisenhower.



The Republican Party has become a radical insurgency – ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. Securing the common good in the face of these developments will require structural changes but also an informed and strategically focused citizenry.

https://www.amacad.org/publication/finding-common-good-era-dysfunctional-governance