If you follow the news, you’ve likely read about the controversy surrounding the New York Times’ publication of an op-ed piece by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton calling for a wide-scale military crackdown on riots and looting that broke out on the periphery of protests spurred by the death of George Floyd.
David Roberts of Vox.com posted an essay this week discussing why the Cotton piece was problematic, and why the Times finds it so difficult to balance its commitment to giving voice to diverse opinions with its duty to ensure that the arguments it publishes are “accurate, good-faith explorations of the issues of the day,” in the words of Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger.
Whereas Roberts’ essay begins with a discussion of the issues surrounding the Cotton piece, it then expands to assess the big conundrum facing journalists in the United States: how to deal with Trump and Trumpism. The most important story in the US today is the rise of racialized authoritarianism, Roberts suggests, “but the domestic mainstream media is prevented by its own anachronistic habits and norms from telling it.”
That’s because US journalists, under the funhouse-mirror version of objectivity that dominates mainstream media, are not allowed to learn anything about Republicans. Failing to extend the presumption of good faith to people who have betrayed it repeatedly for decades is “bias.” Covering too many of one side’s lies without ginning up some sort of equivalent negative coverage for the other side is “bias.”
So how should the press cover the political struggles at play in the United States? Roberts suggests it could employ the kind of objectivity that a foreign correspondent would use to cover politics in another country: “identify those who are and aren’t abusing power, and call out guilty parties without fear or favor.”
That kind of analysis would make it clear that while the Democratic Party is “in the grand scheme of advanced democracies, a normal political party . . . [t]he Republican Party has drifted further right than any major party in the democratic world and descended into a paranoid fantasia, shielding an aspiring autocrat from accountability and echoing his calls for loyalty tests and military crackdowns.”
Roberts’ piece is the deepest, most articulate assessment I’ve read yet of how Trump has been able to advance his authoritarian aspirations without regard for the democratic norms and constitutional safeguards that we once assumed protected us from autocracy.