The American republic is in a more precarious position now than it has been since 1861, and it is entirely the fault of the national press.
It began in 2016 with the upset win of current President Donald J. Trump. At first, the Clinton Campaign was not ready to budge so easy as it became clear that Trump, an outsider candidate who had absolutely bullied a massive crop of milquetoast corporate Republicans to hold the party’s nomination hostage from its own donor class, was the winner of the night. Protests erupted and the slogan “not my president” trended. Recounts were requested and granted, but come January of 2017 Donald Trump had assumed his place in the White House.
Yet even as he had done so, almost the entirety of the national press was hard at work fighting the Administration for domination of the airwaves at every turn. Any reasonable observer had to conclude from the tone, tenor and vocabulary that both sides used in the ensuing battles over the Russiagate hoax, in-kind donation scandals and a nakedly partisan impeachment scheme that the Trump Administration and the national news media were essentially two sides in a propaganda war.
This was the precedent that was set going into the 2020 election cycle, and already major outlets were out in force as the public relations arm of the Democratic Party, while also engaged in a little maneuver called “priming the pump” or “poisoning the well.” First, there was coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic which treated a freak disease outbreak as, in some cases, personally the President’s fault. Then there was the farcical coverage of months-long civil unrest that coined the phrase “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” to describe scenes of chaos, looting, vandalism and department stores on fire.
But in the background, the press began to report in early summer of 2020 about the “Transition Integrity Project,” a war game scenario run by Democratic and Democrat-leaning politicos intended to role-play a contested election where Trump refuses to concede the 2020 Election.
A harmless sideshow for political junkies? Potentially. But as the months dragged on, this idea that Donald Trump might refuse to honor the results of the election began to float around, confirmed in the minds of journalists on the basis of their perception that Trump is a no-good-very-bad-man. The question of peaceful transition of power, apropos of nothing, became overnight one of the many questions the media put to a hostile administration like hot irons in the fire.
Trump, for his part, did little to dispel rumors of supposed autocratic impulses and focused most of his energy against mail-in balloting, which he regarded as likely to lead to fraud. Not only did the media not raise any tough questions when extremely suspicious protocols were put in place in states like Pennsylvania, whose Supreme Court extended the deadline to receive mail-in and absentee ballots until three days after the election without clear constitutional mandate, but they continually asserted that Trump’s claims were baseless, without evidence, and part of a scheme to overthrow democracy. The publications that lacked restraint went so far as to claim that mail-in balloting was safe, proven effective, and it was almost mathematically impossible that it could be used to steal an election by fraud.
So the stage was set when, inevitably, the election careened in the exact way that the media (and Trump) had predicted months before. Trump had a commanding lead in nearly all the swing states, in some cases up half a million ballots, before absentee and mail-in ballots arrived to save the day for Biden.
But the victory wasn’t so cut and dry. First of all, despite social media warnings that they would censor premature claims of victory, both candidates claimed victory before the votes were finished counting. Then, on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 7, most news outlets called the election for Biden after he was declared the likely winner in Pennsylvania.
While the New York Times may have thought that it was the media’s job to crown the winner in a presidential election, it is actually the states themselves and their election commissions that certify results, and we are still a long way off from that.
The challenges to the vote count come in two species. Allegations of fraud, and allegations of “irregularities.”
The first is very hard to prove and can only be alleged in instances where the case seems clearly made that improper voting occurred. Irregularities are instances where the vote processing has deviated from previous years, and this election is rife with it. Election software in Antrim County, Michigan, for example, “glitched” and delivered 6,000 votes that should have gone for Trump to Biden. In Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit) election officials papered over the window of the counting room.
In Wisconsin, based on the latest numbers that the state has given for voter registration, voter turnout for the state was somewhere in the realm of 88-89%, which is extremely suspicious if true. (Media outlets attempted to fact-check this claim by raising the completely meaningless point that, in Wisconsin, they calculate voter turnout by number of voting-age citizens and not registered voters, but any voting-aged citizens that are not registered should have no bearing on the turnout figures since they can’t vote anyway).
In Pennsylvania, legal observers for the Trump campaign were not allowed to oversee the counting of ballots from a reasonable distance and had to pursue a court order in order to facilitate normal election oversight. Justice Alito himself was forced to write an order to election officials in Pennsylvania forcing them to segregate late-arriving ballots.
There are literally dozens of examples of suspicious conduct on the part of poling officials, or strange statistical anomalies in the vote counting. There have been accusations of so-called conspiracy theories flying here, there and everywhere, many of which national media reflexively dismiss with the flimsiest justifications. Take this Politifact article for example, which references a claim originating from average citizens on social media that over 14,000 voters in Wayne County, Michigan were over 100 (which would by highly suspect if true). Not only are the refutations given full of weasel phrases like not all and at least some, but the original list the article links to has been wiped off the Internet so I couldn’t verify the information myself.
In effect, that attitude of major American publications in the wake of serious and sustained allegations of strange goings-on is, “Move along citizen, nothing to see here.” Needless to say, such ambiguities would not be tolerated were the roles reversed.
Am I saying that Joe Biden stole the 2020 Election? NO. It would be irresponsible of me as a journalist to assert, without evidence you might say, that either candidate had won given the state of the race as of the writing of this article.
What I am saying is that the conduct of the media, the refusal to take seriously credible allegations of (at the very least) severe irregularities in the elections is the reason we are in this position. The most respectable media outfits in this nation carried cockamamie conspiracy theories about the President being a Manchurian candidate for months or years, but when the President of the United States cites evidence of irregularities that any armchair statistician can see they cut the feed, stick their fingers in their ears, and shout, “La la la, I’m not listening.” If you want a reason why 60+ million Americans trust some random person on Twitter more than the New York Times to give them their news, that is your reason.
Photo Credit / PBS
