Journalism in the Authoritarian Age

Everyone complains about the press. And, you know, that’s fine. The press is supposed to be the Greek chorus--it tells the harsh truths, the ones we cannot acknowledge ourselves because of our own biases and beliefs. And there is an expectation that there won’t be politics mixed into our truth.
Of course, that expectation is a fool’s expectation. People write news stories. And people are biased.

The problem with “political bias” is that “politics” has expanded beyond the big-government vs. small-government scale. Demanding that people being treated as human is considered “political.” This isn’t a new thing. It’s why the statement “black lives matter,” is considered political, instead of just something that any decent human being agrees to. Or why men need to cite having a female relative when issues of sexual assault come up instead of just saying “Hey, women are human beings who don’t deserve that kind of crap.”

I don’t have to tell you what Donald has said about his plans for the press. You know what they are. As bad as things were before, media wise, they’re about to get worse.

This was bad before. But now, it’s going to get worse. Look at how Vladimir Putin treats the press. Look at how things were under Saddam Hussein. I’m not exaggerating. Donald admires these men.

And scarier still, look at how the press capitulated to Donald during the election. Part of it was his white male privilege, of course--can you imagine if President Obama had been divorced three times, or if Hillary Clinton slapped her name on every single building she owned? But part of it was that he made them money. And then the monster became too big for them.

We’ve already seen journalists trying to normalize Donald. “We can’t be biased,” they say. “We can’t look like they were right about us favoring the Democrats.”

Tonight, I watched the PBS Newshour with my family. We watch it nearly every Friday evening, it’s a family tradition. It’s “news,” without marquees or flashy graphics, and normally, it’s comforting. It wasn’t tonight--it was terrifying. Tonight, Judy Woodruff calmly reported on Donald’s cabinet choices, airbrushing the horrific racism of Jeff Sessions-- who prosecuted civil rights activists for registering black voters and got cozy with the KKK. This got followed up with a Hannity and Colmes style panel about another nominee of Donald’s.
The conservative, a crusty looking man from the Foundation to Defend Democracies (you can laugh, I won’t mind,) gushed about the “heartland values,” of Donald’s nominees “He’s from Kansas! Hoorah!” The milquetoast liberal struggled to draw a comparison between the divisiveness of ISIS and divisiveness of Donald’s ideas. He had a point, but in the immortal words of Samantha Bee-
"Caring about that is like caring about the airbags on a car that is currently on fire.”

The problem with Donald is not that he is divisive. It’s that he wants innocent people dead because they exist differently from how he likes them. It’s actually the same problem I have with ISIS.

This is what normalizing fascism looks like.

Originally published on November 20th