Legacy Media Is Failing Us Hard

Trump delivered some of his most terrifying remarks to date, but the press shrugged. And now it’s refusing to fact check Tuesday’s debate.

Corporate media has consistently failed to meet the danger of rising fascism in the U.S. And there are two stark examples of this out of the news this weekend that we need to discuss.

First, the sane washing. Trump delivered a couple of totally unhinged speeches with some major escalation in dangerous rhetoric, but from a quick look at the news coverage, it’s clear most of the public wouldn’t know that. The press just didn’t think they were a big deal.

Second, the decision not to fact check. CBS wussed out by declining to have its moderators correct the record on any lies spoken at the upcoming VP debate set for Tuesday evening, instead leaving that up to the candidates. For a liar like JD Vance, it’s a huge gift.

Because over the lack of actual news coverage, it falls to independent journalists to fill the gap. Aaron Rupar of Public Notice has been a hero on this front, following Trump rallies and documenting what Trump did and said. I’ll pull from a few of the most alarming and unstable utterances and contrast them to how some of the major media sanitized and repackaged his words for public consumption.

Then I’ll discuss why CBS’s decision to not fact check a liar like JD Vance is such a failure of journalism, and how we the consumers should and must hold the media to far higher standards.

“A mentally disabled person.”

Trump’s speeches in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin and Erie, Pennsylvania were more extreme and more laced with poisonous, inciting rhetoric than at his earlier rallies. Even Trump admitted that one of the speeches he gave was “dark.” 

While in Wisconsin, Trump claimed that Biden had become “mentally impaired,” but that “Kamala” (pronouncing it wrong) “was born that way.” The MAGA crowd cheered Trump on. “She was born that way,” he repeated. “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

On the Sunday talk shows, GOP leaders such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) deflected questions about Trump’s attack, declining to criticize the ex-president and instead saying, lamely, that they want the contest to be about policy and the issues. The news hosts failed to press the question harder, instead asking Democrats like Gov. J. B. Pritzker (D-IL) to comment on the insult.

As I’ll discuss below, the press playing “neutral” while forcing Democrats to counter the outrage is a persistent theme. Thankfully, Pritzker knows how to serve it back, saying, “You heard Donald Trump talk about mental impairment yesterday. I think whenever he says things like that, he's talking about himself but trying to project it onto others.”

The New York Times did run a headline about Trump’s “mentally disabled” attack line, saying somehow that this was his “answer” to her trip to the border. 

But this was no “answer,” and the Times knows it. The “paper of record” apparently expects readers to make up their own minds within the narrow confines of a political horse race, rather than within the broader context of Trump’s clear history of attacks upon the disabled in America. Those include publicly mocking a disabled reporter and Trump’s own nephew Fred Trump’s account of how his uncle said that people with disabilities, including Fred Trump’s own son, “should just die”—another nod to a dark, fascist ideology.

But as if we were enjoying tea and crumpets instead of facing down looming autocracy, the Times merely described Trump’s personal broadside as “startling.” 

“They’ll slit your throat.”

It wasn’t enough for Trump to earlier claim immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country, or to accuse them falsely of eating the pets of local residents. Trump dialed up the fear by painting migrants as violent criminals who will murder you in your home.

“They make our criminals look like babies. These are Stone. Cold. Killers. They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll slit your throat,” Trump warned in his speech. 

As noted by attorney and author Andrew L. Seidel, who has written about the rise of Christian Nationalist and the dangers of modern fascism,

One thing we’ve learned from studying genocides is that language like this often precedes the mass killing. Otherize, dehumanize, and fearmonger about the target group. This is well documented in Rwanda in [the] 90s and in the 1930s Nazi regime.

This is historical fact, not hyperbole.

So how did the press cover Trump’s speech on the subject of violent neck slitting in our kitchens? Bloomberg’s headline stated that Trump “sharpened his criticism on border security” and spoke of Harris’s “political vulnerability” on the question. Axios’s headline read, “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’s border visit.”

The media collectively simply does not know how to report on Trump out of fear they will appear “partisan” or anti-Trump.  

“One violent day.”

There also should be massive headlines about Trump’s insane statement about unleashing the police, without any restraints or due process, upon suspected criminals for just “one violent day” in order for “word to get out” and for crime to “end immediately.”

That’s right. Trump just called for The Purge.

This wild and dangerous statement isn’t getting much coverage, except on social media by fascism experts. As Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat emphasized,

I study dictators and this chills me. Given all his comments in the past about executing people & shooting looters and his admiration for leaders specialized in mass repression, it’s not hard to imagine what “one really violent day” would mean.

Historians understand the terror of Kristallnacht, carried out in November of 1938 as a modern pogrom against Jews in Germany. On that “one violent night,” SS paramilitary forces attacked Jewish shops, businesses and synagogues while Nazi government authorities looked on and did nothing. 

It is the responsibility of news organizations to inform the public and for their analysts to draw relevant, historical parallels. They are failing in that responsibility.

Do your job, CBS.

CBS announced that its moderators would not fact check the candidates during the VP debate set for Tuesday night. As AP reported,

CBS said the onus will be on Vance and Walz to point out misstatements by the other, and that “the moderators will facilitate those opportunities” during rebuttal time. The network said its own misinformation unit, CBS News Confirmed, will provide real-time fact-checking during the debate on its live blog and on social media, and on the air during post-debate analysis.

So I have some basic questions. Isn’t it the job of journalists to broadcast the truth and to prevent misinformation from spreading by stating the truth, as they have investigated it? Isn’t the public depending on them to undertake this vital role?

When one candidate lies constantly and admits to creating stories, it falls to the press to fact check him, not force his opponent to use up time to set the record straight. That’s the only way to equalize the playing field against a Gish galloper like Vance, whose falsehoods are now putting whole communities at risk. 

Indeed, why even have journalists as moderators if they won’t play that essential role? They could simply hire talk show hosts who don’t need to have any actual facts in their heads and are simply responding to the vibes of the moment. As writer Charlotte Clymer noted, 

Being a CBS News vice presidential debate moderator seems like a pretty sweet gig. You just sit there, read some debate rules you don’t really have to enforce, ask a few questions that were written for you, do absolutely no fact-checking (journalism), and get a paycheck.

From where I sit, it sure looks like CBS chickened out because the network is afraid of the blowback that ABC got from MAGA and the ex-president when it dared to call out Trump’s lies during the presidential debate. 

By capitulating to Trump’s later threats (e.g., that ABC should lose its broadcasting license), CBS is actively piling sticks on the fascist bonfire by validating Trump’s authoritarian-style warnings. In short, MAGA and Trump have gamed the refs, and CBS is just okay with that.

But we don’t have to be. We can make our opinion about CBS’s capitulation clear. We can create our own “blowback” and create consequences for the media’s cowardice and utter failure of responsibility, even while supporting more principled media organizations and independent journalism.

Lawyer and activist Qasim Rashid put it well:

A free press is “the fourth estate” for a reason—to hold those in power accountable. If media fails (or refuses) to hold Govt accountable, then it fails to be a free press & instead becomes state run propaganda.