Journalists Need to Be Clear About Threat to Democracy

The journalistic watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) says some mainstream media outlets still find it hard to say what has been fairly obvious for some time now: Donald Trump is trying to steal the 2020 Election.

When the president of the United States has:

• explicitly declared his intentions to withhold federal election funding from states that are trying to make it easier to vote during a pandemic;
• appointed a major donor to his campaign with conflicts of interest to sabotage the US Postal Service—while stating that he opposes additional funding for the post office in order to prevent the opposition party from having universal mail-in voting;
• claimed that the defeat of lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising voters is the “biggest risk” to his reelection bid;
• deputized 50,000 “poll watchers” to intimidate people from voting across the country;
• advised his supporters to commit the felony of double voting;
• proposed postponing the 2020 elections;
• preemptively cast election results into doubt by suggesting the results may not be legitimate; and
• repeatedly refused to state whether he would concede the election in the event of a loss; …

then the evidence threshold has been more than satisfied for journalists to declare that he is trying to steal the 2020 election. Journalists and newsrooms have an obligation to report that the most powerful person in the country is trying to subvert the election and retain power illegitimately, and a failure to blow the whistle on a clear threat to democracy is journalistic malpractice.

Yet, while one can find several op-eds (e.g., The Week, 8/11/20; USA Today, 8/16/20) pointing out the obvious fact of President Donald Trump trying to steal the 2020 election, it appears to be taboo for journalists at the biggest newsrooms in the country to straightforwardly report the fact that Trump is trying to do so.

Read rest of story here: https://fair.org/home/journalists-need-to-be-clear-about-a-clear-threat-...