The New York Times‘ post–New Hampshire analysis of the presidential election by the paper’s senior White House correspondent, Peter Baker, bodes very poorly for how coverage of the 2024 election will proceed.
“The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas,” read the headline (1/25/24), followed by the subhead: “The general election matchup that seems likely between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is about fundamentally disparate visions of the nation.”
That one of those “visions” involves an open embrace of authoritarianism is without question the central story of the 2024 election, and that ought to be covered fearlessly and relentlessly by the nation’s press corps. Yet Baker seemed to be doing his best to instead both-sides the issue in the way he does best (FAIR.org, 1/18/21), framing the contest simply as one of “two Americas” that don’t see eye-to-eye.
Proto-fascists or patriots—who can say?
The New York Times (1/25/24) framing the 2024 election as a contest between “two presidents” plays into the MAGA delusion that Trump actually won the 2020 election.
Baker wrote that the “election matchup…represents the clash of two presidents of profoundly different countries, the president of Blue America versus the president of Red America.”
He then gestured in the direction of the fundamental issue: “It is at least partly about ideology, yes, but also fundamentally about race and religion and culture and economics and democracy and retribution and most of all, perhaps, about identity.”
He continued:
It is about two vastly disparate visions of America led by two presidents who, other than their age and the most recent entry on their résumés, could hardly be more dissimilar. Mr. Biden leads an America that, as he sees it, embraces diversity, democratic institutions and traditional norms, that considers government at its best to be a force for good in society. Mr. Trump leads an America where, in his view, the system has been corrupted by dark conspiracies and the undeserving are favored over hard-working everyday people.
Notice that Biden’s America “embraces…democratic institutions,” but the thing that makes Trump’s America so dissimilar apparently isn’t centered on election denialism or authoritarianism. That’s made even more apparent in the rest of the roughly 1,600-word article, which didn’t bother to mention democracy, or Trump’s open threat to it, again.
Instead, Baker focused on the polarization of the public:
Americans do not just disagree with each other, they live in different realities, each with its own self-reinforcing internet-and-media ecosphere. The January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was either an outrageous insurrection in service of an unconstitutional power grab by a proto-fascist or a legitimate protest that may have gotten out of hand but has been exploited by the other side and turned patriots into hostages.
As Baker frames it, there’s nothing to distinguish one reality from the other; they are crafted in a carefully symmetrical way so as to offer no appearance of Baker having taken a side. Of course, one is indeed reality and the other a dangerous fiction—but the Times is too spineless to label them accurately.
‘Party of the white working class’
Contrary to the media myth, if only people who made more than $100,000 could vote, Trump would have won in a landslide (New York Times, 11/3/20).
Emphasizing the polarization of the parties, Baker repeated a favorite media myth:
Mr. Trump has transformed the GOP into the party of the white working class, rooted strongly in rural communities and resentful of globalization, while Mr. Biden’s Democrats have increasingly become the party of the more highly educated and economically better off, who have thrived in the information age.
It’s treated as gospel in corporate media that Trump’s base is the white working class, so that no evidence is considered necessary to make the claim—but it’s completely false. The corollary, that Democrats have become the party of the wealthy, is equally false.
2020 exit polls showed that voters making less than $50,000 a year chose Biden by 11 percentage points, and those making between $50,000 and $100,000 preferred Biden by 15 points. It was only the quarter of respondents with an income of over $100,000 who favored Trump, by 12 percentage points.
Even when you break that down by race and look only at white voters—who voted for Trump in majorities across income levels—you see that it was among those making less than $50,000 where Trump was weakest. In other words, it’s not the white working class that’s driving the Trump machine (and the Democrats are not the party of the wealthy). But this myth conveniently allows corporate media to repeatedly urge Democrats to pander to white MAGA anxieties (FAIR.org, 6/5/16, 3/30/18, 11/13/18).
‘Things are not normal’
Washington Post interview (1/5/24) with historian Sean Wilentz: “I don’t even want to think about what historians are going to be saying if Trump wins. I just hope there are historians around.”
Baker went on to note “how divorced many Americans feel from each other,” and quoted centrist historian Sean Wilentz for expert commentary: “I think people have yet to understand just how abnormal the situation is.” But as Wilentz’s many warnings over recent years make clear, his central concern is not the feelings Americans on both sides have about each other, but the dangers Trump poses to democracy. Just a few weeks earlier, the Washington Post (1/5/24) published an interview with Wilentz in which he spelled it out:
One political party has basically collapsed. It still has the name of the Republican Party, but it’s no longer the Republican Party. It doesn’t exist as it did before. It is now a political movement dedicated to the well-being of an authoritarian figure, namely Donald J. Trump. If you think we’re still living in normal political times, you’re mistaken, just as they were mistaken in the 1850s.
Baker’s commitment to bothsidesism continued to shift the focus—and, essentially, the blame for the precariousness of the political moment—from the GOP’s authoritarian shift, led by Donald Trump, to a partisan polarization in which two sets of people simply can’t see eye to eye. This followed through all the way to his conclusion, which warned of dire possibilities following “victory by one [side] or the other”:
And while voters may already have some sense of how the winner will operate in the White House over the next four years, it is not at all clear how a divided country will respond to victory by one or the other. Rejectionism, disruption, further schism, even violence all seem possible.
As Mr. Wilentz said, “Things are not normal here. I think that’s important for people to understand.”
If they do, it certainly won’t be thanks to the top White House reporter at the country’s most influential newspaper.
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The post For NYT’s Baker, 2024 Is About ‘Disparate Visions’—Not Threat to Democracy appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.