If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift

[Zorro]

In the year since the Jan. 6 insurrection, mainstream journalists have done a lot of things right. They’ve published major investigations, pointed out politicians’ lies and, in many cases, finally learned how to clearly communicate the facts of what happened leading up to that horrendous riot at the U.S. Capitol — and what is happening now as pro-Trump Republicans steadily chip away at the very checks and balances that saved American democracy last year.

Much of this work has been impressive. And yet, something crucial is missing. For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public.

“We are losing our democracy day by day, and journalists are individually aware of this, but media outlets are not centering this as the story it should be,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of autocracy and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”

That American democracy is teetering is unquestionable. Jan. 6 is every day now, in the words of a recent New York Times editorial that noted the growing evidence: election officials harassed by conspiracy theory addicts, death threats issued to politicians who vote their conscience, GOP lawmakers pushing measures to make it harder for citizens to vote and easier for partisans to overturn legitimate voting results.

“The reactionary counter-mobilization against democracy has accelerated,” wrote historian Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown. “It’s happening on so many fronts simultaneously that it’s easy to lose sight of how things are connected.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/01/03/media-democracy-jan6-atlantic-npr/

[Budi]

1. CNN's lead story Jan 3rd 2022.

CNN is an abomination.

Link to tweet

[TheRealNorth]

2. I hope the MSM enablers of TFG have plans in place to escape if this country....

... if this country goes the way of Hungary. Because I doubt the MAGATS are going to make a distinction between Chuck Todd and Chris Hayes or Andrea Mitchell and Rachel Maddow.

[ShazamIam]

3. Journalists are being told to treat the attacks on democracy as legitimate challenges, our entirely

wealthy owned media direct the journalists to spin and cover story the destruction of the idea of a democratic republic.

The wealthiest, the bankers, resource extractors, producers and sellers have set up a doomed economic system and are refusing to allow the people of the globe have a voice in their own daily lives or in their own nations. Privatize the lands they say drive off the people who have lived there for generations, replace those people with slave wage workers from another nation.

No one seems to notice that is what happened to the U.S. farm family, once the most powerful political voice in the nation, now replaced by the cheap labor of illegal immigrant and refugee workers for corporate ag.
That 80s farm bubble bust cleared the land of millions of small farmers and big changes in farm policy beginning in the 70s started the kill.
So the Midwest is populated with non-citizen workers who have no voiting rights and that is the plan for all the U.S.