Most journalists thought everything was just fine
Yesterday's crisis was created by Trump and his followers.
And yesterday showed that many journalists are willing to state that some actions by an elected leader are unacceptable.
But they will return to institutional cowardice.
2/
— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) January 7, 2021
My hunch is Trump will, from now on, be covered as an illegitimate monster by most media.
But his enablers and his followers will be covered with devoted respect for their different–but equally valid–viewpoints.
4/
— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) January 7, 2021
It wasn't, really, about one man.
This is about a journalistic culture that presupposes legitimate arguments on "both" sides and whose default is to show deference to those with power and authority.
Let's fix this, journos!
6/end
— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) January 7, 2021
This fits with something I’ve been saying since yesterday (well, longer, but with a new emphasis since yesterday). This is partially due to the fact that the press throughout the Trump years has presented his followers as just hard working, unheard Americans with a legitimate grievance that was being ignored. They were just tired of not being listened to.
None of them had the courage to admit that we have been listening to these people; their voices carry further than others. We’ve been listening to them as they picket abortion clinics or occupy wildlife refuges. As they shoot young black men carrying Skittles. As they shout expletives at women, saying on national radio that they should video their sex if we paid for their birth control.
What the journalists never enlightened their readers/viewers about is just what those demands really were that they wanted heard. Their demands were white supremacy, patriarchy, Christian dominionism…it’s a long list, but those are probably the primary drivers of most of what they’re saying. What they didn’t say is that these Trump supporters are angry because other people are allowed the same rights they are, allowed the right to walk around in public while black, woman, gay, or disabled. This is the voice that the media insisted needed to be heard, the voice of white supremacist patriarch Christians with a hatred of almost every value Americans pretend the country stands for.,
They should have listened to Hillary. A basket of deplorables indeed.
But I need to know what people in a diner in Ohio think about insurrection!
Screechy – which diner? That can make a difference. You must get the right diner.
Better send an army of reporters to all of them just to be sure.
I mean, not to the diners in non-white neighborhoods, of course. Let’s not be silly.
Screechy Monkey, iknklast, this should tide you over.
Yes, but Hillary is a liar, so why listen to her? She said *half*…