How the Mainstream Media Misled Us in 2022
Not only did corporate news hype the non-existent Red Wave, it keeps giving short shrift to democracy's defenders. Plus, Democratic ills in New York state.
Hello again. If you are wondering what happened to your regular edition of The Connector last week, no, you didn’t miss one. Sadly, my father Bernie passed away November 5th after a long battle with heart disease and Alzheimer’s, and so I was out of commission. Dad lived a good life all the way up to 89, and was even able to attend his grandson (my nephew)’s bar-mitzvah a few weeks before he left us. Thankfully, we were able to keep him at home and comfortable at my sister’s until the very end. The American Way of Death is not for the faint-hearted; one doctor we consulted with near the end told us he too would do anything to keep his own father out of the “woodchipper” that is the American hospital health care system. Just imagine what it might be like to live in a civilized country where such metaphors were seen as obscene rather than commonplace.
Speaking of wanting to live in a civilized country, how about those mid-term elections? So much has already been written about the way that the vaunted “Red Wave” failed to materialize that there isn’t much for me to add, and frankly much of what is being produced right now is premature. Once the hard voting data is collected and analyzed (ballot records, not exit polls), we’ll be able to say more about exactly how much women and young people turned out and shifted the expected shape of the electorate, and from that we may be able to draw conclusions about how much abortion and democracy mattered compared to the issues emphasized by Republicans like crime and inflation.
That said, I have one overarching comment. If you can throw your mind back a week or so, it’s really striking how much the dominant narrative of 2022 until now was one of doom and gloom for Democrats and confidence that Republicans were going to benefit from the historic pattern of mid-term voters punishing the party in power. The idea that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as well as the ongoing threat to democracy represented by hundreds of MAGA election deniers and January 6ers running for office would prompt a surge of Democratic voters (or Republican abstentions) that could break that pattern was just not deemed plausible by the conventionally wise in the worlds of political science and punditry alike.
Even as polls suggested that Democratic candidates were favored overall (or that the two parties were at a statistical tie) and MAGA election deniers faced a headwind, that narrative frame didn’t budge. The church of the savvy were so sure of this that when a late national poll by Politico-Morning Consult, found Democratic congressional candidates at 48 percent, five points higher than Republicans, it was dismissed by Politico’s own staff politics reporter as “an outlier.” There’s a built-in bias toward Republican strength and Democratic weakness in our political culture, and it’s worth thinking hard about how our side uses media and is (ab)used by it if we want to get to a better place.
I’ve already written multiple times about the soul-crushing content and tone of nearly all Democratic emails and texts. This is where Democratic leaders and organizations talk in a direct, unfiltered way to their own base and the message is almost always “the sky is falling, democracy is doomed—unless you rush me money.” Just look at this tweet replying to Addisu Demissie, a top Democratic strategist, showing what one activist’s phone looked like the Sunday before the election. The fundraising-industrial-complex has surely burned down most if not all of the Democratic donor base this cycle. While a few candidates and party committees seemed to hit the brakes on this approach in October, it’s doubtful the average grassroots donor noticed the change. And when you relentlessly keep telling people their favorite candidate is LOSING, that a DISASTER is happening, that WE LOST, or WE’RE CRUSHED, well, who isn’t going to start believing all those things?
But if the emails and texts that campaigns and party committees send to grassroots Democrats are where our side creates and reinforces a narrative frame, then consider as well what it means to also be dependent on the so-called “mainstream” corporate media to get Democratic messages to a mass audience. Looking back, it’s stunning how much political news coverage of 2022 emphasized the dominance of election deniers compared to the assertiveness of democracy defenders. Some of this is because the threats to democracy coming from the MAGA party are really news in the most basic definition of the word—these are unprecedented and widespread portents of a collapse of democratic values. I’m not suggesting at all that we need less coverage of the Proud Boys or Oathkeepers or January6ers or less attention to the many ways Republican leaders are embracing authoritarian policies and tropes. But attention to the threats without equal attention to their antidote produced an overwhelmingly pessimistic frame, one that came dangerously close to demotivating pro-democracy voters and helping authoritarians.
For example, compare how much attention the mainstream media gave to far-right election denier Dinesh D’Souza compared to progressive rabble-rouser Michael Moore. According to MediaCloud, from September 1st until Election Day, D’Souza was mentioned in more than three times as many news stories as Moore. (I built this and the following news comparisons using MediaCloud’s U.S. top sources collection which is made of 50 top newspapers from around the country plus 37 top digital outlets, including sites like Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Daily Beast, HuffPost, Slate, The Root, TMZ, Verge and Vox.) D’Souza, who pled guilty to the felony of making illegal campaign contributions by the way, got all this attention for making the “2000 Mules” propaganda film (I won’t call it a documentary because it is shot full of lies) about supposed “ballot harvesting” in 2020. Moore, who is also a filmmaker and political activist, was predicting that Democrats would win big in the mid-terms. As it turns out, he was more right than most, but his cheerleading for a pro-democracy outcome was seen as outside the acceptable frame drawn by the editors and producers who decide the news agenda for most mainstream outlets.
As
noted in his Substack newsletter yesterday:“During the six weeks leading up to the election, no newspaper, no magazine, no TV network or armed forces wire service sought either to report on my facts and data about ‘no red wave is coming’ — or do their own reporting to tell the public that a fantasy narrative has been concocted to depress the Democratic vote. I’m on TV a lot. I’m always being asked to come on TV to join the discussion. But not during the midterms. They didn’t want to even consider what I was saying. Other than Bill Maher (who didn’t agree with my analysis but thought I should be heard), Salon, and The Guardian newspaper would let me put forth the possibility that the red wave was in fact a red herring….In the final days before November 8th, three decent, brave non-primetime souls on MSNBC — the longtime pro Alex Witt, the rapper/lawyer Ari Melber and the indefatigable Joy Reid — gave me a voice. Viewers were shocked to hear someone say we on the left were not only going to keep the Senate, we were going to pick up a seat or two. That not only were the Republicans not going to clobber us in the House with 30 to 50 new seats, they might be in for an upset because it’s gonna be so dang close. And Trump’s mob of election-denying candidates were going to go down in flames. There would be record numbers of young voters, and women were on a rampage over the abolishment of Roe. The sword of vengeance would be theirs.”
Or, to take another example, Cleta Mitchell, one of the top lawyers leading the “audit the vote” election-denial crowd, got mentioned six times more often than Sherrilyn Ifill, a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation who is the former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and perhaps the most prominent voting-rights protection lawyer in the country. Ifill, by the way, has 427,000 followers on Twitter compared to just 6,079 for Mitchell, yet one commanded far more attention across mainstream media than the other.
Or, at the level of organizational salience, consider this: The Proud Boys got mentioned 485 times from September 1 through November 8 in those top 87 media sources monitored by MediaCloud. The Working Families Party, which is the progressive backbone to a tremendous amount of election protection and voter mobilization work on the left, got mentioned 28 times. The Democratic Socialists of America, another progressive movement organization, got mentioned 26 times. Does a neofascist group with perhaps 20,000 active members deserve our attention? Absolutely, considering how many of them have been showing up at local election offices and public libraries, intimidating public officials and trying to break up drag queen story hours. But should two progressive organizing communities that each have far larger membership bases be so obscure? (The Proud Boys just slightly less attention than the ACLU or the NAACP, if you want a different benchmark.)
The fight to build democracy in America is an uphill one, but if we fail to invest in our own media it just gets steeper. And that means new media as well as the more traditional kind. As politics writer and DNC committee member David Atkins noted last week, as soon as Big Tech started paying more attention to hate speech and disinformation,
“the Right stood up at least 3 twitter clones to push hate and lies. The entire liberal-left couldn’t stand [up] one even ONE twitter close despite long advance notice of the Musk takeover. The Right funds infrastructure to fuel hate and overt propaganda. The Liberal-Left refuses to, because it feels icky and they just want to win the next election and hope everything calms down and goes back to normal. You cannot cede the information space and hope to succeed. …Every cycle we overfund a bunch of Senate races to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. And every cycle the Right swallows up more and more of the media infrastructure: AM radio, TV news, cable news, podcasts, YouTube channels, social media ownership and algorithms. We have *allowed* them to do this by refusing to grasp that we are in an information war. The Right has understood that for decades. You don't give a speech and hope the New York Times covers it, then hope readers make the right choice. That's for losers. You have to actually push your narrative. The fact that our narratives are TRUE and theirs are lies doesn't mean they'll win automatically. You actually have to develop the infrastructure to push and sell them anyway, or you have no chance…. If you properly fund media (and social media) year over year, cycle after cycle, you won't have to dump a bajillion dollars into Senate races. You'll have a fairer playing field to begin with. Every election cycle we fight uphill in a quagmire of lies. We don't have to.”
Bonus image: This map of America’s news deserts—counties that have one or fewer local newspapers—correlates well with places where MAGA know-nothingism has a strong hold.
Empire State Blues
Speaking of media power, there’s no question that the millions of people who live in the New York City metropolitan area are affected by the nonstop hyping of street crime stories by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. It’s not a coincidence that Sean Patrick Maloney, the now-defeated chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee went out of his way to blame “the fiercest outlet in the News Corporation fear machine” for his loss as well as Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s flaccid five-point victory over fear-mongering Congressman Lee Zeldin.
But New York Democrats need more answers for why one of the bluest states in the nation, at least in terms of voter registration, bucked the 2022 trend and almost went red. Hochul, like her predecessor Andrew Cuomo, had amassed a $50 million campaign war chest, but most of that money was gone by mid-October, when alarms first arose that Zeldin was nearing her in the polls. One professional donor organizer told me that the Hochul campaign didn’t even start a paid field program until October, and that absence really showed. State Senator Elijah Reichlin-Melnick, who lost his re-election bid in the swing suburban Rockland County, went on Twitter yesterday to point out that she lost his district by 11 points, while Biden won it by 3. “Why the disastrous results here?” He wrote, “Simply put, the Governor's campaign was completely absent. No public visit to Rockland County from the Gov. or LG. No high profile surrogates in the county. No organizers on the ground. No field team knocking doors. No one to organize or recruit volunteers. No one making phone calls. No outreach that I'm aware of to Black, Latino, Asian, and other minority communities.”
There’s a push underway among NY liberals and progressives in the wake of this near-death experience to get Hochul to replace Jay Jacobs, the long-serving state Democratic party chair, who is seen as more concerned with attacking progressives than beating Republicans (just like his political sponsor, former governor Andrew Cuomo). So far Hochul has stood by her man, even as more than 1,000 party leaders and activists have signed an open letter demanding change. Which makes me wonder if her coziness with the real estate and Wall Street interests that so heavily financed her campaign made her less interested in defending vulnerable Albany Democrats this cycle. Party labels in New York often obscure real power relationships, and despite ongoing efforts at campaign finance reform, little has changed in what is aptly still called the Empire State.
Bonus link:
's interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, where she gets into the weeds on what is wrong with the New York Democratic party.—Related: By the way, if you think democracy is only endangered in red states, check out what’s happening in Yonkers, the third biggest city in New York, where Mayor Mike Spano and his allies on the city council are trying to ram through an extension to the city’s term limits rule without taking the issue to the voters. In 1994 and 2001, Yonkers voters overwhelmingly opposed changing the two term limit on their reps; in 2018 the mayor and his allies ignored public opinion while voting themselves a 3rd term extension. Now they want to do it again. And so far, there’s been almost no media coverage of their machinations, because Yonkers is effectively in a news desert. (Here’s a statement from Rep. Jamaal Bowman and several local community groups opposing the change.)
Odds and Ends
—What’s really great about the Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried implosions is how effectively these two men are demolishing the cult of the genius-billionaire-founder, with the added benefit of also blowing a huge hole in the Effective Altruism cult’s claim that the best way to save the world is to make as much money as quickly as possible and then give it away. If you want one piece to read on the SBF FTX crash, make it this one by Tarpley Hitt in Gawker.
—In the spirit of Web3IsGoingGreat.com, say hello to TwitterIsGoingGreat.com.
—Coming up Thursday: The Obama Foundation Democracy Forum, in partnership with Columbia University and the University of Chicago, will be streaming live here starting 12:30pm ET, features speakers like Renee DiResta, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Anil Dash, and Zeynep Tufekci.
End Times
—Vaughn Hillyard of MSNBC on Arizona’s Kari Lake, who was probably the most talented of all the election deniers running for state office in 2022, suggests in just two minutes why a Trump 2024 candidacy is likely to lose.
Regarding the larger number of news mentions of right wing groups this year, I would think some part of that is news stories about oath keepers and proud boys on trial or pleading guilty for Jan 6.