A passive media will be a ‘contributing factor’ on U.S. democracy’s death certificate

The crime was every bit as shocking as the initial news bulletins on Friday morning: A man had broken into the San Francisco home of the highest-ranking Democrat in U.S. government — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — and ultimately attacked and seriously injured her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer in a bizarre incident.

It’s still early in the investigation, and there are certainly a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how the incident went down. That said, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes — or even Inspector Clouseau — when it comes to discerning the attacker’s motive. It turns out that 42-year-old David DePape left a 15-year-long paper trail of clues about his right-wing political hate and misogyny on his blog, including a recent focus on the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud. The clincher is that police say DePape broke into the residence hoping that the House speaker, who was out of town, would be present, shouting “Where is Nancy?!”

If that phrase sounds painfully familiar, those exact words were uttered by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who ultimately occupied and trashed Pelosi’s office in the U.S. Capitol and even stole her laptop in the midst of their failed coup. For the last 21 months, the voices of those most worried about the precarious state of American democracy have warned that right-wing extremists would try to finish what they started that day. Here now is the most tangible proof yet that violence remains the cutting edge of these growing threats to the American Experiment, in the most advanced assassination plot against a high-ranking official in more than 40 years.

Yet 3,000 miles away on the West Side of Manhattan, the editors of the nation’s most influential media outlet, the New York Times, apparently weren’t feeling it. In laying out the next day’s front page of the so-called paper of record, Times journalists did squeeze the attack on Paul Pelosi onto the very bottom right, with a headline — “Pelosi’s Husband Is Badly Injured in a Hammer Attack by an Intruder” — devoid of any political import.

Instead, editors of the nation’s most-read legacy newspaper rated Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with two articles, and developments around the U.S. economy and Britain’s new prime minister, as well as the deaths of rocker Jerry Lee Lewis and Harlem minister Calvin Butts, as more or at least equally important as an assault on our democracy.

Veteran Times watchers noted that the wounding of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise in an assassination attempt by a left-wing loon received large type splashed across the top of Page 1, and they also recalled the fateful day in late October 2016 when the paper gave 80% of the front page to a nothingburger twist over Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The problems with shrugging off the political implications of growing, violent extremism are two-fold. A muddled voice from America’s leading newsrooms won’t help in quashing the inevitable right-wing conspiracy theories about what happened in San Francisco which — you will not be shocked to learn — spread within hours of the news. But the muted response also gave wide license for TV pundits to “both sides” this assassination attempt when almost all of the political violence in America, as well as the threats to our election, are coming from one side, which is the far-right movement driving the Republican Party.

“People on both sides should tone down the rhetoric,” a Republican congressman from Kentucky, Rep. James Comer, was allowed to opine on CNN, despite the general lack of such rhetoric or violent attacks coming from the left side. Needless to say, the dialogue was even worse on places like Fox News, where the news somehow bled into its long-running memes about street crime in Democratic-run cities like San Francisco. Bringing the week’s grim news full circle, Musk — celebrating his takeover of San Francisco-based Twitter — even responded to a Hillary Clinton tweet about Pelosi by posting a link to a conspiracy theory and writing: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”

Good grief.

The media’s general botching of the Pelosi story comes as arguably this fall’s most timely book — the veteran journalist Margaret Sullivan’s Newsroom Confidential, which is part memoir and part a message to mainstream media colleagues who respect and might actually listen to her — warns that reporters need to adopt a new and less passive tone in confronting today’s profound threats to democracy. Now that she’s out promoting her tome, Sullivan sees a media that this election season largely is not meeting the moment.

“The news media desperately wants to be seen as fair and unbiased and impartial, and, you know, those are good aims,” Sullivan told MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan last week. “But in order to get there, they are overly responsive to criticism from the right and they keep moving over to try to make it seem like they are, you know, are fair — and in fact they’re taking things down the middle that shouldn’t be taken down the middle. You know, democracy and antidemocracy are not equal things and they shouldn’t be treated as such.”

And yet they are treating it as such, by and large. The 2022 midterm elections have been truly without precedent in many ways, even before the assassination attempt — from the rise of unabashed Christian nationalism to the number of Republicans running for key offices who believe (based on zero evidence) that President Biden was not legitimately elected to the threats to the election like the armed men patrolling an Arizona voting location. And yet too many journalists are too eager to cover this race like just another election, or unable to describe the obvious.

» READ MORE: Racist ‘Willie Horton’-style fearmongering on crime may win midterms for GOP

For example, the media has clearly struggled with the rapid spike in antisemitism in our political discourse. When the artist formerly known as Kanye West dropped a blatantly hateful tweet against Jews a couple of weeks ago, a slew of major newspapers and TV networks flubbed the initial response, using fudge words like “alleged” or “purported” or “widely deemed as” to label an open-and-shut case of antisemitism. Since then antisemitism has continued to get louder, including a “Kanye was right” message on the wall of a college football stadium and a comment Saturday night from the wife of gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano attacking Jews for allegedly not supporting Israel as fervently as she and her husband.

On another key issue, mentions of “crime” in the mainstream media have spiked dramatically in tandem with a GOP-driven fearmongering campaign to make this supposed rise in urban mayhem the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds. There’s been little critical scrutiny from journalists into the more nuanced reality that while some crime is clearly up in some cities — Philadelphia’s high murder rate, for example — incidents nationally are fairly flat and remain well below levels seen as recently as the 1980s and ‘90s.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about the new right-wing group called Citizens for Sanity that has raised millions from unknown rich folks to blanket the baseball postseason with violent, racist, misleading and occasionally false commercials against Democrats that make the notorious 1988 “Willie Horton ad” seem tame. And I laid out the group’s ties to the most virulent xenophobes on Team Trump. Since then, mainstream outlets like the Times or Washington Post have written little or nothing about these ads that might tip the election on Nov. 8. What are they afraid of?

In this make-or-break moment for America and its 246-year run, too many journalists are focusing on the “trees” by bragging about their fairness and their balance, and thinking they can keep their right-wing critics off their back, while missing the “forest” that journalism itself will die quickly if there is no democracy to sustain it.

Based on what I am seeing in these fraught final days of October, I am terrified that we will wake up on Nov. 9 — much as we famously woke up on another Nov. 9 just six short years ago — and wonder again what the heck just hit us and why did we not see this coming. Then, you will probably see some deeply reported stories in the New York Times or on CNN and everywhere else about the death of democracy. And it will all be too late.

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