- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Just because Republicans choose unreality doesn’t mean the media should ignore the facts of January 6.
On January 6, 2021, I watched CNN as thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. As someone well-versed in watching tragedy on television, I was struck by just how indisputable the facts were at the time: violent, red-hat-clad MAGA rioters, followed by Republicans in Congress, tried to stop democracy in its tracks. Trump had told his followers that the protest in Washington, DC, “will be wild,” and in the assault that followed his speech, some rioters smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol. Hundreds of them have since been convicted on charges ranging from assault on federal officers to seditious conspiracy. These are stubborn facts, the kind that do not care about your feelings. These facts include the inalienable truth that Trump is the first president in American history to reject the peaceful transfer of power.
It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.
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But the problem is, when all you have is conventional political framing, everything looks like politics as usual. One candidate makes a claim; the other disputes it. Two sides are divided, etc. This framing only works if both parties operate within the frameworks of a shared reality. But Trumpism doesn’t allow for the reality the rest of us inhabit. Trump’s supporters believe their leader’s reality and not, say, the reality the rest of us see with our eyes. As Trump once told a crowd: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Journalists may be well-intentioned in trying to be “objective,” or they’re simply afraid of being labeled partisan. Either way, coverage of January 6 that gives equal weight to both sides—one based in reality, one not—is helping pave the road for authoritarianism.
To demonstrate the inability of conventional media to cover an extremist like Trump, this article points out that the New York Times once ran an article titled “Hitler Tamed By Prison”. The article, published in 1924, starts off with a disturbing parallel to recent events:
Look no further than the New York Times falsifying an entire article about Hamas raping women to manufacture consent for israel’s Genocide.
So I’m unfamiliar with mondoweiss.net. The Media Bias Factcheck page on this source rates it as questionable. Is there another credible source for these claims?
Sure. The direct family members that NYT falsified testimonies for. On TV programs. On social media.
That article is filled to the brim with evidence. It’s all in there with links.
You don’t have to just take their word for it like the New York Times.
You will need a different source. That one is dodgy as fuck. We don’t fight right wing disinformation by trotting out disinformation of our own, so unless you can come up with a better source, no one should take your claim seriously.
The source has plenty of evidence inside of the article and is fully backed up by evidence of TV interviews, Haaretz articles, links to the family members whose interviews were falsified speaking out on social media. Even the IDF investigations evidence of the state of the bodies have shown to contradict these statements. No women were found beheaded or with their breasts cut off either.
I don’t care about what you perceive “dodgy as fuck”. The only thing that is dodgy as fuck is NYT publishing a Hamas rape fanfic as an article, that now has confirmed lies while providing exactly zero evidence except witness statements, which have now being debunked by multiple of the quotes people they supposedly “interviewed”.
They’re doing what they’ve always done, trying to get money. This shouldn’t be a shock.