Sign up for The Media Today, CJRâs daily newsletter.
Last Thursday, Republicans in Georgia passed a law imposing restrictions on voting in the state, including new ID requirements for absentee voting (replacing a signature-matching process), a reduction in the number of absentee-ballot drop boxes (compared to 2020), greater powers for the state legislature over local election officials, and even the criminalization, in some cases, of the distribution of food and water to voters standing in line outside polling places. The changes will disproportionately impede Black voters. Governor Brian Kemp signed the law in private and beneath a painting of a plantation; outside, Park Cannon, a Black state lawmaker, was arrested for knocking on the door. Georgiaâs Democratic US Senator Raphael Warnock, who visited Cannon in jail, condemned her treatment at a press availability; he started to walk away, but turned as a reporter shouted a question about the effect the new law might have on Democratsâ discussions about removing the filibuster that, at present, is impeding their efforts to legislate national-level voting protections. Warnock stressed that Republicans are the bigger impediment. âFolks keep asking what we are going to do about the filibuster,â he said. âI think they ought to ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: what are they going to do about voting rights?â
Questions about the Senate filibuster are legitimate. And the Georgia law is complicated; not all of its provisions are restrictive, and some of the restrictions could easily have been even worse. (Stephen Fowler, of Georgia Public Broadcasting, has the most thorough breakdown that Iâve seen.) As Media Matters for Americaâs Eric Kleefeld has noted, however, âthe fact that a less extreme bill passed is not simply a non-story if it followed weeks of controversy and efforts to prevent something even worseââand, more broadly, the law ought to be covered less through a lens of âpartisan politics,â and more as a âcivil rights issue.â Much coverage has hit the latter mark, but a number of stories have used the former frame, with complaints like Warnockâs at the thin end of the wedge. On Friday, Politicoâs Playbook newsletter headlined the Georgia news with the caption, âYOUR MOVE, DEMOCRATSâ; yesterday, some of the Sunday shows bothsidesily referenced the âfightâ or âbattle overâ (not for) âvoting rightsâ in Georgia, and the âdueling reactionsâ to the law. On Meet the Press, Republican Senator Pat Toomey attacked Democrats for âa completely false narrative about so-called voter suppressionâ in Georgia, and asserted that the new law âhas nothing to do with race.â Rather than interrogate that language, specifically, Chuck Todd asked whether such laws were a âgood lookâ for Republicans.
New from CJR: Itâs time to rethink how journalism covers guns and mass shootings
Itâs not just Georgiaâthereâs vital broader context here. As of last month, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU had counted more than two hundred and fifty bills, across forty-three states, that would make voting harder, mostly by restricting mail-in voting and imposing tougher voter-ID laws; a Washington Post analysis of these bills concluded that they could lead to âthe most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men.â Lawmakers in Iowa (where Republicans did well in November) recently voted to curtail early and absentee voting, and to close polls earlier; one bill in Arizona even proposed allowing the state legislature to override the will of voters in presidential elections. The greater the number of such restrictions one considers, the more coverage organized around the competing claims of political âsidesâ looks less like a lazy endrun around engaging with the complex specifics of a given bill, and more like a systemic media failure to truthfully characterize a broad, urgent threat to democracy. As the election lawyer Marc Elias, who is now involved with challenges to the Georgia restrictions, told CNNâs Brian Stelter recently, âreporters are uncomfortable treating one side as correct and one side as wrong on topics that they see as fundamentally about politics.â
The why of the restrictive voting bills is also vital, arguably as much so as the what. Republicans across the country have pitched new laws as correctives to public fears about election âintegrityââeven though such fears were, for the most part, simply made up by Donald Trump and his enablers in the right-wing political and media firmament. Denizens of the reality-based press have often pushed back strongly against the deranged letter of Trumpâs âbig lieââbut we have, on the whole, arguably been less consistent in characterizing just how rare electoral fraud is (âno widespread voter fraud,â a phrase that can regularly be heard in interviews with Republican politicians, is perhaps not specific enough), and in tracking the big lieâs ongoing impact, including in state-level voter suppression efforts. It is, perhaps, most useful at this point to conceive of the work of covering voting and elections as fighting multiple big lies, rather than just the one. As the NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen put it over the weekend, so many Republican voters now believe the lie that âthe election was stolen!â that âa second order lieâ is required to persuade them to keep voting: âwe fixed it with new laws.â
The original big lie continuesâeven in its time-limited, post-election senseâto have direct relevance for the press. Coverage of the insurrection continues apace. And, on the right, actors caught up in the lie are continuing to seek accountability. On Friday, Dominion Voting Systems, an election-tech company at the heart of Trumpworldâs fraud smears, sued Fox News over remarks made on its air, alleging that hosts on the network platformed and amplified blatant lies. The Dominion suit follows a similar defamation action filed against Fox and three of its hostsâone of whom, Lou Dobbs, has since been let go by Fox Businessâby another voting-tech company, Smartmatic. Fox, which already asked a court to dismiss the Smartmatic case, pledged to âvigorouslyâ oppose the Dominion suit, too, calling it âbaseless,â and arguing (yes, really) that Fox’s election coverage stood âin the highest tradition of American journalism.â
In addition to asserting basic newsworthiness, Fox, the New York Times reports, has argued that its election coverage âshould be viewed in its totality, pointing out that at least one host, Tucker Carlson, voiced skepticismâ about the fraud lies of Trumpâs lawyers. The legal merit of such defenses has yet to be seen, but, as I wrote in November, any pushback by Carlson and others does not earn Fox much moral credit, since the only media standard for election denialism must be zero tolerance. The same standard should apply, going forward, to the âsecond-orderâ lies around voting laws that erode democracy, including by making it harder for Black Americans to cast their ballots; thereâs little point in debunking Trumpâs big lie if we donât follow through with similarly sharp scrutiny of the restrictions being imposed in its name. Thatâs not to say we should abandon nuance or detail in covering these laws, of course. Itâs to reject the facile partisan framing that itself has become a dubious high tradition of American journalism.
Below, more on voting:
- Bridging gaps: Recently, CJRâs Lauren Harris profiled Votebeat, a nonprofit newsroom that was recently established âto cover voting rights and election administration beyond election cycles.â Votebeat, Harris writes, âsees America facing two big problems when it comes to local voting coverage: either newsrooms are neglecting election coverage, or they donât have enough reporters to cover the beat.â It aims to address these problems via âpartnerships with local newsrooms or establishment of their own local offices.â
- A local reaction: In an editorial, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that Georgia Republicansâ âcynical actionsâ put them âfirmly on the wrong side of historyâ: âWeâve said it before here; and lawmakersâ actions necessitate saying it again. There was no voting fraud or related shenanigans of a magnitude that would have affected the outcome of the November electionsâor the January US Senate runoff. Lawsuits and other claims shakily asserting otherwise were quickly cast aside by the work of due process.â The paperâs editorial board also predicted that ârather than stomping into oblivion voter-engagement activity,â GOP supporters of the law have likely emboldened it.
- The Dominion perspective: On Stelterâs show, Reliable Sources, yesterday, he interviewed Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer for Dominion, about the companyâs Fox suit. âOur complaint lays out in gory detail [that] over days, and days, and weeks in November and December of last year, Fox kept spouting these lies about Dominion⌠even while they were being told the truth over and over again,â Shackelford said, referring both to letters from Dominion itself, and to a âchorus of bipartisan officialsâ in the country.
News from the home front: On April 6, CJR and Columbiaâs Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma will convene a virtual summitâwith media participants including the Times, The Guardian, and The Traceâdedicated to rethinking the mediaâs approach to covering guns and shootings in America. You can sign up for the summit here. In the meantime, weâve placed news boxes around New York City containing newspapers headlined The Inevitable News. The papers, our editor and publisher, Kyle Pope, explains, âare fourteen pages of fill-in-the-blanks news stories, featuring details from a selection of mass shootings since the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Each article is identical; only the victimsâ names and locations are changed.â You can read more about the initiative here.
Other notable stories:
- On Friday, Vanity Fairâs Charlotte Klein wrote about how ânext-levelâ online harassment of female journalists is testing newsrooms; among others, the story quoted Steven Ginsberg, a Washington Post editor who publicly backed a Post reporter, Seung Min Kim, who faced a recent torrent of abuse. Afterward, Felicia Sonmez, another Post reporter, wrote on Twitter that Ginsberg had failed to similarly support her last year, when she was harassed online after drawing attention to a rape allegation against Kobe Bryant in the wake of his death; instead, the Post suspended her. Sonmez, who has spoken often about being a survivor of sexual assault, revealed that the Post has barred her from covering sexual violence. Politicoâs Rachael Bade has more details of the ban.
- Also on Friday, Hemal Jhaveri, a former race and inclusion editor at USA Today, wrote on Medium that the paper fired her after right-wing trolls seized on an inaccurate tweet that she posted about the ethnicity of the Boulder mass shooter, and accused Jhaveri of anti-white racism. âThere is always the threat that tweets which challenge white supremacy will be weaponized by bad faith actors,â Jhaveri wrote. âI had always hoped that when that moment inevitably came, USA Today would stand by me and my track record of speaking the truth about systemic racism. That, obviously, did not happen.â
- Last week, New York Public Radio released a âRace Equity Action Planâ that lists nineteen commitments aimed at âbuilding a more diverse and inclusive workplace.â The commitments include regular listening sessions; hiring BIPOC candidates into sixty percent of open roles; retaining BIPOC staff at a higher rate; and formalizing NYPRâs Source Project, âan ongoing initiative to track the demographics of guests and sources.â
- Unionized staffers at the New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica voted to authorize strike action should the publicationsâ owner, CondĂŠ Nast, continue to block demands around remuneration and other workplace issues. Natalie Meade, who chairs the New Yorkerâs union, told the Daily Beastâs Maxwell Tani that the ball is now in CondĂŠâs court. On Saturday, the unions held a solidarity rally outside the companyâs New York offices.
- Thereâs been another twist in the Tribune story, with HansjĂśrg Wyss, a Wyoming-based Swiss billionaire who led a medical-devices company, telling the Times that he has joined with Stewart Bainum, Jr., a Maryland hotel magnate, in a bid to stop Alden Global Capital, a cost-slashing hedge fund, from acquiring the newspaper chain. Wyss says he would retain the Chicago Tribune and seek civic-minded owners for other Tribune titles.
- In his Times column, Ben Smith profiles Harperâs, which he calls âthe weirdest place to work in New York media and yet an unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out in part because of its wide range, in style and substance, amid a homogenizing media landscape.â Among other nuggets, Smith reports that the magazineâs bosses have forced staff back to the office amid the pandemic, leading to âa kind of hostage situation.â
- In the UK, police in Bristol physically assaulted Matthew Dresch, a reporter with the Daily Mirror, a left-of-center tabloid, while he was covering protests against a government bill that would expand police powers over peaceful demonstrations. In a video that Dresch posted to Twitter, he can clearly be heard identifying himself as press. âI was respectfully observing what was happening and posed no threat to any of the officers,â he wrote.
- In Brazil, a court ordered President Jair Bolsonaro to pay damages to PatrĂcia Campos Mello, a reporter with the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, after Bolsonaro insinuated that she offered to sleep with a source in exchange for information. Bolsonaroâs son, Eduardo, made similar remarks, and was previously also ordered to pay damages to Campos Mello. Bolsonaro has a long history of attacking reporters, as I wrote in 2019.
- And Gail Slatter, a former news assistant at the Times, has died after contracting COVID. She was sixty-eight. Slatter ânever received a byline or a photo credit,â the Timesâs Sam Roberts writes. âBut her unassuming job title belied the significant impact she had on what appeared in the paper and on the daily lives of her colleagues, particularly on the culture and photo desks. She was a guide, gatekeeper and guardian.â
ICYMI: All communities deserve deeply-reported, beautiful journalism
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.