For all the ire conservatives direct at the media, some liberals have become increasingly frustrated with coverage of election reform, the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and even the Republican Party that doesn’t frame them as existential threats to the country.
Democrats this week marked the one-year anniversary of violence at the Capitol, intended to stop electoral counting proceedings in Congress from declaring Joe Biden as president-elect over defeated President Donald Trump, with dramatic warnings that democracy itself is at risk.
Biden delivered a hard-edged speech from Statuary Hall on Thursday in which he said supporters of the former president “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy” last year.
Vice President Kamala Harris stirred controversy by comparing the events of Jan. 6 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.
And left-leaning commentators spent days leading up to the anniversary urging reporters to approach their coverage of topics related to the riots in ways that would explicitly help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
“New Rule for 2022: Media institutions should stop covering the GOP as a normal political party and report on its increasing radicalization and active threat to our democracy,” wrote Wajahat Ali, a left-leaning columnist, on Twitter this week. “It’s all there you just have to cover it accurately. Will they succeed?”
Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist at the Washington Post, wrote in a piece this week that news outlets should “fearlessly” place a “pro-democracy emphasis” at the center of their political news coverage.
“Don’t be afraid to stand for something as basic to our mission as voting rights, governmental checks and balances, and democratic standards,” Sullivan wrote in a plea to newsroom editors. “In other words, shout it from the rooftops. Before it’s too late.”
Sullivan advocated for an unequivocally negative characterization of Republican voting reforms and far more openly positive coverage of voting rights advocates, such as Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat.
Many left-leaning commentators have gone after a basic journalistic principle that has fallen out of fashion during the Trump years: objectivity.
Derisively called “both-sidesism” by liberals, the idea of giving equal weight to opposing sides of a topic has become anathema to a growing number of journalists, who increasingly frame policy points such as voting laws in moral terms rather than impartial ones.
“There’s still a great deal of both-sidesing going on in coverage of our national effort to reckon with the legacy of Jan. 6,” wrote Greg Sargent, a Washington Post columnist, on the one-year anniversary of the riot.
Karen Attiah, a fellow Washington Post columnist, concurred on Twitter.
“The news media will ‘both sides’ our democracy right off a cliff!” Attiah wrote.
Remarking on the coverage of Biden’s speech on Thursday, University College London professor Brian Klaas slammed commentary that questioned whether Biden was sowing more division by engaging in such hyperbolic language in his Jan. 6 speech.
“No, he’s not being divisive,” Klaas wrote. “He’s stating facts while being unapologetically pro-democracy. American media should be overtly pro-democracy, too.”
Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to Julian Castro, a Texas Democrat, reacted with disgust to a New York Times headline this week that framed the Jan. 6 riot as “just another wedge in a divided nation.”
“If this is how coverage of an assault on democracy looks, we’re screwed,” Hackett wrote.
In addition to focusing on Jan. 6, left-leaning commentary has focused closely on the debate over voting rights and how the media should be covering it.
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Much of the advocacy has urged covering changes to election laws, such as limiting pandemic-era voting practices like unmanned ballot drop boxes, as assaults on fundamental rights rather than policy changes with merits and drawbacks.
Senate Democrats have pivoted to their push for voting rights legislation that would implement their own changes to election laws, and Biden has taken up the cause, too.
The president is set to deliver a speech in Georgia, one of the first GOP-controlled states to pass substantial voting reforms last year, about voting rights next week.
