Journalists normalising Trump's racism are failing democracy

As Trump builds his power on a foundation of racism and authoritarianism, the media’s silence speaks louder than ever, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

IN NOVEMBER 1922, a New York Times journalist, Cyril Brown, wrote a piece reporting that Adolf Hitler’s violent ‘fulminations against the Jews’ had led a number of ‘prominent Jewish citizens’ to seek asylum in the Bavarian highlands.

But, seeking to pour water on these fears, Brown went on to write:

‘But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organisation is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.’

He continued:

‘A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them”.’

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In the same piece, Brown evaluates Hitler’s oratorical skills as politically valuable, subjectively claiming that Hitler ‘exerts an uncanny control over audiences, possessing the remarkable ability to not only rouse his hearers to a fighting pitch of fury, but at will turn right around and reduce the same audience to docile coolness’.

Did Brown continue to commend Hitler’s oratory skills at the authoritarian Nuremberg Rallies? No doubt Brown’s well-informed sources, including the sophisticated politician, were Hitler’s Nazi allies and not members of the Jewish community who not that, long after this article, became one of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.

This playing down and excusing of Hitler’s antisemitism as just a clever political strategy to win votes regularly comes to mind when I see the way that journalists excuse, normalise and play down concerns about Trump’s clear racism, which feeds his authoritarian attempts to overthrow American democracy.

Mainstream journalists’ unwillingness to call Trump’s extreme immigrant deportation agenda what it is – an assault on American justice, freedom and democracy – is the modern equivalent of Brown, who I hope was one day deeply ashamed of himself.

Just as Brown admired Hitler’s ability to use racism to manipulate, while normalising antisemitism as a worthy political strategy and a clever way to hide the Nazi agenda, Trump’s blatant racism and race-baiting throughout his entire political career has been normalised, ignored, played down and never adequately condemned by mainstream journalists.

No doubt these failures are caused by the same reasons as Brown’s weak reportage: in the name of “neutrality”. This journalism neutrality, this cowardly aversion to calling Trump what he really is, has been the perfect veil for Trump’s rise. It has enabled Trump’s movement to immorally use the issue of immigration as a political weapon. It has been the perfect cloak behind which Trump has worked to provoke, legitimise and ultimately weaponise anti-immigrant sentiment to rise to power.

Even once in power, as journalists watched with their own eyes how Trump has acted on this anti-immigrant agenda, ignoring the rule of law and due process, using masked untrained men to disappear innocent immigrant families – including children – indefinitely to El Salvador prisons and who knows where else, sending in the military to try to squash protests against this agenda, journalists still won’t say it.

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In their silence, they misunderstand that neutrality in journalism was never meant to result in their ignoring reality. Rather, it is a journalistic value aimed at ensuring their independence so that they do not take sides. They fail to understand that calling out Trump’s racist authoritarianism is not taking the Democrats’ side. Quite the contrary — hiding the true, terrible reality of Trump’s racist authoritarian agenda is akin to taking Trump’s side. This failing represents journalists failing at their most important job — holding power to account.

Journalists might be too scared to call Trump what he is, but I am not. Trump has created an authoritarian movement on the back of a racist anti-immigrant agenda.

Despite the incorrect orthodoxy around Trump’s rise, which misrepresents him as the beneficiary of working-class votes, academics Marc Hooghe and Ruth Dassonneville analysed voting behaviour in the 2016 U.S. Election and found:

‘...indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote — even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants.’

Let me say it even more clearly. Trump rose to power the same way Hitler did. He used racism as a political weapon and then, once in power, worked to enact a White supremacist, authoritarian, anti-democratic regime. News media organisations like to promote themselves as a democratic guardrail, as watchdogs who hold power to account. They have no right to claim this important public mantle when they are too cowardly to hold Trump accountable for his assault on American democracy.

Just as one pertinent example of their utter failures, in the same was as New York Times’ journalist Brown normalised antisemitism, never thinking it might be worth critiquing the use of racism as a political strategy, here we have the modern New York Times writing a nice little puff piece promoting Trump’s military parade.

Until journalists collectively stand up against racism and authoritarianism by criticising Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, and until they stand up for the rule of law and the democratic freedoms that America once was supposed to value, they are not serving democracy. They are just helping Trump grow and maintain his power. Shame on them.