How to cover election deniers? Try calling them election liars.

 

To do otherwise would hide the nature of the candidates, misrepresent the facts to voters and fail to fulfill the journalistic obligation to take the side of truth. An election teeming with militant liars should not be covered as an ordinary contest between two parties. This is no time for coverage based on false equivalence and whataboutism if we are to survive as a democracy with credible elections.

How to cover election deniers? Try calling them election liars.

 

By Jennifer Rubin

Columnist|

August 22, 2022 at 10:30 a.m. EDT

 

A fleet of Republican candidates are running on a fundamental lie that strikes at the heart of our democracy — and on an implicit promise of future insurrection. The common term is “election deniers,” but that underplays the menace they pose.

 

For starters, we should keep in mind that they are not only lying about the 2020 election, repeating the thoroughly debunked falsehood that President Biden was not legitimately elected. In no other era would a national party have nominated such crackpots to any office, let alone governor or U.S. Senate.

 

But the worrisome trends don’t stop there. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has been linked to a rabidly antisemitic social media site known to have provided an “online home for the man charged with killing 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.” (While condemning antisemitism, he has refused to disavow the site, to which his campaign paid $5,000 for “consulting services.”) In April, he spoke at a conference organized by Alan and Francine Fosdick, who have promoted QAnon conspiracy theorists, that “included the screening of a video claiming that the country is experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and a ‘global satanic blood cult.’ ”

 

Kari Lake, Republican nominee for governor in Arizona, has endorsed a candidate for Oklahoma state Senate who “produced such a stream of internet bile he can only be seen as a committed anti-Semite, homophobe and racist — one of the most vile people in political life, unfit for government and unwelcome in polite society,” as one Arizona Republic column put it.

 

Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has called the GOP nominee to succeed him, Dan Cox, a “QAnon whack job,” “a nut” and “not, in my opinion, mentally stable.”

 

Republicans’ reprehensible and radical views (including climate denial, xenophobia and advocacy for forced birth, with no exceptions from abortion bans, even for a 14-year-old rape victim) should be enough to disqualify them from office. But beyond all that, these and other GOP Senate, House, gubernatorial, secretary of state and attorney general candidates are running on the lie that set off the violent insurrection at the Capitol.

 

The GOP nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem, for example, “introduced a resolution to decertify 2020 election results in the state,” NPR reported. “Finchem — a longtime member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group — was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in an interview with NPR earlier this year he declined to call what happened there a riot or an insurrection.” Several members of the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty and/or been convicted of crimes for their Jan. 6 actions.

 

Incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is running against election liar Republican Blake Masters. Kelly had this exchange Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper:

 

TAPPER: I want to ask you about your Republican opponent in the upcoming Arizona Senate election.

 

He says Democrats want to — quote — “change the demographics of the country.” He has openly embraced Donald Trump’s election lies. He has the support of a lot of openly racist notorious individuals.

 

Your — the Arizona Republican nominee for governor says that President Biden isn’t a legitimate president. He — she says she wants her Democratic opponent in jail. The Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, he’s a self-proclaimed member of the Oath Keepers. . . . What’s happened to the Arizona Republican Party?

 

KELLY: Well, unfortunately, I think right now that the folks you mentioned have some really dangerous ideas, and they’re not consistent with most -- most Arizonans, even most Republicans in Arizona.

 

So I’m hoping we can move away from that. My Republican colleagues that I talk to in the United States Senate, I mean, these are good, good people, by and large, who are working really hard. And they don’t need those dangerous ideas in the United States Senate.

Jim Marchant, Republicans’ nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, says that he would not have certified President Biden’s Nevada win (a victory that had a margin of more than 33,500 votes). Michigan’s GOP nominee for secretary of state is arguably crazier. As the Atlantic reports:

 

Kristina Karamo, a community-college professor who’d previously accused Democrats of having a “satanic agenda,” went on Fox News again and again to describe how illegal ballots supposedly had been tallied for Joe Biden at the TCF Center in Detroit, where she worked as a poll watcher. She testified before the State Senate that sacks of votes inexplicably had been dropped off there in the middle of election night. She suggested that Dominion Voting software had flipped Trump votes to Biden votes statewide.

None of what Karamo described actually happened—as far as anyone has been able to confirm.

It is grossly insufficient to call these characters “election skeptics” or even “election deniers.” Their candidacies are based on the “big lie” (supported by fabulist tales and fraudulent claims). Their views are well beyond what was the mainstream in American politics before the MAGA movement came along.

 

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who describes “large portions" of the GOP as “very sick,” vowed on ABC’s “This Week” to campaign against election liars. “I’m going to work to support their opponents. I think it matters that much.” If lifelong conservative Republican Cheney is apparently willing to campaign for Democrats, this is no ordinary midterm election. The mainstream media should adjust accordingly.

 

The mainstream media cannot pretend that these Republicans are ordinary candidates in ordinary races. The language to describe them should be as blunt as Cheney’s — liar, insurrectionist, antidemocratic, radical, etc. They should be introduced and labeled that way when they appear on interview shows or in print and online pieces. And their lies should be debunked within headlines and lead paragraphs (“Election liar Lake says...,” etc.).

 

To do otherwise would hide the nature of the candidates, misrepresent the facts to voters and fail to fulfill the journalistic obligation to take the side of truth. An election teeming with militant liars should not be covered as an ordinary contest between two parties. This is no time for coverage based on false equivalence and whataboutism if we are to survive as a democracy with credible elections.

Margaret Sullivan

 

My final column: 2024 and the dangers ahead

Before signing off, Margaret Sullivan offers advice to her fellow journalists on how to cover a perilous election

Perspective by Margaret Sullivan

Columnist|

August 21, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

 

After a recent announcement that I’ve decided to retire this column and leave The Post, a Vanity Fair reporter asked me by email about the media’s performance in covering threats to democracy. That certainly was a fair question, since it’s been one of my most frequent subjects here.

I’m “encouraged one day, despairing the next,” I told her, adding that the next election cycle is going to be a real test for the reality-based press.

This is my last column for The Washington Post — my plans include teaching at Duke University and publishing a book this fall, both a personal memoir and a tell-all about what I’ve seen in my four decades in journalism. So I’ll explain more about what I meant.

Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media. It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements. That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House. 

What’s more, the media seems finally to have absorbed what should have been blindingly obvious from the beginning: Trump is by no means a normal political figure, and he will never reform into some kind of responsible statesman. (Who can forget the perennial predictions that he was becoming “presidential” every time he read from a teleprompter instead of veering off on an insulting rant?) 

Another encouraging development is the decision by a number of major media organizations, including The Post, to form democracy teams or beats, concentrating on efforts to limit voting access, the politicization of election systems and the insidious efforts to instill doubt in the public about legitimate voting results.

Democracy is at stake in the midterms. The media must convey that.

And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

I’m often reminded of the troubling questions posed by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in multiple interviews late last year about what it would mean to cover Trump if and when he runs for president again. He deemed it perhaps the greatest challenge American political reporters will ever face.

“How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic? How do you cover a candidate who is running both against whoever the Democratic candidate is but also running against the very democratic system that makes all of this possible?” wondered Karl, a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. His questions hit hard, the more so because of his reputation in the political press corps as a straight shooter.

The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.

For the sake of democracy, they must.

Journalists certainly shouldn’t shill for Trump’s 2024 rivals — whoever they may be — but they have to be willing to show their readers, viewers and listeners that electing him again would be dangerous. That’s a tricky tightrope to walk

One thing is certain. News outlets can’t continue to do speech, rally and debate coverage — the heart of campaign reporting — in the same old way. They will need to lean less on knee-jerk live coverage and more on reporting that relentlessly provides meaningful context

Real-time fact checking is of limited usefulness, in my view. Better to wait until these live events have occurred and then present them packaged with plenty of truthful reporting around them.

Journalists simply can’t allow themselves to be megaphones or stenographers. They have to be dedicated truth-tellers, using clear language, plenty of context and thoughtful framing to get that truth across.

Please, pundits, stop trying to predict the future. You’re bad at it.

Consider, for example, the disparate presentations that the Associated Press and the New York Times gave to a recent story out of Florida about a new push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to crack down on the supposedly terrible problem of voter fraud; in fact, illegal voting is a rare occurrence, though something that Trump and his allies would have you believe underlies all the efforts to deny him victory.

As Kate Pickert, director of Loyola Marymount’s journalism program, noted last week, AP’s Twitter news alert took DeSantis’s hyperventilating news conference at face value, providing the kind of treatment the governor might have written himself: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced criminal charges against 20 people for illegally voting in 2020, the first major public move from the Republican’s controversial new election police unit.” Whereas the New York Times tweet cut through the noise (I’ve added the italics) 

“Gov. Ron DeSantis said 17 people have been charged with casting illegal ballots in the 2020 election, in which 11.1 million Floridians voted. There is no evidence that election crimes are a serious problem in Florida or anywhere else in the U.S.”

(For the record, the AP often does a good job with framing, and the Times sometimes blows it.)

News organizations also have to continually explain to their readers, viewers and listeners why they are doing what they’re doing. If they aren’t taking a speech live, for example, they ought to say why. Not because they are on the team of the opposing candidates, but because they are not in the business of spreading lies.

If Trump runs, as Karl put it, he will be running “against the very democratic system that makes this all possible.” And he’s bringing the vast bulk of the Republican Party along with him.

As Edward Luce, associate editor of the Financial Times, tweeted this month: “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” General Michael Hayden, the former CIA director appointed by George W. Bush, chimed in with two ominous words: “I agree.”

How journalists can spot the signs of autocracy — and help ward it off

So my prescription — and it’s only a start — is less live campaign coverage, more context and thoughtful framing, and more fearless straight talk from news leaders about what’s at stake and why politics coverage looks different. The latter could take many forms: editors’ notes on stories, columns written by news directors and posted prominently on websites, public appearances, and more.

Even if the reality-based press does a perfect job with coverage focused nonstop on the truth — and that’s unlikely — it will be no match for the duplicitous right-wing media, particularly Fox News with its all-in audience and constant work on behalf of Trump and his allies. Prime-time commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity will do the heavy lifting. A candidate can’t buy that kind of help.

I hope that newsroom leaders are thinking hard about moving outside their long-standing practices as the presidential campaign approaches. This will not be a traditional contest, and the stakes are high. We simply have to get it right.

A final, and personal, word. As I wrap up a 42-year newspaper career, I’m deeply grateful to those of you who have read my Post columns over the past six years, and to those who have written or called me to offer constructive comments or suggestions. And yes, sometimes to correct or (respectfully) disagree.

It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to write for the legendary Washington Post — the very newspaper that inspired a teenage girl awed by its Watergate reporting to get into journalism in the first place.

 

RUDY ON THE RAILS AND ON THE ROPES

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

  

How Fathers Figure in the Creation of Entrepreneurs

Whether your father was present in your upbringing or not, he will always be a force, good and bad, in your business.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

The statistics pertaining to what kind of upbringing is most likely to result in the creation of a successful entrepreneur have a wide dispersion, are completely contradictory, and totally inconclusive. That's even before you consider the fact that the vast majority of the collected data deals almost exclusively with white males and a smattering of male immigrants, typically Asian or Indian. Needless to say, this accumulated data doesn't have a whole lot to say about today's multi-cultural and multi-gender entrepreneurial world. And don't even get me started on the famous "nature" versus "nurture" debate.

Predictive factoids, formulations, and fantasies were and continue to be prevalent across media and literature. There are conclusions about birth order, divorced parents, single parent (always a mother), unemployed or fired parents, rich or poor - and none of them has ever made a material or meaningful contribution to the world's understanding. Frankly, it's unlikely that these conclusions will improve in the future, but the search for certainty continues.

None of this matters: whatever family situation gets you started on the startup journey is only a small part of the path to ultimate success. Passion, preparation, perseverance, and perspiration -- basic hard work-- play just as big a part in anyone getting to the goal line as family lineage. 

At the same time, in my own hundreds of conversations over the last 50 years with successful entrepreneurs, I have found a single correlative consideration to be present in an astounding number of cases. Starting from amazingly young ages and spanning decades of interactions and life changes, how you feel about your father and the changes over time in your relationship with him have a dramatic and lifelong impact on you as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are always builders, and even they don't always realize that what they're forever trying to build is a bridge back to their fathers. This is also why so many of them confuse and can't effectively separate their work from their self-worth.

Let me state my own caveat at the start - my comments, conversations and conclusions have to do exclusively with my own interactions, discussions and observations of the male entrepreneurs I've dealt with over the decades. So, my perspective and impressions are limited in that regard even though it's obvious that successful female entrepreneurs may share many of the same feelings and experiences. Experience and anecdotal information is certainly not evidence. But, make no mistake, these feelings are at the very heart of the drive, desire, and success of millions of individuals building businesses throughout the world.

In a few words, the American poet Robert Frost probably expressed it best: "You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's." Most entrepreneurs I know spend a lifetime trying to earn that love and respect. It's never an easy task, but it's an inevitable and unavoidable one. And it starts early on - sometimes couched in ironic references, but almost always pretty close to the surface and easily combined with a touch of anger and a big chip on the shoulder. Armed with a grin and hiding behind painful humor.

One CEO said his father stole most of his childhood. Another joked that one day his father took him aside and left him there. Fatherless children - whether through disappearance, death or divorce - feel abandoned, cheated, and forever angry deep down inside.  As Sam Fender sings in Seventeen Going Under: "That's the thing with anger, it begs to stick around. So it can fleece you of your beauty."

I believe that, if you haven't had a good father or lost one abruptly, you have to create your own. Many entrepreneurs feel that their businesses are surrogate families and literal extensions of their own lives, which they can better craft and control than their own upbringings. They think they can make things "right" this time around. Everything becomes far more personal and emotional - commitments and loyalty, among other things, are regularly tested - because the business's success is so psychologically important to the entrepreneur's mental health as well as to his or her financial well-being.

This is also the reason that so many fathers (much to their late-in-life dismay) get so wrapped up in making a living that they lose sight of the need to make a life for themselves and their families as well. If they're not careful, the cycle repeats itself and, as Harry Chapin wrote long ago in a song called Cat's in the Cradle: "And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me. He'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me."  Sam Fender calls it "a mirrored picture of my old man."

Writers and especially academics spend a great deal of time stressing the importance of finding mentors at critical junctures throughout your career without really appreciating that the path, the boundaries, the tenor and the final destination for so many entrepreneurs are set and defined early on by our parents, and especially our fathers.

Our mothers may be our first coaches, but our fathers are our earliest and most essential mentors. The most pivotal person in a young man's life isn't a lecturer or teacher, it's someone who offers and demonstrates that they care unreservedly about that kid as an individual and have his back. The best fathers try to set the goals, dreams, and aspirations not only for themselves, but for their sons and daughters as well, but they do it from an emotional rather than a purely rational perspective. Young people need models, not critics.

Our mothers seek to protect us from the world while our fathers too often threaten us with its woes and worries. They think of this as preparation and protection for the often brutal and bitter road ahead, but it's a delicate and complex task and one that's easy to overdue. Fathers often use too much force.

Done well - the manifest grit, guidance, and encouragement create an unquenchable fire. Children with strong fathers learn to trust early, to believe that their needs will be met, that their fears will be addressed, and that they are wanted and loved. Overdone or done too pedantically and aggressively, and the process can create a destructive and debilitating albatross. Absent entirely, it's likely to lead to an even worse result.

The most important lesson for entrepreneurs as they mature and start families - whether their childhood was a supportive bed of roses or a thorny and painful garden of grief - is that you have two critical jobs to do at the same time. You've got to build a business and, if you have them, also raise strong, secure and resilient kids if you ever want to call yourself a true success. But, unlike startups which provide regular opportunities for course corrections, new starts, and even do-overs, you only get one chance and one lifetime to make the best life for your family while you're trying to make a living as well.

What we know for sure is this: Your family is a much more important extension of yourself than any work you will ever do. Don't sell them short.

AUG 16, 2022

TWO SICK DOGS

 

 

THE FAT FRAUD'S FANTASY

 

JAIL THE FILTHY PIG BEFORE HE FURTHER DESTROYS THE COUNTRY